Christian Texts; Jewish Context

The Son of Man Must Suffer

In today’s assigned gospel reading, Matthew 16.21-28, Jesus continues to help the disciples come to terms with the passion prediction, Matthew’s author places Jesus’ suffering and death at the feet of the “chief priests and scribes,” Peter is rebuked for resisting Jesus’ passion prediction, and the assigned reading closes with Matthew’s author declaring—rather, having Jesus declare—that the end time is iminent.

But first! I have an update to share about the newsletter that maybe you’ve already noticed!

News for the Newsletter

I launched Notes from the Diaspora six months ago as an outlet for exploring my complicated religious identity. Raised in a mainline Protestant (Christian) home, learning later about an important ethno-religious Jewish identity, I’ve been working out my commitments and tentative conclusions in public right here, and you all are part of it. Thank you for being here! 🥰 We’re now a community of 54 total subscribers, and together we’ve read 59 posts that I’ve published. Seeing that I stumbled into this project on uncertain terms, I’m just tickled pink, as my grandmother would say, that anyone is reading at all. Let’s continue growing together!

What’s in a Name?

For several months before launching this newsletter, the working title was “Jewish Pastor’s Kid,” aka jPK. Ultimately, I decided against this title, going instead with Notes from the Diaspora. Against jPK, I harbored two primary concerns: First, that combining “Jewish” with “Pastor’s Kid” would align me with a Christian movement called Messianic Judaism, whereby Christians follow Jesus as the messiah and their personal savior, also follow an adapted approach to the laws of Torah. Second, I worried that that by juxtaposing Jewish and Pastor’s Kid, I would signal a motivation to proselytize to the former, in light of the latter. I wished to avoid both of these misconceptions.

My upbringing within Protestantism and more than 20 years trafficking in Jewish spaces, stemming from my mom’s Jewish family, uniquely equips me with a voice to speak with both traditions and to help each understand the other. Ecumenical and interfaith dialogue can only strengthen one’s understanding of their personal tradition, while extending intellectual charity in both directions. Writing to Christians about Judaism is the gift you didn’t know you needed. 🤓

With this aim in mind, I return to my first instinct that Jewish Pastor’s Kid is the best autobiographical and rhetorical title for what I’m up to. For me, this is my response to the call of a community that dares to imagine a Creator. I’m happy you’re a part of it with me.

The Suffering Son of Man

Two weeks ago we took a closer look at some historical context related to the label and theological notions associated with the “Son of Man.” Namely, we saw this label connected to the Jewish apocalyptic literature. Matthew continues to put this label in service of more passion predictions, in other words, Jesus’ continued instruction to the disciples:

Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised (Matthew 16.21).

I want to connect the Matthean appeal to suffering and resurrection to the prophetic tradition. We’ll take suffering and resurrection each in turn, appealing to Isaiah and Hosea, respectively. As our guide for interpreting the Matthean text, we hold fast to our view that the gospel writers are repurposing the Scriptures of Israel to proclaim Jesus as the anointed one, commissioned by God to deliver Israel from their current state, under militarized Roman occupation, now, for the post-70 CE gospel writers, without the Temple, in diaspora, competing for the Jewish sectarian group that would sustain the future of the traditions of Israel.

To make sense of this experience for the gospel writers; maybe better, to see how the gospel writers repurpose the texts to make sense of the discordance between messianic expectations and historical events for Jesus, we must confront two matters of fact for the Jesus movement: first, that Jesus is here to save the people of Israel (e.g., three chapters later in Matthew (21.9), crowds greet Jesus at entrance to Jerusalem with cries of “Hosanna!” literally, “God save” or “help” related to Psalm 118.26, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord. We bless you from the house of the Lord.”

And yet, Jesus the anointed one, did not deliver in the present sense but was killed by Rome, raising the second concern that the messianic age was not established. This messiah suffered and died. How might we reconcile expectation with reality? The gospel writers must solve this tension for their community of Jesus followers.

The move for the gospel writers is to repurpose older prophetic predictions to demonstrate that really, the suffering of the messiah was predicted all along, and second, that Jesus the messiah in fact did usher in the messianic age. The kin-dom is here, at hand, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his [kin-dom]” (Matthew 16.28).

Take Isaiah 53.3:

He was despised and rejected by others;
    a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity,
and as one from whom others hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him of no account.

Within the Isaiah context, reports the commentary in the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) Jewish Study Bible, the servant who suffers here references either Israel as a whole or an “Ideal Israel” that suffers within the broader Jewish (Judean) population that has strayed from the way of Torah.

The gospel writers repurpose this suffering servant to apply to Jesus, proclaiming that, in fact, the messiah would be rejected and despised. Take, for example, Matthew 13.57, “And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honor except in their own hometown and in their own house.’”

We see here how the gospel writer repurposes ancient prophecy to explain the lived experience of those in the first century who were anxiously awaiting the messiah to deliver them, Hosanna! As for the resurrection as a sign of salvation, consider Hosea 6.1-3:

6 “Come, let us return to the Lord,
    for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us;
    he has struck down, and he will bind us up.
² After two days he will revive us;
    on the third day he will raise us up,
    that we may live before him.
³ Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord;
    his appearing is as sure as the dawn;
he will come to us like the showers,
    like the spring rains that water the earth.”

Hosea, the prophetic book, is especially concerned with repentance (JPS Jewish Study Bible, Introduction to Hosea, 1143). This is an appropriate choice for the Matthean author to repurpose and apply to Jesus the Christ: A figure especially concerned with repentance, who is struck down by the Holy One: “And going a little farther, he [Jesus] threw himself on the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not what I want but what you want’ (Matthew 26.39), and then is this raised up.

Do we notice the project here? Jesus, the anticipated anointed one, who does not conquer but is killed, and who does not return, as expected. Isaiah for the suffering, Hosea for the resurrection, and the innovation of the gospel writers to shift the messianic age from a future state to a realized eschatology that is iminent, “at hand.”

Conclusion: One Tradition, then Two: Messianic Hope for the Future

Jews continue to pray for the coming mashiac, or messiah. The Amidah (also called the Shemoneh Esrei) is a Jewish prayer in the daily liturgy that originated in the Mishnaic period, beginning in the first century CE that continues to be recited by (observant) Jews three times each day. The messianic expectation certainly stands behind the gospel accounts, and we see how the recitation of the Amidah and the commitment to the parousia, or second coming of the Christ, express a shared Jewish and Christian hope for the future, though with different theological commitments.

This is my motivation, as the “Jewish Pastor’s Kid,” to straddle the porous boundaries between two related traditions, like the metaphor expressed by Amy-Jill Levine: Judaism and Christianity are like two trains that left from the same depot, running along parallel tracks for a time that ultimately diverge. Recovering the shared starting point and respecting the divergence is what I hope to help us accomplish each week.

To reiterate my earlier point, I’m happy you’re here!