Well, week 9 of our 10 week spring quarter is about to begin. This is academic crunch time. Of course there is always way too much reading because every discipline and each course has countless scholars who have countless nuances on things. So after reading volumes of work it is now time to put pen to paper, or more accurately, finger to keyboard!

The past few days I have been studying for a paper I am writing on the theology of discipleship, in light of Immanuel (God with us) in the Gospel of Matthew. I've been reading some excellent scholarship on this subject (Ulrich Luz, Dale Brunner, Stanley Hauerwas, and Graham Stanton as well as others). But for as much as each of these scholars really frames Matthew in very helpful ways, it is the Gospel of Matthew itself which has gripped me.

The Gospel of Matthew is considered to be called the "First gospel" though Mark was likely the first to be written, Matthew is first in the Christian NT canon. Matthew seems to provide the best bridge between Torah-Writings-Prophets since it has a distinctly Jewish tone with a Gentile melody. Matthew seems to place Jesus as "The New Moses," places the "Ethical Teachings for the New People of God" (e.g. Sermon on the Mount) as like a (re)newed ten commandments, or a deeper nuance on the commandments, he also organizes his Gospel into five fairly distinct discourses (though some debate this as they do everything) with resemblance in mind of a "New Torah" (e.g. the first 5 books of the First Testament).

Most of all, Matthew is a gospel that places COMMUNITY at the center of what God is doing in the world. For Matthew Church = Community and Community = Disciples. Discipleship is not an individual pursuit. Perhaps that is why it is so (de)emphasized in our Western Churches who perhaps in a skewed way read Paul as divorcing "knowing and doing." For Matthew, and deep within the Consciousness of 1st century Judaisms (of course to varying degrees), is the reality that one cannot separate "knowing and doing." As Rabbi Lawrence Kushner put it in reference to a Jewish sage, "to know is to do and to do is to know."

That means if we have churches which function as collections of individuals with a loose association, but are not deeply enmeshed in each others lives, we are left with a performance, an event, a separation that creates an unbiblical consciousness that somehow church is something one shows up to, not something one is. Of course the sheer size of our popular Churches would be a visible polemic against Matthews’s insistence on community equaling discipleship. And perhaps the sheer size and isolation of our communities and our culture is precisely the problem. Perhaps in this way the ekklesia tou theou (Assembly of God) to borrow a Pauline phrase is more outlandish than it was in first century Antioch.

It's my understanding that the Gospel (re)narrates our lives. That is it tells us a true story that invites us into its narrative, and in so doing, it exposes the pseudo-narratives of the world around us.

In a Western Church that too often mistakes Paul for the way of Jesus, the Gospel of Matthew provides precisely the (re)orienting we need to "re-imagine" what it looks like and thus means to be the people of God, the Church.

I leave you with a quote from Ulrich Luz in his The Theology of the Gospel of Matthew:

the defining property for the Church is neither confessions of faith nor its institutional fabric, but rather its conformity to Christ. To be a Church means to assume the commission and the authority of Jesus, to live as he did, to suffer as he did. To be a Church means discipleship. To be a Church means itinerancy, movement, commitment and suffering…Matthew 10 implies that no Church meets the defining qualities of being a Church. But every Church is called upon to do so. Far from providing a doctrine of the Church, Matthew says there is no essence of the Church apart from its practice and its identity, and hence no possibility of being a Church apart from worldly action and suffering in conformity with its sole exemplar, Jesus.