Something I've just noticed as the Gospel according to Matthew opens, because of course it's Great Week:

Its spiritual power is relentless, with genealogies leading to an angel talking about a spirit that gets a virgin pregnant and then astrology and dream interpretation.

Should I livetweet my reading of the Gospels? It feels a bit perverse, but the forbiddenness of such a thought makes it all that much more appealing.

I mean, do Christians notice this? Matthew opens with all these things that they tell us Chinese people we had to give up when we became Christian: genealogies, spirits, astrology, and dream-work.

Every psychoanalytic bone in my body has been vindicated BY THE BIBLE.

There is so much Holy Spirit work going on here, even as the infancy narratives open out into John the Baptist's ministry. This is a supernatural universe that invites the reader's immersion.

One temptation I think I have as I read is that old Bible college habit of breaking this beautiful work of seamless writing into inclusios and pericopes, sections and paragraphs. Maybe you need that if you're deciding what to read liturgically, but not if you're just reading.

The action of the Spirit. I really have not noticed this so powerfully in Matthew before.

Dude, and angels too. All night, all day.

OK, so I know there's lots of scholarship about Matthew's usage of Hebrew Scripture, but can we talk about how this guy is literally using the text like it's a magical book?

Feels right for a narrative that also has genealogies, spirits, astrology, and dreams.

AHA. Now the Sermon on the Mount has context. What could all this spiritual stuff in this supernatural universe mean?

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens. Boom.

It's funny -- in spiritual direction a few months ago, we talked about how it might be a nice meditative act for me to re-imagine what if the Magi were astrologers from China seeking the Buddhist scriptures, but went way too far west. Reading Matthew, it's not a stretch.

Setting his teaching against magical thinking -- long prayers, playacting piety, practicing the letter of the law, worrying about tomorrow -- Jesus says it means that your secrets matter more than your practices, for even the hidden parts are in this supernatural universe.

In other words, Matthew describes a universe as shot through with the supernatural. But such reality is not to be manipulated. Instead, it has implications for the very secrets of one's heart.

This is psychoanalysis.

In this way, one may have the best of intentions for rendering judgment, disrupting marriage, and playacting piety, but there is such a truth as the Freudian slip.

Has anyone ever tried reading the Gospel of Matthew and Zora Neale Hurston together?

Coming out of the Fast where the daily vespers readings were from the Book of Proverbs -- where justice for the poor is the marker of the wisdom that invites us to her kitchen table -- the Sermon on the Mount reads as fulfillment. The rains came down, floods came up.

'Moreover, I tell you that many will come from East and West and will recline at table alongside Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of the heavens.'

Like astrologers and centurions. All the supposedly spiritually wrong people.

Make no mistake; there absolutely are demons in this text. But the demons do the exact opposite of what Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount. They are not poor spirits. They are possessive little viruses.

Jesus forgive sins. The scribes say in their hearts he blasphemes. But of course, as Jesus suggested on the mount, their secrets are part of the supernatural universe. He can hear them. That's why he translates his forgiveness into making the paralytic walk.

HAHA. Matthew is a tax collector, with lots of friends!

Exactly. Like the astrologers and the centurion, he's THE WRONG PEOPLE.

I think I used to read this passage about only the sick needing a physician as Jesus condescending to the sinners. No, that's not right, when read with the next pericope, where the disciples don't fast. He's saying that the spiritual does not respect social boundaries.

'If I but touch his mantle, I shall be healed.'

And she is healed. This is a supernatural universe.

HAHA. Read like this, OF COURSE IT MAKES SENSE that the Pharisees say that Jesus exorcises demons by the prince of demons. With all this spiritual mess, orthodox me is half tempted to think so too!

THE LORD OF THE HARVEST.

Is this Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Now the disciples are sent out to exorcise these little possessive vampiric viral pests. The harvest is here, the spirits are thrown into chaos, the world of the supernatural is turned upside-down.

The Gospel of Matthew can almost be titled 'Everything Your Superstitious Aunties and Uncles Told You Is Probably True, But Not True Enough.'

Even the greeting of peace is framed within this world of spirits. If they receive it, peace comes on them. If they don't, it comes back to you.

God, that's freaky.

This possible betrayal by the 'leaders and even kings' and those collaborating with them -- is this not a political theology here, that Jesus warns that this topsy-turvy spiritual upheaval of the kingdom will disrupt the semblance of control over spirits?

Again, a reference to Beelzebul. Jesus knows that's what they call him. He knows this harvest is spiritually disruptive, most of all to those who thought they had the spirits all worked out in their neat and tidy boxes.

I feel this after watching the Diablo 4 trailer on the recommendation of my (cough!) CHINESE CHRISTIAN friend. No, Lilith is not Beelzebul, but same dif. I feel a bit for the Pharisees. This Jesus, this Master of the 'harvest,' is he not opening portals that shouldn't be opened?

'I came to impose not peace but a sword.'

Um yes. That is what you are doing when you call your thing a 'harvest,' and they call you Beelzebul. Let's call this the Buffy Hermeneutic. You heard it here first.

HAHAHAHAHAHA. EVEN THE JOHN THE BAPTIST IS CONFUSED.

Look, ok, when John the Baptist, who paved the way for you and talks about baptism in the Holy Spirit and fire, can't figure you out spiritually, you just might be spiritually confusing.

Is it bad that I'm siding with everyone who is confused by Jesus in Matthew's Gospel? With all his astrologers, centurions, tax collectors, and followers who don't fast, I think this guy is just raw spiritual chaos.

And he calls his thing a harvest.

'Yet from the days of John the Baptist till now, the kingdom of heaven has been violently assailed, and the violent seize it.'

This verse has never made more sense to me than today.

AND WISDOM HAS BEEN VINDICATED BY HER WORKS.

He's a womanist too?!?!

Yes, that's right, no way we're repenting at these feats of power, because this level of supernatural madness is downright pagan. Tyre, Sidon, Sodom? Of course they'd get it.

'I give you fullest thanks, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you hid these things from the wise and sagacious and revealed them to infants.'

BOOM.

At this point in Matthew's Gospel, it feels like it'd be better not to know any theology, because honestly it would all be a little less confusing.

I remember hearing one New Testament prof say that you kinda have to know Hebrew Scripture to really get Matthew.

Um, no, you don't. It might be better not to know anything. That is why the early church used this as the catechetical gospel.

LOL now Jesus is using OBSCURE DAVID STORIES to spar with the Pharisees. Really deep cuts from Samuel.

Lord of the Sabbath may sound less like Buffy than Lord of the Harvest, but in this time of coronavirus, it's actually just as freaky.

There he goes again, using Isaiah like a magic book of riddles. ISAIAH'S BOOK OF PROPHECIES IS ABOUT HIS OWN KIDS.

OH SNAP, he's actually going to answer the charge about being Beelzebul.

I SEE. What Jesus is saying is:

Sure, there's a kind of freaky spiritual chaos these exorcisms bring, but notice there's a morality to it too. If you flatten it all out to just 'the spiritual,' of course it's confusing. Or if you box it up into your rules, it's also confusing.

But here we get a clear spiritual word:

It is neither confusion nor order that marks the work of the Spirit. It is whether its fruit is good or rotten.

THE BOWELS OF THE SEA-MONSTER.

Jesus is really going for the jugular with this allusion to the appropriation of Canaanite lore in the story of Jonah. Indeed, indeed, not a jot nor tittle. I get it, I'm trackin.

The story of the unclean spirit going out and finding seven squatter roommates to repossess the person it was driven out of makes so much more sense now. After unleashing spiritual chaos, Jesus is now offering a theological interpretation.

And it is not an individualistic theological interpretation. It is an interpretation of the age.

LOL now his mother and brothers think he's crazy. I don't blame them!

God, I love this sower parable. It's such an accurate description of what has just happened in Matthew. Seed has been scattered, and it's all been quite random.

Is the Lord not unraveling my preconceived notions of the spiritual here? Are they not overdetermined by a lack of understanding, or a rootlessness, or the anxiety of this life and the temptation of wealth? Does he not speak into this chasm of my modern alienation?

This is psychoanalysis in Matthew:

The spiritual chaos unleashed by the harvest of the kingdom brings to the surface the overdeterminations with which the world of spirits is entangled.

Is this not what Barth taught us, that religion is the frontier of our projected artifices that can itself turn into the very no-gods that the Word of God throws into krisis?

Rightly do Adorno and Horkheimer throw Barth in with the psychoanalysts as they rattle them off in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

But I digress. Back to Matthew.

THEN THE JUST WILL SHINE OUT LIKE THE SUN IN THE KINGDOM OF THEIR FATHER.

The mystery of the kingdom, in other words, is that it's all going to be one big spiritual mess. But what will be the criterion for the harvest? The just.

YES! 'Like a large dragnet cast into the sea and gathering in things of every kind'! Exactly. Couldn't have put it better myself.

Oh yes, absolutely. If you want to exercise your scholarly chops in the kingdom, here it is. The old things, by which overdeterminations of the spiritual might be made, can also make a lot more sense with the new things.

And now his own hometown is confused. Oy.

Oh god, I felt that. The beheading of John the Baptist. I liked that guy.

No Herod in this story is good. No, not one.

This Jesus and his capacity to be inwardly moved with compassion -- I'm starting to come around that he's not Beelzebul.

Is it just me, or are we starting to get more of a sense of Jesus' inner life now, here with the feeding of the five thousand and his walking upon the water? Before, I feel like we got more of the secrets of others' hearts. But are we not let into the secrets of Jesus' heart now?

As David prays, 'Then in the secret of my heart teach me wisdom.' Is this not also the spiritual catechesis afforded by the Gospel of Matthew, that the secrets of the heart remain part of the economy of spirits?

I'm back, and with a thought, which I'd never had before, which is that with the invocation of Lady Wisdom being vindicated, is not the teaching on the secrets of the heart in Matthew a gloss on Proverbs?

IT IS A PHANTOM. There's been so much spiritual randomness in this gospel that it might as well be.

The question in Jesus' reply regarding the tradition of the elders circles around whether its practice tends toward justice. If so, it is the scribe bringing out old and new. If it is not, it is unclean.

And if it is unclean, then Matthew's Gospel has already shown what must be done: it must be exorcised.

This is a magnificent play on the discernment of spirits. No wonder this is the catechetical gospel.

That is right. It is the secrets of the heart that defile -- indeed, that determine cleanness. It is there that the criterion of the just in the world of spirits is worked out.

Indeed, and thus it is the secrets of the Canaanite woman's heart that reveal her faith.

Again, Jesus is moved inwardly. Again we glimpse the secrets of his heart.

They want to see ANOTHER SIGN?! Didn't Jesus already answer these people?

I have never read this passage this way, that the contrast between the yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees with Jesus lies in the secret of his having been moved inwardly with compassion for the crowds so that he fed them.

Here, the criterion for Peter's confession lies not in him getting it that Jesus is the anointed one, but in what this messianic mission means. Missing the point of his passion, Peter's mis-discernment aligns him with Satan.

The mistake lies in celebrating the spiritual as power. The criterion in the discernment of spirits is the poverty from which justice, not exploitation, flows.

And yet, the gentle mystagogy that Peter undergoes here is deeply moving. Immediately, Jesus shows him another inner secret in his transfiguration, and he gets it wrong again, but instead of being judged, he is comforted.

It gives me hope that, like Peter, I too am equally confused by what seems like Jesus' mixed spiritual messages, overdetermining the world of spirits as I do with ideologies of power. This gentle catechesis is also for me.

This is very moving to me. John the Baptist was confused by Jesus' acts. But Jesus recognizes John as Elijah. In this act, wrapped up in his passion, is all righteousness truly fulfilled.

'O faithless and perverse generation.' I really get the sense of Jesus' frustration now. After all this catechesis on the discernment of spirits, it's the same old exorcism that's being requested. Boring.

Even his explanation to his disciples about why they couldn't cast it out is boring. It's the same old, same old. This faith as a mustard seed -- these are the secrets of their hearts.

What was once an exciting program of spiritual chaos in which Jesus is even labeled Beelzebul by his opponents has been routinized late into Matthew's Gospel, as the secret criterion for the discernment of spirits -- that the wisdom of justice begins in the heart -- is revealed.

Well, ok, it's only sort of boring. This fish drachma story, thrown in right after Jesus vents his frustration, is fresh and charming.

There is a spiritual reality around the little ones -- their angels in heaven look upon the Father. I would have taken this statement on guardian angels metaphorically, but I am starting to know better this reading around.

It's more like the world of spirits has become the baseline reality at this point. 'Oooh are there guardian angels?' Yes, but that's not interesting. What's interesting is that if you cause any of these little ones with guardian angels to stumble, you'll go to hell.

It is very difficult to read this passage on the little ones and their guardian angels and those who cause them to falter without the context of the ecclesial sex abuse crisis that plagues all Christian communions. If I didn't know better, I'd say the Lord called it here.

I had not noticed that it is Peter's question about forgiveness that elicits this parable of the two servants. Indeed, Peter has been and will be forgiven of much, mostly of his constant mis-discernment of spirits due to the overdetermination of power.

Again, the material on marriage and divorce goes once more back to the secrets of the heart.

Indeed, the young man is choked by his own possessions. This is overdetermination. Keeping the commandments, it turns out, does not spiritual magic make. The poverty of justice does.

But here, the Lord is really plumbing the secrets of the heart. It turns out there can be a kind of pride in the poverty of justice. But if the rich were to come in to work in the vineyard at the last minute, will they not also be paid one denarius?

Again, the secret of the mother of the sons of Zebedee is that in her heart, she wants her sons to rule. But this is not the criterion of the kingdom. Service is.

How many layers of spiritual overdetermination does the Lord unpack in his journey to Jerusalem?

So many. The dirty secret about the heart as it approaches the spirits is that it is endlessly deceptive about how much its true desire is like Cain's, to dominate.

Indeed, this is the point with the young man and the commandments. Even the commands themselves can be used for a kind of magical thinking that fails to discern the spirits.

'Lord, that our eyes might be opened.'

Jesus again is moved inwardly with compassion. But is this not also the prayer of my heart now, confronted by Matthew's Gospel with my endless delusions and deceptions about the spirits?

The temple and the fig tree, according to this criterion of discernment. My.

Oh, to appeal again to John's baptism. Jesus, your heart is open.

Jesus is not feeling sorry for the tax-collectors and the prostitutes when he says they go into the kingdom ahead of you. He's saying that they have discerned the spirits rightly, that theirs is the discernment to trust.

The crowds know him to be a prophet. The crowds are lumped in with the tax-collectors and the prostitutes. Indeed, how often are crowds pathologized? And yet the crowds have also discerned the spirits rightly.

In Matthew's Gospel, the poll-tax trap is already anticipated by the story of the fish in whose mouth is the drachma that Peter uses to pay the temple tax. It's almost like the joke's on the questioners from the start.

'But knowing their wickedness Jesus said...'

Even the question arises from the secrets of hearts.

YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART.

I have not read these woes to the scribes and Pharisees as a dispute about the discernment of spirits before. The accusation seems to me to be that they are using the tradition as a kind of magical manipulation of the supernatural. But the truth of the world lies in justice.

Jesus talking about the apocalyptic destruction of the Temple is also in this vein of undermining magical thinking in the discernment of spirits. Don't get wowed by the spiritual phenomena, he's saying.

YES. The apocalypse is ultimately about revealing the secrets of the heart. 'But if that slave, being base, says in his heart, "My master is taking a long time..."'

The criterion of wisdom thus extends to the apocalypse. The story of the virgins -- is this not yet again a gloss on Proverbs?

YES. THE JUST WILL ANSWER HIM: 'When did we see you hungry and feed you,' and so on?

These stories extend the criterion for the discernment of spirits into the apocalypse.

'Go from me, you execrable ones.' Literally, you shitty people.

The criterion is justice.

On the woman who anoints Jesus:

Here, the heart is truly perverse. Even this teaching on poverty and justice can be perverted by the disciples' overdetermination.

Peter's reply to Jesus on the Mount of Olives is precious. He still doesn't get it.

TWELVE LEGIONS OF ANGELS.

The spiritual possibilities in Matthew are endless, aren't they?

Peter, oh Peter. This denial was foreshadowed throughout the entirety of Matthew's Gospel. He wants to get it, he just doesn't get it, he can't understand the criterion for discerning the spirits, and he ends up denying Jesus.

And in these tears comes the real change of heart.

If Matthew shows anything, it's that anything can be perverted. A kiss, a witness, even a defence of orthodoxy against blasphemy. The will to domination is truly strong.

There is something about reading these stories of Peter when one is in communion with Rome. There's an intimacy here, a very personal brotherly affection.

This traditionalist obsession with cleanliness to the end: the silver may have been used to spill blood, but it can be used to purchase a Field of Blood.

Traditionalism -- and I think this reflects especially on us who claim this Gospel in our liturgy -- is perverse.

Dreaming to the very end of Matthew's Gospel: Pilate's wife has a dream.

This charge that Jesus will tear down the sanctuary -- it's repeated twice in Matthew's Passion. Is it a reference here to what he says about the apocalypse?

Right down to the end, they ask for a sign, even while he's hanging on a cross.

And then, darkness descends, but they still don't get it. They think he's calling to Elijah. This is dark stuff.

BOOM. Right when they thought they got rid of him, the portal opens. The drama of spiritual chaos in Matthew comes right to its climax.

Another earthquake. The tomb opens.

Wow. The tale about the disciples stealing the body of Jesus contrasts the entire narrative of spiritual chaos. This is the most naturalistic moment in the entire Gospel, and it is a fabrication.

BUT SOME DOUBTED. He's risen from the dead, and they still don't get it.

I feel so seen.

Now the lessons of this catechetical gospel will spread. I do not think I'd ever read Matthew as a narrative manual for the discernment of spirits and the heart's secrets. Certainly, it is not the only way to read it. I may even have misread it.

But here we are. Mark tomorrow.

I wonder what would happen to this thread on Matthew if I went:

@threadreaderapp unroll