Today and for the next three weeks, we’ll be hearing instructions to disciples and apostles from Matthew’s Gospel. There is an interesting puzzle in today’s Gospel passage, when Matthew insists that disciples should not preach to non-Jews. But we recently heard in Acts of the Apostles that Paul was preaching to gentiles, and he had gotten Peter and the other apostles to agree that those non-Jews could be full members of the new Christian church. So what’s going on? This divergence probably is explained by location.
Matthew’s Gospel was written in Antioch, or somewhere else where there was a strong Jewish community, a critical mass, we might say. The early communities of Christians were geographically separated. Travel was dangerous and primitive by our standards. Scriptures (Epistles, Gospels, etc.) were written for specific communities. There was no unified “New Testament” yet, in circulation and used by all the new communities. So basically, the jury was still out about how inclusive the still-very-new Christian Church was going to be. In Matthew’s community, we can see that clearly there are insiders (Jews, Jewish converts) and outsiders (non-Jews, Gentiles). Matthew’s Gospel was probably written around the year 80 C.E. (Christian Era), and the Holy Spirit, whose coming we celebrated two weeks ago, had not yet brought unity to the growing Christ movement. Accepting non-Jews was still being resisted. We know that all groups, by definition, have boundaries that define who’s in and who’s out, helping to define the group’s identity. It is a complicated situation to this day. How inclusive can a group become without losing its identity? How can a group extend love and compassion and reconciliation to outsiders? What do we fear when we consider widening our circles, or when we keep someone excluded from our group? Jesus’ priestly prayer in the Gospel of John is that “all may be one, as I and the Father are one.” We struggle to find our way to oneness in so many aspects of life, in our families, our work groups, our national and international politics, and in our Church. Is God asking us, me, to do anything about this?
— Blog entry by Sister Mary Garascia
The post June 14, 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Outsiders: a Sunday Scriptures blog first appeared on Sisters of the Precious Blood.