Two-Minute Homily: But Some Doubted       

FINDINGS II

Trinity - A - June 19, 2011

Matthew 28: 16-20        

Matthew 28: 16-20   

The eleven remaining of Jesus' followers went to the mountain in Galilee as they had been told. When they saw him, they bowed down to him, but some doubted. Then Jesus walked up to them and spoke these words: "All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth. You are to go and make followers of all the people. You are to baptize them in the name of the father and of the son and of the unseen force. Teach them to fulfill everything I have asked. And keep in mind that I'll be with you every day from now on as long as the world goes on."

(Translated, condensed and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.)

RUBRIC

When I was in congregational work, I did everything I could to assign the homiletic task on Trinity Sunday to another member of the clergy. I would neither have asked nor expected a lay preacher to take on that doctrine -- one which I came to see early on in my graduate school and post-graduate days as abstract in the extreme and utterly unessential static in an already noisytheological universe. I am, however, compelled to treat of the text and the liturgical occasion for which it is chosen in Year A. It is my penance.

HOMILETIC WORKSHOP

Mark's gospel has no ending worthy of the name. It screeches to a halt with the words describing the women who came to the tomb and found it empty: "They told no one because they were afraid." The fourth gospel ends like a Beethoven symphony, i.e., over and over again: at 20:31 or at 21:24 or at 21:25. Luke's ending is but a bridge to the beginning of Acts of the Apostles. The actual ending of the Gospel according to Matthew may be the words, "but some doubted." But just as Mark had a patch put on it by later editorial initiative, so, perhaps, was Matthew's text "improved" with a thumping symphonic ending loud and brash enough to drown out the word έδίστασαν, which can mean to doubt or to hesitate.

Why would there have been hesitation on the part of those who are said by Matthew to have witnessed in person some one who has recently died? What more need be known? Or is έδίστασαν another way of saying some present there could not quite believe their eyes, or thought they were seeing things? Did any of those people on that Galilean mountain want to risk the rest of their lives of something that is ordinarily impossible? And would that have been somewhat similar to the kind of situation that may have obtained in the Syrian communities of Jesus Jews toward the end of the first century as Matthew's gospel was emerging? Especially the Gentile members of those communities who would never have known Jesus or any of his original company -- might they have been hesitating over their commitment?

The fact that neither the author nor any redactor offers commentary beyond the "but some doubted" suggests that the original audience for what is now 28:16-20 would have known quite well what the situation had been: some bowed down; some doubted. However, I think we are meant to believe that the commandment "all people" (the word "people" here being έθνη, as generally used meaning "all nations exclusive of Israel -- the goyim, in other word). A literary tradition whose author(s) and editor(s) took great pains to connect its Galilean protagonist with the patriarchs of Israel replete also with quotations from the Hebrew bible, "to all people" is a grand concession to universality. (So also, by the way, is the story of the Magi an appeal to universality from another angle.) There is, of course, ample evidence that the Matthean communities were largely Gentile, if not in origin, soon enough in dominance.

The Trinitarian language of the passage is confusing because such a doctrine had emerged neither in what would have been the lifetime of the gospels' various Jesuses nor yet in the 80s and 90s of the first century C.E. when According to Matthew was taking shape. Some theologians blithely say that god-talk just naturally fell into the three-fold pattern represented in the text. Not at all a convincing argument.

Baptism and related terms (Baptist, baptize, baptized, baptizer, baptizing) appear only 62 times in the gospels with some of those mentions coming in the same sentence (see, e.g. Luke 12:50 ) and never as a command, much less a command given by Jesus. Moreover, baptism was in the era from which our text comes was more associated with ritual washing or proselyte initiation rites. Did the hand that gave us the "go ye into all the world" image have in mind mass conversions to post-Temple Judaism? Did Christian eisegetes and meddlesome theologians appropriate the text and its image for their own ends? I'm just asking.

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Two-Minute Homily

But Some Doubted         

By Harry T. Cook

A certain professor of systematic theology in a certain seminary in the 1960s was wont to say that he generally skipped church on Trinity Sunday, preferring to stay at home and chuckle over an early sherry about the inevitable heresies being committed by his former students in pulpits all over America.

The fault, the chuckling professor went on to say, was neither in the stars, nor in his former students nor yet in his own pedagogy but, rather, in the impossibility of the Trinitarian doctrine itself. It was, he said, a kind of poetry -- not good poetry, but poetry nonetheless, and therefore should not be treated as prose to parse, slice and dice even into three-point sermons.

Herr Professor was certainly aware that "some doubted," even as Matthew said of some number of Jesus' disciples who were depicted as having climbed up a Galilean mountain to hear Jesus' last earthly words only to doubt either what they were seeing or what they were hearing -- certainly an odd note in an otherwise triumphal passage.

I'm as sure as I'm sure my name's not Willow Tit Willow that it was not a slip of the quill that caused the "but some doubted" to sneak into the text. William Albright and C.S. Mann, who wrote an exegesis of this text, want to pass it off as an acknowledgement of a conflict among traditions. I disagree. I think it was an editor of the Matthean manuscript who wanted to insert a note of credibility into the impossible Metro Goldwyn Mayer mountaintop scene.

"But some doubted," he wrote. There is no indication that anyone was put out of the community for his doubt. Perhaps lurking in the Matthean passage appointed for Trinity Sunday is a clue that all sermons on this doctrine should not only leave room for but invite careful doubt about the three-in-one and one-in-three formula.

As I said to an antagonist who was about to enter a charge against me for conduct unbecoming a clergyman on the grounds that I declined to teach Trinitarian theology: I find the language and concept of the Trinity to be impossible to consider in an Enlightenment world. The Trinity to me is an abstraction constructed out of bits and pieces of scripture and tradition that are fundamentally meaningless in the 21st century.

A well-intentioned Presbyterian clergyman with a Ph.D. in church history attempted a rebuttal to that statement, saying that the doctrine of the Trinity was the perfect response "to the immensity of the biblical deity who can not be comprehended in singular terms." I told him that Ralph Waldo Emerson had done tolerably well without the encumbrance of the Trinity, and that I intended to try to do the same.

If "some doubted" on the Galilean mount, some can and do doubt now. How biblical!