A Fresh Perspective

Philip Gulley tells about pastoring a small Quaker meeting not far from where he lived when he was still in college. Several months into his tenure there, an elder in the congregation approached him with the news that a man and a woman in the congregation, both of whom were widowed, had begun living together. This elderly couple had met and developed a deep friendship that blossomed into a deep and mutual affection. This elder confronted Gulley: “Did you know they weren’t married? I think you should talk to them. They’re living in sin,” he said. Gulley says that like many people of his generation, he’d been taught that couples who were romantically involved and living together should be married. It was a principle he had never questioned, so he agreed to visit them. Tom and Maggie welcomed Gulley into their modest home, ushered him to the most comfortable chair, and offered him refreshments. Pictures of their respective children and grandchildren lined the walls. Gulley asked ...

I have found that many Christians are better able to cope with tensions in life in general than they are able to cope with tensions in their spiritual and religious life. There are reasons for this, I’m sure, but I am not going to speculate on what they may be. It’s enough to acknowledge the reality. For whatever reason there are many Christians who are willing to overlook real paradoxes and contradictions, and settle for superficial solutions. Tensions abound—in the biblical text, in our faith communities and relationships, and in our individual lives—and yet these tensions are often consistently ignored, denied, and trivialized in favor of simplistic answers, dogmatic certitudes, and quick fixes. Matthew 5:17-19 presents a case in point. Apparently there were tensions in Matthew’s church over the place and validity of the Jewish law for disciples of Jesus. Should the Jewish law have authority in the church and in discipleship to Jesus? This question may seem strange to us to...

It is difficult to know how much of this passage, if any, originated with Jesus and how much is to be attributed to the author/redactor of the Gospel. Either way, it’s in our sacred text and we are faced with the task of making sense of these words from Matthew’s Jesus. What is Matthew’s Jesus saying? The most obvious reading is that Matthew’s Jesus takes a strict view of the Jewish law. But how then can this text be reconciled with a text like Matt. 12:1-8, where Jesus clearly disregards Sabbath law, offering as justification an example from the life of David where David clearly violates the Torah requirements regarding the sacred bread in the holy place? The tensions/contradictions these differing responses to the Jewish law create are not easily resolved. What may have prompted the writer in 5:17-20 to be so insistent (or so over-the-top) on the continued validity of the Jewish law? Part of the answer is that he is preparing the way for the antitheses that come next in ...

“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly” (Matt. 1:18–19). Engagement in that culture was a legal contract. You couldn’t just say, “I’ve had second thoughts, I don’t want to be engaged anymore.” It could be broken only by going to court. It was as binding as marriage. So Joseph and Mary were engaged and may have been engaged for years. Often marriages were arranged by parents years ahead of time. Before they consummate their marriage, Joseph discovers that Mary is pregnant. Matthew says that Joseph is “a righteous man.” For many in that culture that meant that Joseph kept the law of God, he revered the law of God as holy and sought to obey it. That sounds good, but is slavish obedience to the law—to what...