Tragic?

I was a visitor in the course of one of my colleagues today, who thought it would be fun to have students read The Gospel According to Matthew in a course on tragedy in various genres. I figured it was a set-up - like George Steiner, he was going to insist that Christianity just doesn't get tragedy - so I tried to think of a way to at least be a stumbling block. Here's what I did - I'm not saying it worked, but at least he wasn't mopping the floor with Matthew on the Monday of Holy Week.

I started by playing Ella Fitzgerald singing "Get thee behind me, Satan," noting its modern sense that temptation is probably something it's human to give in to, and that I'd return to it. After a quick introduction about how Christians never just read a gospel through, I focused on two passages, which between them let me raise several important points. The first, the reference to the "sign of Jonah" (12:39), was chosen to stop sneering about superstitious credulity at miracles - none of the healings and exorcisms count as signs here, so don't get hung up on them - and to underline that the NT builds on and may require the OT.

³⁸ Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, "Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you." ³⁹ But he answered them, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. ⁴⁰ For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. ⁴¹ The men of Nineveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. (RSV)

The second, "Get thee behind me, Satan" (16:23), I picked to show that even Peter, who's just "got" who Jesus is, still doesn't really get it. He's still thinking in human rather than divine terms in thinking Jesus needn't go to Jerusalem to be crucified. And yet, just five verses before, Jesus - who'd warned against building a house on sand (7:24-27) - had announced that Peter was the rock on which he would build his church (16:18)! As in other passages (like the explanation of parables), the author of Matthew here veritably insists that human interpretation will not get what's going on in the story of Jesus.

But something even more interesting is going on, I suggested. Does Jesus perhaps snap at Peter like this because he's tempted, too? This is the turning point in the story, after all, where preaching in the hinterland turns toward trial and death in the city. Think back to Jonah - the "sign of Jonah" is explained in terms of three days and preaching to outsiders, but Jonah's also the Bible's most reluctant prophet. My point wasn't that of the gospel according to Jonathan Bach or José Saramago. It was, rather, that the humanity of Jesus must have taken affront at various points at his superhuman destiny (most famously in the Garden of Gethsemane) - and that our readings often do, too. The writer of Matthew wants us to be tempted to read the story as a human story - even as a tragedy.

He also wants us to know we're so tempted. Get thee behind us, Satan?