Chapter 28

April 18, 2014

A Reading of the Gospel 

     according to St. Matthew

Then there was a great earthquake, when an angel descended from heaven and rolled back the stone.  The angel sat on the stone, looking like lightning dressed in snow.  The guards posted at the tomb shook and fainted dead away.  But to the women, who were neither shaken by the earthquake or afraid of him, the angel said: “I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He isn’t here, as you can see.  So, go, tell his disciples that he has risen and is going before all of you to Galilee; you’ll see him there.”  So the women went running to tell the disciples, only to find that Jesus had not gone away, he was just around the corner.  “Hi,” he said. 

There’s some sort of commotion in the background. Matthew puts down his pen.  Something’s wrong, but he’s not quite sure what. Could it be the presence of the Roman soldiers he has dragged into the story so he can impeach their story doesn’t, finally, prove anything at all? Their testimony is clearly unreliable in any case: they were in a dead faint whatever happened; they slept through an earthquake. Meanwhile, the body really could have been stolen; or Jesus could simply have come to; or someone could have resuscitated him, and he hobbled or was carried away on a stretcher. The soldiers don’t know. If instead they swore he’d been raised from the dead, they’d still be testifying to something they had neither seen nor heard.

          But the angel. We would believe an angel, would we not, if we saw him, shining like lightning, woven out of snow-drift?  But he’s not a truly reliable witness either. “Tell the disciples he is on his way to Galilee ahead of you.” But he isn’t! He’s still in Jerusalem. In fact, he’s just around the corner. 

          It’s the oddest of stories Matthew is writing, soldiers paralyzed with sleep at the sight of an angel and the quaking of the earth, neither of which upsets two women at all.  Maybe that’s the lesson − the relative pusillanimity and chutzpah of Italian men and Jewish women.  The gospeleer is confused.

It is at just this puzzling point, that Matthew is interrupted again. (See Cyril Satorsky’s depiction above.) Here he is. We might think he’s casting a suspicious eye on future readers, but the sidelong glance is only the result of Mrs. Matthew calling again him to dinner, for the third flycatching time. “And, I’m not calling again.”

          She’s a loud woman − “lickerish,” too as Chaucer would say, loving not only the bodily pleasures of life, the release of liquid from her bladder, air and solid from her colon, eructation and lubrication, but relishing the obscenities that not only describe these pleasures but, as interjections and adjectives. can be brought to bear on practically any subject. You can see how that would be a pain to poor Matthew now that he’s contracted religion − her accusations that he’s pipiting away his time with his nose in a scroll, while his new friends think their shearwater smells like ice cream and pretend they don’t have petrels and tapaculos like everyone else. “My God, who has blessed me with every good thing: What is the world coming to?” He can’t put up his pen and take up a knife and fork and enjoy his meal, then put down his knife and fork and take his nose in his handkerchief and come to bed? “My God who had blessed me with every good thing, until . . . .” she yells from the kitchen.

He hesitates only a moment more, then he puts down his quill and goes in for swill, smiling (just barely) at the little rhyme he’s made, realizing it’s not really fair, for Mrs. Matthew, Miriam, like the women in his story, short, dark, full-bosomed and -bottomed − “Look at these titmice,” she says, walking stark naked into his study, the birds fluttering in her hands. “Look at this albatross,” turning around. It’s really not fair, for his lewd wife is a marvelous cook.

          If only he could eat . . . and the other.  But until he gets his Gospel right . . . .  And afterward, will he be “back to normal”? (She wonders).  Look at the heaviness in that face, whichever way the eyes are cast.  He has sunk into the seriousness of his religion; he’s so infected with its gravity, he picks at the food he should enjoy, and he closes his eyes and ears and prays that she’ll stay on her side of the bed.

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