Sleeping Baby

An Ecological Reading of Matthew’s Gospel 1:1-23

ELAINE WAINWRIGHT explains how the opening verses of the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 1:1-23) situate Jesus in the Earth and cosmological community. 

The turning of the liturgical cycle and the turning of the calendar year draws our attention to the Gospel of Matthew which we shall hear, read and ponder during 2017. This column each month will engage with the gospel ecologically providing the opportunity to read our sacred text through the lens of and in dialogue with not just text but also con-text, both ancient and contemporary. The con-text is all that surrounds and is imbued in the text itself. As we read with fresh eyes the materiality of con-text will come alive in our imagination and our very being. It will give new life to the scripture and to us as a community reading our sacred text. In the language of the Matthean gospel, this is where and how God is with us (Mt 1:23).

Clues Within Text

The Gospel’s opening verse begins with the book of the genealogy/biblos geneseōs of Jesus Christos. The verse vibrates, as it were, with what we call intertexts. They are texts that occur elsewhere in the bible and which are evoked either explicitly or implicitly in a new text. In Mt 1:1 we find the words of Genesis 2:4a, the book of the generations/the biblos geneseōs of the heavens and the earth when they were created, evoked in the geneseōs, the genesis of the heavens/sky and the earth together with all Earth’s constituents, as they echo through the first words of the Matthean gospel. The intertexture with Gen 5:1–2, the biblos geneseōs of the human community/the anthrōpōn (the human) male and female, functions to place the human story within the story of Earth and of the heavens/the sky.

It is significant that the con-text for the human community is the Earth community. While the human community has always known this, in recent centuries we have come to think of ourselves as having power over the Earth rather than of living in harmony, in right relationship, with it. This mindset has led us to limit our reading of scripture to see only the relationship between the human and the Holy.

The evocation of both Gen 2:4a and 5:1-2 in the opening phrase of Mt 1:1 challenges this narrow reading. Gen 2:4a evokes the first genealogy of the heavens/skies and the earth. It is only later in that genealogy that the human community appears, placing humanity within the unfolding of the universe and so giving us a cosmic genealogy. The Genesis genealogy is encoded in Matthew’s opening phrase of the story of Jesus. It invites us to read the story with a cosmological and ecological lens. It is a new story. Justice, or right relationship, calls us to this reading. And justice is woven through the Matthean gospel.

Tied to Earth and Sky

Justice takes our attention to the maleness dominating the opening verse of the gospel: “Jesus Christos, son of David, son of Abraham”. Recognising this we turn back to the genealogy of Gen 2:4. Divine creativity characterises the Genesis narrative and this creativity is shared by the human community, male and female, in the image of the Divine (Gen 1:27). However, this community was given dominion over the Earth in Gen 1:28. We need to critique this perspective in the narrative as we have seen dominion borne out destructively in relation to the Earth and to the vulnerable in the human community, many of them women. Such dominion cannot be allowed to permeate our ecological reading of the Matthean text and its intertexts despite the dominant androcentrism of the gospel opening verse and of the entire genealogy. (We read that a male was the father of another male repeated 39 times, broken only by the naming of five women.)

The inter-con/textuality in Mt 1:1 alerts readers to a range of indigenous cosmologies evoked by the intertext of Gen 2:4a. By way of example, for New Zealand Māori, whakapapa/genealogy is a key to their identity and it is conceived cosmically. The poet, Apirana Taylor, captures this:

Whakapapa whakapapa ties you to the land . . .
this is your inheritance
the sky and earth and all that lies between.

Each generation of Matthew’s genealogy (Mt 1:2-16) is “tied” to a habitat and land, the Earth, while also belonging to the genealogy of the heavens/sky.

New Story

The opening word of the gospel — biblos — and its rich inter-con/textuality signals a new narrative, a new story of the heavens/sky and the Earth, a new story of Earth held together within the woven tapestry of text, the biblos. Before it became known as “book” or “narrative”, biblos named the bark, the inner bark of the papyrus plant from which sheets of papyrus were made to be used as the carrier of writing and story. The original gospel texts were most likely written on papyrus. Biblos functions within the web of life of the Earth community. The giving up of the inner bark for writing material evokes the giving up of the life of Jesus Christos, the central human character in the narrative.

Jesus, Child of Earth and Sky

The biblos geneseōs becomes very specific in the second half of the verse and provides the focus of a particular human genealogy — it is of the one who is designated Iēsou Christou. Jesus’ name frames the genealogy (Mt 1:1 and 1:17) and provides a textual link between Mt 1:16 and 1:18. In Mt 1:16, the name Jesus is followed by the phrase “who is called the Messiah (the anointed, the Christos)”, whereas in Mt 1:17 Christos stands alone in designating Jesus. Mt 1:18 parallels Mt 1:1 in that Christos follows immediately after the name Jesus. It seems that by the time of the compilation of the Gospel, Christos, or anointed one, had become synonymous with the name Jesus.

Another naming of Jesus occurs in Mt 1:23 and can rebound back to the Christos designation in Mt 1:1. Jesus is identified metaphorically as Emmanu-el, God with us. The gospel is suggesting that God is with “us” — Earth and all Earth’s constituents (Mt 1.23). It is not just as a particular geographical, historical, political and economic community but as all who participate in the biotic and abiotic Earth community within the context of a new ecological perspective.

God has been “with us” from the beginning as indicated in the genealogy’s opening and unfolding. God is with us now, the contemporary Earth community, in the birth of this particular child Jesus in all his materiality and his con-textuality replete with the web of multiple interrelationships that constitute him. It is into this that the opening verse of Matthew’s gospel invites contemporary readers.


Published in Tui Motu Magazine Issue 212 Feb 2017: 20-21