Between genealogy and virgin birth

origin and originality in Matthew

Lee Daneš

pp. 23-36

in: Yvonne Sherwood (ed), Derrida's Bible, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Abstract

Authority? What is it? Who has it? How is it to be established? For Matthew, Jesus teaches as "one who has authority" and not as a scribe (7:29) and, after the resurrection, Jesus says to his disciples: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me" (28:18).² The resurrected Jesus claims all authority as a gift. Is all authority, then, (a) given? Given that authority preexists us, how do we stand before it? If one is to begin with the authority of the given, the gift of authority, must one always authoritatively cite the father of all authority, the son for whom all authority in heaven and on earth is a gift? What would such citation mean? Must all authority be resurrected from the dead? Would not such authority reek of authoritarianism? What sort of living space would it provide for you and me? Or, rather, is it the case that all authority is dead until it has died and been resurrected? To adapt John 12:24, "Truly, Truly, I say to you, unless a grain of authority falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." Is there a sense in which all authority is an authority of death and resurrection—the coming of a spirit that, as always already prophetically fulfilled, is always fulfilling and is at all times in the offing, but as such can be neither fully present nor wholly absent? Yet, have not we, the living, been commanded to let the dead bury the dead: to let sleeping gods lie? How, then, are we the living to appropriate this gift of authority and this gift of death (always en/crypted, always scriptural, always silent, and always secret and thus revelatory) in a way that is not dead or deadening? To transpose the lesson of the Jesus of John's Gospel: is it not true that "before authority is, I am"? (John 8:58).