Messiah, while Luke wrote to a largely Gentile audience. With this hypothesis in mind, we would expect Matthew to exhibit more continuity and connection with the past than either Luke or Mark.
While Matthew preserves much of the same language, it deletes Mark’s specific reference to “the new from the old” (Mark 2:21). As reflected in my translations above, the same Greek adjective may be translated as either “unshrunk” or “unbleached.”8 For Matthew, the problem was that the patch wasn’t treated correctly, and so it pulls away from the garment; instead of fulfilling its purpose, it makes the rip worse (Mt 9:16). In addition, notice that Matthew slyly adds to the description of wine and wineskins that “both are preserved” (Mt 9:17). Can such slight changes to parables dramatically change their meaning? What might Matthew be trying to communicate to his original audience and to us?
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus famously states, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill” (Mt 5:17). In terms of the parables, the old garment does not need to be destroyed, but repaired; the new wine needs to be placed in the proper containers, so that neither are destroyed. Biblical scholar Eugene Boring might have an unfortunate name for someone who publishes, but I have always found his insights to be stimulating. He makes note of these differences and concludes, “Matthew sees Jesus as having brought something eschatologically new . . . But Jesus brings the eschatologically new in such a way that it does not do away with the old, but fulfills and preserves it.”9 The new is in continuity with the old; the new perfects tradition, instead of getting rid of it.
Conclusion
It is important that we recognize the variations in the different Gospels because they give us an insight into the original communities and the struggles they faced. Specifically I hope it was clear that the make-up of the original audience of a particular Gospel impacted how they interpreted their community’s relationship to the past. This is true today as well. Like first-time parents, the church today must carefully weigh the arguments for maintaining tradition versus implementing new ideas in a rapidly evolving culture. Occasionally we should take to heart Luke’s insistence that we need to change and let go of our outdated ways in order to experience a fresh perspective. In other circumstances, we do well to hear Matthew’s call to carry forward with the best of tradition, even as we seek to live into a new day. Sometimes the way forward is a form of compromise, like our experience with the Velcro swaddle, as we find a balance between the new and the old. I’d like to think about these ideas through the illustration of naming our son, Samuel Greene Taylor-Troutman.
Alongside My Son
Called by Name
When we were married, Ginny and I decided to hyphenate our last names. We wanted to start our new life together with the symbolic understanding that both families of origin are important. A hyphen creates one word from two separate ones, meaning that something new is actually the result of maintaining a direct reference to both traditions. As people learned of this decision, the most common question involved our children: Would they also have a hyphenated last name? Yes! We wanted to pass along this value of equal preservation, while starting something new with our nuclear family—the Taylor-Troutmans. Once the last name was decided, we were left the not-so-simple decision about the rest of our child’s name . . .
We had made up our minds, even before she was pregnant, that we wanted to learn the sex of our baby as soon as possible. In part, this had to do with plans and preparations; but mostly we wanted to select the name in advance. I’m sure that you’ve probably got a great story about naming your child just after you first laid eyes on the baby . . . but we simply could not wait!
After the ultrasound proved convincingly that we were having a boy (that is a story for another chapter), we discussed this important decision over lunch at our favorite restaurant. As we ate quiche and soup, we touched on this name and that one. We wanted a name for our newborn that reflected our joy about this unique and wondrous gift, yet also reminded us of our family history. In seeking the perfect balance, there were several good options but none that seemed quite right. That is, until I suggested Samuel Greene Taylor-Troutman. I’ll never forget Ginny’s face, as she lit up and whispered reverently, “That’s perfect.”
In the Old Testament, a boy named Samuel was the fulfillment of Hannah’s fervent prayer for a child after a long period of infertility (1 Sam 1:13–16). We, too, knew something about the agonizing uncertainty of those prayers (yet another tale for later in this book). But the child’s name evokes the incredible feeling of grace when the wait is over. In Hebrew, “Samuel” is a play on the words, “name” and “God.” Hannah thought that her son was named by God (1 Sam 1:20). But the Hebrew letters embedded in Sam’s name can also form the verb, to hear, as in “God has heard.” Our son is an answer to our prayers and we want to raise him in our faith tradition, which includes the story of his namesake and how this scripture is God’s Living Word in our lives.
Sam’s middle name, Greene, is the maiden name of my maternal grandmother. Like many family names, it has a history tied to a place and time. To this day, members of the Greene family live in Oxford, North Carolina, which is a small, agricultural town with a Baptist church that all my relatives attended. Shortly after Ginny and I began dating, the community marked its one hundred and fiftieth year with a sesquicentennial celebration. For the Greenes, it was really more like a family reunion; but the truth is that I didn’t want Ginny to attend this reunion. At that time in my life, I was ashamed of this side of my family.
Timothy Tyson has written a book, Blood Done Sign My Name, about the horrific racism in Oxford during the Civil Rights era, including the real-life story of cold-blooded murder of a young black man.10 My relatives lived during this sad history and one of them, my great uncle, actually appears in the book. He was the man who bought the public swimming pool in order to maintain segregation by making it private property. He couldn’t even swim; but he was racist and had the money to prove it. As difficult as it is for me to imagine, he must have thought that he was maintaining a just and noble tradition. In fact, segregation blinded him to the reign of God that demanded a new way of living regardless of skin color and ethnicity. For such shameful reasons, I didn’t want Ginny to even visit the place or meet these relatives. Years later, why in the world would I want to name my son after this side of the family? What about new wine and old wineskins?
Like many small churches, there is a cemetery just outside the little Baptist church in Oxford. After the sesquicentennial celebration, we stood under a big blue canopy of a sky and my dad told me about the women of the Greene family, about how they would gather around family tombstones after funerals. The older generations would share the stories about the departed, such as the one about my great-great-grandmother who allegedly chased away Union troops with a kitchen broom! While the veracity of these tales might not stand close scrutiny, the abiding message related to the strength of these women. And so, the new generations would hear these stories about the seemingly ancient past, no doubt embellished, but nonetheless a part of family history meant to inspire the future.
While there is racism snaking its way up my family tree, there are also strains of fierce independence that have rooted my relatives during difficult times. So it’s not as simple as replacing the old with the new: I do not want my son to be blind or indifferent to the skeletons in our family closet. Yet, instead of denying the past and the reality of its mistakes, I hope that Samuel Greene will study our cultural history and learn from the best lights of his own family tradition.
A Privilege
For Mark, I have argued that it was an important aspect of his rhetorical style to write his Gospel at frantic speed. Not only does this convey the sense that the reign of God was breaking into the world, but it puts a special emphasis on the
