St. Matthew Passion by Hans Blumenberg

Author:Hans Blumenberg [Blumenberg, Hans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, European, German, Aesthetics
ISBN: 9781501759062
Google: 5uscEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: CornellUP
Published: 2021-11-15T20:46:23+00:00

The One Driven by Great Expectations

Perhaps the second most important function of repetition in myths after the dissolution of fears is to dissolve hatred. Not only the central figure of the ‘Servant of God’ but also the minor characters like Pontius Pilate, or even Judas, are kept in a peculiar suspension between being guilty and contributing to salvation.

Christian dogma has never allowed that the fallen angel in the role of Satan be turned into the principle of evil and an object of unbridled hatred, principally because the reservoir of creatureliness is inexhaustible and even in rejecting God’s incarnation the zealot betrays a detectable remainder of zeal for God; similarly, in the case of Judas the complicity with the one who drew him into his fold and intimacy is undeniable. It was inevitable for someone who was overly zealous for the purity of the Messiah to take offense, someone who had already, in the scene in Bethany with the anointing woman, reached the limits of his tolerance. Much has been said but too little has been thought about this.

But part of such a rethinking must be that Bach begins the St. Matthew Passion with this scene, which as an anticipatory anointment of Jesus’s corpse relates to the Passion but also prepares and introduces the digression of Judas. It is not just Judas but all of the apostles who grumble (eganaktesan) and utter the deprecatory word ‘waste’ (apoleia; in Luther’s translation: Unrat) that for Bach seems to emerge from the background of the looming crisis: “Wozu dienet dieser Unrat?” [What is the point of this waste?]. When Jesus answers with the provocative promise that this woman, no less than they, the grumblers, will become part of the gospel, Judas is only the amplifier. He is the true believer who, without hesitation, gives his answer to this provocation: “Then one of the twelve, named Judas Iscariot, went to the high priests.…” (MP 7; Matt. 26:14).

It is not only the reaction of the messianic brotherhood to the elevation of the anointment by the nameless woman into the gospel, not only the stinginess of the keepers of the alms who know at all times where the money could be invested better—it is the conjunction of anointment and burial, and the intimation of a long period of missionizing and waiting, that bestows on this moment such an ominous effect with regard to the Passion as the messianic catastrophe into which it would develop.

The one anointed in advance by the woman would be buried—that meant: he would not triumph as the Davidian king, and he would not elevate to high positions in his kingdom those who were entitled to them. There is only a gradual difference between Judas and the rest of the apostles, and when John calls him ‘the son of perdition’ (ho hyios tes apoleias) he becomes ‘waste’ as a figure—precisely what all of them had condemned in Bethany: the futility of an effort.

Judas is simply an exponent of messianic impatience. He does in his fashion what the others will do in theirs.

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