Insights on Luke with Rev. Dr. Shelly Matthews

Watch the video here or on Vimeo.com here.

Recently, Rebecca Trefz from the Dakotas Conference communications staff, had a conversation with Rev. Dr. Shelly Matthews, about her commentary on Luke, volumes 1 and 2, in the Wisdom Commentary Series. This video is Part 1 of that conversation.

Rebecca Trefz: All right, well, I am excited to be here today with Reverend Dr. Shelly Matthews, who is an elder in the Dakotas Conference, but serves in Extension Ministry. And as we are on this journey in 2025 through Luke and Acts as a Dakotas-Minnesota Episcopal Area, we're excited to have, I don't know, should I call you Dr. Matthews? Should I call you Shelly.

Shelly Matthews: You can call me Shelly. I think Shelly in the Dakotas first names only, right? None of that stuffy stuff.

Rebecca Trefz: I thought I should formally introduce you. It’s great to have Shelly here with us today as she has this work on Luke—and Acts, eventually here, we'll get to later on maybe in the year—but has been a part of her scholarly work and pastoral work in that service. So welcome, Shelly. It is great to be with you today.

Shelly Matthews: Thank you, Rebecca. I am pleased to be talking to you in the Dakotas here from my perch in Texas, longing for home.

Rebecca Trefz: Well, let's start with a little bit, tell the folks from Dakotas and Minnesota where you're serving right now and in your ministry and scholarly work.

Shelly Matthews: I am at the Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas, which is the originary denomination of the Brite Divinity School is the Disciples of Christ, which I had never heard of coming from North Dakota.

Rebecca Trefz: And how long have you been at Brite?

Shelly Matthews: Brite, I have been 12 years, maybe it's 13 now. And then I began in South Carolina at a small liberal arts school known as Furman University. So, it's the plague of academics is that the job market is national. So you have to go where the job market is. And also, everybody wants to work in a Methodist seminary and not everybody can. My luck has never or my you know, providence, whatever you want to call it has not brought me into that circle.

Rebecca Trefz: Well, we always say in the Dakotas, we're excited to be able to send out missionaries to other places. You're one of our missionaries out there.

Well, so tell us a little bit about, you have really this two-part commentary that you co-wrote on Luke. So tell us a little bit about that project that worked.

Shelly Matthews: Thank you. So I have co-authored a two volume commentary on Luke through the Wisdom Commentary series, which is a series that is produced by Liturgical Press in Collegeville, Minnesota. So if some of you have Minnesota ties, right, that's the school right down I-94 on the way to Minneapolis. You're coming from Fargo near to St. Cloud. They have a Catholic press but, of course, as with any sort of mainline denominations anymore, they're ecumenical. The Wisdom Commentary is aiming for volumes on every book of the Bible, including what we Protestants know as Apocrypha. So there are commentaries on Judith and the Maccabees. But I was asked to co-author Luke with Barbara Reed, who is now the president of Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

Our volumes were edited by Amy Jill Levine, who some people know since she's got a profile in Protestant churches. That was quite an experience between working with both those people, but it was also fun. Our goal was that we didn't have to provide all of the introductory material that one could find in a standard commentary such as has been recommended for people in the series by say Joel Green or Fred Craddock, but to offer up perspectives from non-dominant interpreters. We have lots of contributing voices in addition to our own commentaries. We invited others to contribute little snippets. And of the work I've done, I have to say when we were writing this, we were really thinking of preachers and pastors. I mean, some teachers as well, of course, we'd like to have it in the classroom, but because of the commentaries, style of it, right, so you can pick it up for little snippets. You don't have to read the whole two volumes to get a sense of preaching, you know, some ideas and we hope to have included some things that you've never thought about before, ways to approach it that provide fresh lenses.

Rebecca Trefz: Yeah, so as someone who has not written a commentary, how do you go about, you know, what is your approach going to be? Is this something that's kind of, is there a theme or a sort of flavor with the Wisdom Commentaries or was this something you and Barbara came up with? How did you approach that?

Shelly Matthews: Yeah, no, mean, I have to use the word feminist and then maybe that will scare people off. lot of our perspective, I mean, but feminist in a really important and I hope engaging or useful way. many that they didn't, I mean, there are, you know, so we are looking particularly at issues of gender and power and how the scriptures have been used to liberate, how scriptures can be used to harm. So we have this sort of two-way lens of interpretation. So we try to take a parable or a story, for instance, in the probably what you'll be getting to in Lent, as Jesus approaches Jerusalem. There are stories, for instance, the parable of the vineyard where the vineyard owner has tenants, and the tenants exploit the owner or there's tension and then there's actually murder on both sides. The tenants kill the vineyard owner's son. This has traditionally been preached, I mean, the 2,000 year history of the church, this parable has been interpreted allegorically as the bad people in the parable have been the Jews. The parable becomes interpreted supersessionistly that the vineyard owner being God kicks out the Jews and finds new owners. So we look at the sort of negative, we want to say that the supersessionists or anti-Jewish understandings are problematic, but then we also want to say, well, let's look at this angle instead. And there are traces in the parable of the vineyard of a story not preserved in the gospels, but of the story that the vineyard owners actually he's exploiting the workers. And so then you see the exploitation and then the response of violence and then the spiral of violence. And then we can talk about how this parable might illuminate violence and counter violence and exploitation in our own time. So that's just an example of the sort of two-way lens of our approach to the text. How we can use this text for good, how this text has been used in ways that are not life-giving. So that's our way through.

Rebecca Trefz: Wow. I mean, I think that's so…even just as you talk about it and sort of mining the text like that for and bringing in those other pieces. And even what came to mind for me when you were talking about that was just human nature. The humanity that we see both in the text in that story revealed the humanity and that cycle of violence and then also how we've seen it used in some detrimental anti-Semitic ways or that.

Shelly Matthews: Yeah, so I can start at the beginning if you like the first chapter, we want to talk about Theophilus a little bit.

Rebecca Trefz: Yeah, that would be great to kind of set the tone as we're opening into it, you know, we're recording this were in week four of our read through Luke and Acts, but you know, again, it starts off with this. Who is the who's this?

Shelly Matthews: Yes, I will say I read my Conference newsletters and yes, I am aware, and I signed up even to be on the Facebook, though I haven't posted yet. But yeah, you're in Luke four. And of course, that is a very powerful story that the Bishop was centering on the rejection of Jesus in Nazareth. And we can talk about that too. But I guess I like to, when I teach the Gospel of Luke, I like to talk a little bit about Theophilus and those first four verses at the beginning where Luke addresses most excellent Theophilus and then acknowledges, okay, other people are writing stories. We actually think he's at least including the Gospel of Mark and stories Luke knows. But he's decide, the author of Luke—and I will use “he” for a reason to talk about as well, but I mean, I think the primary author is male—he is going to provide a better account, if you will, right? He's going to put it in order. So it's going to be an orderly account. And then the goal is that Theophilus will have, the translation is usually surety, that he'll be reassured. But I think that those, that preface really signals some of the things that Luke is doing throughout the gospel and some of the things he's changing in his version of Mark.

First of all, Theophilus, we know, Theophilus might be a real person, a wealthy patron. We do know in the ancient world that authors often were sustained by wealthy people who would pay for their works and then have stage readings in their libraries or whatever. So Theophilus might be a wealthy person who has funded Luke's work. It's also possible that Theophilus might be a symbolic name because Luke uses symbolic names at several points in his gospel and symbolically, the word is lover of God or God lover. So it might be one person who actually had that name or it could be, I'm writing to God fearers. All of you who, and by God fearers means people who are trying to be pious or live lives of piety toward God. But the fact that he addresses this patron as “most excellent” also signals that he's upper class. That's a title of respect to someone in a higher station.

And I think then what Luke is doing when he says, I'm going to write you an orderly account and you can be reassured by it, I think that what Luke is going to do, or we see in places that how he's going to reassure an upper-class patron of the truth of the movement around Jesus and his disciples is he's going to polish it a little. Theophilus or people from his station might've been a little nervous about these Jesus followers. He might have felt that the Jesus followers were a little subversive or disorderly. I mean, what is this with women and slaves being treated as if they were equal to others in the household, like the first come last and, you know, things like that. So, I think Theophilus has heard things about the movement that make him cautious, like, can I really join this and retain my status? And Luke is like, I'm going to give you a reassuring portrait, show you how respectable we are so that you can go forward. And so, we see places in Luke where that happens and I don't know, do you want some examples?

Rebecca Trefz: Yes, of course.

Shelly Matthews: Okay, well right away, and it's one of my very fun ones to point out to my students, is the story of John the Baptist. And I would say that Luke makes John the Baptist a little bit more respectable than he comes across in the Gospel of Mark. So, you go read Mark chapter one, what is John the Baptist wearing? He's wearing a hairy coat, right? And they wore them on the inside. It's a sign of a penitent or someone who's an ascetic of some kind, right? And so it's scratchy. That is when you had a camel hair coat and you were a penitent, you wear the scratch on the inside, right? It's a way to punish yourself. And then what is he eating?

Rebecca Trefz: Locust and honey.

Shelly Matthews: Yeah, he's eating bugs. You know, so he comes off, in Mark, as a bit of a wild man, right? I mean, he's a prophet out in the wilderness. Who knows where he came from? But you've got to go to Luke. And first of all, Luke gives him, you know, polishes up his genealogy. He's not just a guy from nowhere. His father is a priest of the house of I can't remember now. I'm having the tip of my tongue. Anyway, his father's a priest in the temple, right? And his mother is of the lineage of Aaron, right? So, John the Baptist, you know, is not some crazy guy in the wilderness. He is, or he's got a good pedigree. And then look for the hairy coat and look for the bugs in Luke. They're not there.

Rebecca Trefz: Interesting.

Shelly Matthews: And instead, I mean, he's a prophet still, but a literate prophet, right? He's quoting Isaiah.

Rebecca Trefz: Yeah!

Shelly Matthews: Right. So, I just give that as an example of, I mean, as I imagine Luke is reading Mark is like, Okay, I've got to reassure Theophilus, what is the first thing that's going to make Theophilus say. So he tames him down a little bit. So you have things like that going on. And it's fun to see in Luke four, actually, I mean, I think the best part of Luke four and certain, you know, the preaching edge, and I think your Bishop touched on it this week in a pastoral letter is that Jesus, you know, reads from the prophet Isaiah, his liberation message: The sight to the blind, good news to the poor, and to proclaim at liberty, or the year of liberty, for all who are oppressed. That's language of the Jubilee here, right? The freedom of captives. So I think that's very interesting and very important, and it deserves a lot of preaching, but I was just going to say a little bit about the polishing up part. The idea that Jesus takes a scroll and then rolls the scroll and Isaiah is the biggest scroll of the prophetic scrolls and is able to find a spot. That suggests that Luke wants to show you that Jesus has quite an education, that he's highly literate, you can read a book the way that typically a carpenter or peasant fisherman in the Galilee would not be able to do. So those are some examples and there are a few more where Luke is, I think having, he wants to make the gospel presentable to those of higher station who might be nervous to join a ragtag bunch of peasants, slaves and women.

And there are good things, I think, the fact that Luke did that I think is good for the spread of the Jesus movement. But also good, I think, is that he didn't succeed totally in cleaning it up, right? We still have plenty of justice messages, certainly plenty of messages, you know, preaching good news to the poor, both in Luke four in that synagogue sermon, and then also in Luke six in Luke's Sermon on the Plain which gives blessings to the poor and the hungry. So again, you have those sort of two things going on, the polishing up, but also the inability to, you know, to polish everything. You so we've got plenty, plenty and going in both directions. Anyway.

Rebecca Trefz: Yeah, well yeah, and you think about, I mean, in my readings and stuff where it's often highlighted as Luke being the gospel who includes outsiders or highlights some of these folks that would not necessarily have been on the inner circle. So it's interesting to have that, but also sort of see that there was this lens and so trying to both insert that stuff, which also when you think about he's talking to this upper class person and being able to say, you know, there's some polish, there's some credibility, and there's these others that are included that you might stretch you a little bit.

Shelly Matthews: Yeah, and it is a puzzle because I do think both things are going on in Luke. Yet Luke is, you know, the favorite gospel of, you the gospel of the poor, right? Or that demonstrates God's preferential option for the poor. Certainly, the Magnificat of Mary about the rich being tumbled from their thrones and the poor and the hungry being raised up and then the synagogue sermon and the critique of wealth, which is particularly pointed in Luke. I'm thinking of that parable of the man with the barns, and builds more barns and brings in more. And then the parable says, know, what profit is this? Cause your life can be taken from you. So there's a critique of wealth. But on the other hand, it's often aimed at wealthy people and wealthy people from surprising places become protagonists in the particularly, and this is a puzzle. It's the one I want to work on next is the Roman soldiers in Luke are astonishing to me. And they carry on into Acts, right? Roman soldiers, they're already in that story of John the Baptist in Luke, and it's only in Luke is that when he's at the baptizing scene, these Roman soldiers say, well, what should we do? And he tells them not to extort and be satisfied with their wages. But there's another scene where a Roman soldier comes and asks for healing, and that goes on into Acts where Cornelius bows to Peter as if Peter is a god. And it's like Roman soldiers didn't do that. So, I don't know if Roman soldiers are part of Luke's audience in a special way. And I guess on the one hand, those might also be poor or marginalized in the sense that they were drafted and probably didn't have high wages. But on the other hand, they represent Rome, right? So it's a puzzle. That's why I like, I have favored Luke as an area for study because it's so rich, so long, and there's so many threads that, you know, you can get a lot out of, depending on which threads you pull on, you can get a different view of the early Jesus movement.

Rebecca Trefz: Yeah, and the things you talk about, I mean, that add so much color and nuance and, you know, depth to it. Again, it's not just sort of the surface level or stories that are predictable, these things fit neatly in, but how might this group or how might this example be fleshed out some more and give us a different insight into humanity, into God, into the way that, yeah, Christ incarnated God's character and richness in that way. So that's an important place to start and move to part two.