Reading The Gospel of Matthew Ecologically in Oceania Elaine M. Wainwright- oceania as Context for Reading
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-Elaine M. Wainwright- Oceania as Context for Reading In the Melbourne daily newspaper, The Age, of 29 July, 2009, Adam Morton reported on those believed to be the first climate change refugees, the people of the Carteret Islands, seven tiny volcanic atolls belonging to Papua New Guinea and situated almost 100 kilometres north east of Bougainville in the South Pacific Ocean 1 These refugees are in the process of leaving their homes, their islands, and being set up on Bougainville land acquired by the Catholic Church for their use. Scientists are aware that the situation is complex and that geological factors other than climate change may be affecting the islands causing them to sink as well as sea levels to rise. But those rising sea levels together with the changes in temperature, violent storms, tsunamis and other effects on/of the ocean are some of the factors that scientists demonstrate are the result of rising temperatures caused by human emissions of CO2’s into the atmosphere and its inability to escape The lifestyle of some in our world is having a catastrophic impact on others with the peoples of Oceania or the Pacific bearing the burden in untold ways and the ocean itself and its complex ecosystems and species being changed and destroyed. Climate change is, therefore, one of the most urgent global concerns whose effects are devastating and urgent for the small island nations located in the Pacific or the region of Oceania as it is becoming known, for their ocean contexts and for all Earth constituents of whatever life-form in the region.2 It is from this region as an Australian biblical scholar currently working in New Zealand that I seek to undertake an ecological reading of the Gospel of Matthew. I join other scholars in the region who are undertaking similar interpretive tasks from a variety of perspectives. Oceania is the place of origin of the Earth Bible project, a five volume set of collections of essays overseen by a team of scholars located in Adelaide, Australia, and directed by Norman Habel.3 The Team developed six Ecojustice Principles to guide ecological readings of biblical texts4 and invited a range of international scholars to read selected texts from across the two testaments guided by these principles. Among those texts selected, only two focus specifically on Matthean gospel texts, my own article in Volume 1, “A Transformative Struggle towards the Divine Dream: An Ecofeminist Reading of Matthew 11”5 and that of Adrian M. Leske, “Matthew 6:25-34: Human Anxiety and the Natural World” in Volume 5.6 The work of the Earth Bible Team was continued through Norman Habel’s establishing a Consultation on Ecological Hermeneutics at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, beginning in 2004. Out of this consultation emerged Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics, a volume edited by Norman Habel and Peter Trudinger, the co-chairs of the consultation, and published in 2008. No studies of the Matthean gospel appeared in this volume. During this decade, however, other important ecological readings of biblical texts began to appear in the region. Robert Barry Leal undertook a study of wilderness in the Bible with particular attention to the experience of wilderness in an Australian context.7 He did not, however, specifically develop an ecological hermeneutic. Anne F. Elvey does so as she reads selected Lukan texts from an ecological feminist perspective.8 I sought to integrate an ecological with a feminist and postcolonial perspective in my study of women healing in the Graeco-Roman world9 and to develop eco-feminist readings of specific texts.10. Ecological issues have also been taken up in the region by theologians and this is evident in the work of Ilaitia S. Tuwere,11 Ama Tofaeono,12 Winston Halapua,13 Nicola Hoggard Creegan,14 Neil Darragh15 and Dennis Edwards16 to name but some. It was no surprise, therefore that the inaugural meeting of the Oceania Biblical Studies Association held in Auckland in July, 2010 in conjunction with the theological society, Waves of the Moana, chose as its the theme “Climate Change in Oceania: Biblical and Theological Responses.” Also at the 2010 meeting of the Society for Asian Biblical Studies, Dr. Nasili Vaka’uta delivered one of the keynote addresses with a focus on reading eco-wise in Oceania.17 Biblical scholars in the region are beginning to undertake ecological readings of biblical texts and traditions with particular attention to their context in Oceania, a context that is experiencing quite profoundly the effects of climate change and global warming. It is within this context that I place an ecological reading of the Gospel of Matthew. Reading Matthew Ecologically Undertaking such a task has entailed developing a framework for reading that I can only outline here. I have been significantly influenced by Lorraine Code’s Ecological Thinking. In her work, she demonstrates the need for a new social imaginary if we are to address the ecological crisis and it is that new or emerging imaginary that she calls ecological thinking. She envisages such thinking as working against the instituted social imaginary of mastery in all its forms—human domination of human and all other life-forms constituting Earth or the anthropocentrism which characterizes so much current thinking and practice. It requires, therefore, a hermeneutics of suspicion or a critical appraisal of all forms of domination that has been so prevalent in Earth’s history. But such a critique will not, in itself, bring about transformation. Code herself goes on to add the significance of what she calls ‘reconfiguration’: The instituting imaginary is a vehicle of radical social critique: it requires thinking and acting away from received conceptions of knowledge, subjectivity, responsibility, and agency, from positions located squarely within the power-infused rhetorical spaces where knowledge making and knowledge circulating occur; determining how reconfigurations might be proposed, innovative hypotheses articulated and tested in and for that climate, that place, positioned as it is in relation to other places and climates.18
“[it] emerges from and addresses so many interwoven and sometimes contradictory issues—feminist, classist, environmental, postcolonial, racist, sexist—that its implications require multifaceted chartings.19 Its focus, however, is Earth and all its constituents and the function of power within the relationships among all Earth’s constituents including the human but within the broader web of relationships.
ethologies, genealogies, commitments, and power relations that shape the knowledge and subjectivities enacted there; the intractable locational specificities that resist homogenization or suggest novel connections; the positionings available or closed to would-be knowers; the amenability or resistance of both human and nonhuman entitites to being known.25 The biblical methodology that best facilitates an ecological reading for me is socio-rhetorical. Habitat can function as interpretive key within an analysis of the text’s inner texture (its characters, plot, setting, rhetorical features and other aspects of that inner texture). Similarly, in relation to the intertexture both behind and in front of the text,26 habitat provides an important ecological lens. Vernon Robbins names the third texture of his socio-rhetorical model the social and cultural texture.27 Within an ecological reading, I am suggesting that this third texture be called the ecological texture. It will include analysis of those social and cultural features that are generally seen to constitute the human community as these are encoded in the text. But this analysis will be extended to recognize all Earth relationships and their dynamics as these too are encoded in the text. The socio-rhetorical reading that I am proposing, therefore, uses ‘habitat’ as interpretive key within a reading of the inner texture, intertexture and ecological texture of the Matthean text. The term I use in order to highlight the complex reciprocity of author-text-reader in/and habitat as place to know and place from which to know in an ecological reading is inter-con/textuality.28 It is not only concerned with relationships between texts but also between texts and contexts as these are encoded within texts. It will also include the interweave into this reciprocity of the multiple aspects of habitat and the shift in consciousness necessary to hear those aspects of Earth encoded in the text. This is necessary because these interrelationships have been silenced by previous readings so that they are almost forgotten by readers. Or, more seriously, they have been erased and so an ecological reading seeks to hear the erasures that the text evokes. In an inter-con/textual reading, habitat, in all its diversity of the embodied, materially and socially related Earth beings, of social, temporal and physical locations, of their histories and genealogies and of their power relations, functions as inter-con/text. It is woven into the texture of the text. The reader will need to listen for the re-mark which Timothy Morton describes as a kind of echo in the text that makes readers aware that there is but a “hair’s breadth” between foreground and background in a way that leads to “questioning the genuine existence of these categories.”29 Ecological readers will be attentive to that echo which takes us to the hair’s breadth between habitat as background and foreground, which breaks down the binaries while not collapsing the categories themselves into a singularity that destroys the very diversity of eco-systems. In concluding this theoretical section, I want to emphasize that the ecological reading I am proposing is one that can be used when interpreting any text. If ecological reading is limited to texts that highlight Earth, then it will be seen as peripheral. I am arguing here that it is integral to a reading of all texts. In this regard, then, our reading and interpreting of biblical texts will contribute, in its turn, to the shaping of the new and emerging social imaginary that Code calls ecological thinking. Reading Matt 4:1-11 Ecologically In a previous study, I characterized the movement within Matt 3-4 under the title “From Wilderness to Waterfront”. In the process of reading Matt 3,30 it emerged that both John and Jesus move from wilderness to waterfront with an additional waterfront to wilderness movement by Jesus (3:13-4:1). Also, given that the Jordan River flows through the wilderness of Judea, the boundaries between the two are somewhat porous in some parts of the text until Jesus moves to a new waterfront, that of Capernaum (Matt 4:12-13). Inter-con/textually, however, both wilderness and waterfront characterize Matt 3 and Matt 4. Reading the reference to ‘wilderness’ in 4:1 inter-con/textually with Soja’s theory of first-, second- and third-space,31 it can evoke that area extending west from the lower Jordan River and the Dead Sea into the hill country at the level of firstspace (or perceived space). From the very outset the narrative is characterized by its material location. The text does not, however, give readers any glimpse of Jesus’ interaction with the space that is the wilderness/desert as it did in relation to John (3:4). Rather, it points to the fact that Jesus did not eat of the sustenance that the desert can provide as he was fasting. Reading through the lens of the re-mark, one recognizes the “hair’s breadth” between background and foreground and the possibility of bringing the firstspace appropriation of wilderness/desert to the foreground which opens up to at least imaginative exploration of the wilderness in interaction with Jesus and he with it. This also allows for a reading of wilderness that is not idealized by the human community but rather as that place with all its diversity of habitat/s and Earth constituents in which Jesus fasts. The fast of Jesus in the desert and its contrast with Matt 3:4 may alert the ecological reader to the process of desertification that is resulting from climate change in the twenty-first century, aware at the same time that first century inhabitants of the region of the Jordan acted in a range of ways in relationship with their desert/wilderness environment. In Oceania, desertification processes are most common across much of the land mass of Australia but now land degradation is also visiting the once exceedingly fertile islands of the Pacific.32 The text can be read intertextually with this world in front of it as well as that behind it. Robert Leal summarizes the intertextuality that seems most appropriate to the Secondspace understanding of Matt 4:1, conceiving wilderness as the place of divine encounter in which discipline, purification and/or transformation take place often as a result of the harshness of the environment in relation to human habitation.33 Thus the reference to wilderness can function geographically and metaphorically. It is a space that has its own particular eco-systems but a place that can be harsh for those of the human community who have not learnt to live there.34 As such it is conceived of as a place of encounter with the divine and with the diabolos and so it is the spirit who has been characterized earlier as “holy” (1:18, 20; 3:11) and “of God” (3:16) who leads Jesus into the wilderness. Reading the erēmos/wilderness or desert through the lens of Sojo’s thirdspace, it can be seen as a site of marginality but not a marginality that is “imposed by oppressive structures” but is rather a site that “one chooses as a site of resistance”.35 It is a place where Jesus fasts for forty days and forty nights. In this way he is characterized intertextually through the lens of the prophet and mediator of a covenant with the divine, namely Moses and Elijah (Ex 34:27-28 and 1 Kgs 19:8). Moses fasted for forty days and forty nights and Ex 34:28 goes on to say “he neither ate bread nor drank water,” the sources of food and drink which the Earth gives for the sustenance of the human community. Elijah journeys for forty days and nights on the strength of the food and drink that he is given in the wilderness. Thus fasting can be read inter-con/textually as a symbol not only of human reliance on divinity but also on Earth. The abstaining from food brings an awareness of this—Jesus is hungry (4:2).36 The mediator of the covenant between divinity and humanity or the prophet of God with/in whom God is with God’s people (Matt 1:23) or the beloved in whom God is well pleased (3:17) must know this reliance, the hunger that comes from the choice not to eat nor to drink for a period of time.37 Jesus has been lead into this marginal or liminal space not as a location imposed on him but a space that he clearly embraces and from which resistance will be possible. This resistance becomes manifest as one reads the account of the three tests or temptations that Jesus faces (4:3-10) through the lens of Soja’s first-, second- and third-space. The firstspace location of the 3 tests differs. The wilderness or desert remains the perceived space for the first test and in it, Jesus experiences hunger as a result of his fast. The test offered to Jesus is to change stones into bread, to intervene in Earth’s processes and the delicate interrelationship between the human and other-than-human Earth elements. Jesus resists the challenge. Reading his response from a third- or resistant space and an ecological perspective, one can hear him affirming Earth interrelationships and their interconnectedness with the divine. The alla or ‘but’ in the phrase “the human one/the anthrōpos shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (v. 4) could be interpreted as opposing the sustenance of human food with the sustenance of God’s word.38 Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich and Danker, however, offer an alternative way of understanding the connective: the other side of the matter, but yet.39 The human one must be in right relationship with both Earth elements and with God.40 The response of Jesus also resists the diabolic proposal to manipulate Earth’s elements for one’s own satisfaction or gratification providing a challenge to contemporary readers in a world where such manipulation is contributing to ecological degradation in multiple ways.41 The firstspace location of the second test is the pinnacle of the temple in the city of Jerusalem. Already in Matthew’s gospel, Jerusalem has been portrayed as the centre of political power with Herod’s building programme providing it with the built environment of a royal city.42 It was also the religious centre given the location of the temple within the city. This temple had been reconstructed by Herod using the massive stones that can still be seen on the site. But the temple also bears all the ambiguity of this reconstruction by Herod whose use of power and the material was in opposition to claims of divine presence. Some of this ambiguity is already woven into Matt 2:1-12, in which Jerusalem was contrasted with Bethlehem, the place where Jesus was born. The devil’s taking of Jesus to the ‘holy city’ and placing him on the ‘pinnacle of the temple’ evokes these first- and secondspace connotations inter-con/textually as Jesus is represented as having it all within his extraordinary purview. Place and power with all their political, social, cultural and religious connotations play within the ecological texture of the text constituting habitat. Jesus’ claim on power is being tested in this second temptation by the diabolos or tempter in the context of the intersecting web of power functioning in this text. The tempter places Jesus in a position of oversight of all the visual symbols of Herod’s political and economic power resulting in the transformation of material resources into the city below him. He then challenges Jesus within the framework of the challenge/riposte functioning between them. In the first such contest, Jesus bested the tempter with his citation of the scriptural text, Deut 8:3. The tempter then throws out the challenge of a different text to Jesus: Ps 91:11a, 12. This is a psalm that uses multiple imagery to evoke God’s assurance of protection and it is interpreted literally by the tempter, challenging Jesus to throw himself down and to expect extraordinary divine intervention to counteract his human action. Jesus interprets divine power very differently. He cites Deut 6:16 and its prohibition against tempting God and in doing so evokes the intertext Ex 17:1-7 and the people’s ‘testing’ of God at Massah and Meribah.43 There the people trust neither God nor Earth to provide them with water to drink along their wilderness journey and yet it is the intersection of the power of both that will sustain them. This is the reliance that must not be tested, not some self-initiated challenge to God’s care as put before Jesus by the tempter. Oceania readers will recognize that the complex web of relationships in relation to water, evoked by the intertexture of this verse, has been broken by climate change either as this relates to the ocean to which they are intimately related,44 or to the much needed water in the larger islands of Australia and New Zealand. Power emerges even more explicitly in the third temptation whose location is the top of a very high mountain from which “all the kingdoms/basileias of the world” are visible. Intertextually, the tops of high mountains are the abode of divine power: of the gods of those with whom Israel contested (Deut 12:2), of Israel’s God (Ez 20:40; also Moses and Elijah encounter God on the mountain height of Sinai or Horeb—Ex 34; 1 Kgs 19); and of the gods of Rome who, as Warren Carter says, “were thought to reside on Mt. Olympus.”45 From this place of divine power, the tempter shows Jesus “all the kingdoms/basileias of the world” as noted above. These “basileias of the world” are the political, economic, social and religious centres which are being offered to Jesus with all the “honor …, fame, recognition, renown … (and) prestige46 that accompanies them. Already in the narrative, however, John the Immerser has proclaimed that the basileia of the heavens is at hand (3:2) and that there is one coming after him who will carry on the task of eschatological prophet (3:11-12). Jesus has been intimately linked with John by way of John’s baptizing of him to fulfil all righteousness or right ordering and according to McVann’s interpretation, Jesus is thereby initiated as just such a prophet by way of the ritual process which he, McVann, identifies in Matt 3-4. The price offered to Jesus for these kingdoms with all their political, social, economic and religious power is that he fall down and worship Satan, recognizing in the tempter divine power and honouring this power with his homage. Jesus once again speaks from the thirdspace of the mountain top, a third word of resistance—only God shall be worshipped, only God will be given the homage of one’s life. Jesus has shown himself to be “beloved Son” (3:17) to be faithful son (4:3 and 6) unlike Israel who was also called ‘son’ or ‘firstborn son’ (Ex 4:22-23; Deut 8:5; 14:1 and Hos 11:1 already cited in Matt 2:1547). While the first two tests of the beloved one point to the web of right relationships that connect the divine, human and the other-than-human, the third test, which purportedly challenges the power that characterizes the basileias of the cosmos, in fact breaks the web. It focuses only on divine power or the divine/human interrelationship presented as cultic service.48 Earth is excluded at this climactic point in the pericope as are divine-human relationships imaged in ways other than power. This alerts the attentive ecological reader to the exclusion of the female from this entire narrative. Jesus, the tempter (4:3) and God (explicitly in 4:10 but implicitly throughout by way of pronouns) are all gendered male. The ecological reader will need to take up the space of resistance given to Jesus in the text and to read against the grain of this gendering, bringing into the imaging of God, at least, echoes of Sophia or of the female divine imaged as dove from 3:16-17.49 It will also be necessary to carry the web of relationships which function in Jesus’ successful negotiation of the first two tests into that of the third. Conclusion The ecological reading of the opening pericope of Matt 4 has demonstrated that attention to the material in its interconnectedness with both the human and the divine offers ways of both reading the text anew in the light of ecological thinking and of informing the emerging social imaginary that Code calls ecological thinking by way of these new readings. Subtle movements between inner, inter- and ecological textures of the Matthean text allowed new meanings to emerge in front of the text but always taking account of the inter-con/textuality within the text. Such readings are both informed by and inform Oceania’s ecological readers, aware as I am of the multivalent relationships of peoples, nations and ecologies within the region. They open the way for the engagement of other readers from contexts different to my own to come into dialogue with these readings and to produce others that together may lead to new ecological praxis in the region. Elaine M. Wainwright 1.10.2010 1 Adam Morton, “First Climate Refugees Start Move to New Island Home,” The Age 29 July, 2009. Accessed http://www.theage.com.au/national/first-climate-refugees-start-move-to-new-island-home-20090728-e06x.html, 15 September, 2010. 2 For a more extensive analysis of the effects of climate change in Oceania, see Graham Sem, "Climate Change and Development in Pacific Island Countries," in Pacific Futures, edited by Michael Powles (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2006), 164-181. 3 Norman C. Habel, ed., Readings from the Perspective of Earth (The Earth Bible 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Norman C. Habel, and Shirley Wurst eds., The Earth Story in Genesis (The Earth Bible 2; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Norman C. Habel, and Shirley Wurst, eds., The Earth Story in Wisdom Traditions (The Earth Bible, 3; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001); Norman C. Habel, ed., The Earth Story in the Psalms and the Prophets (The Earth Bible, 4; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001) and Norman C. Habel and Vicky Balabanski, eds., The Earth Story in the New Testament (The Earth Bible, 5; London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). 4 The Earth Bible Team, “Guiding Ecojustice Principles,” in Readings from the Perspective of Earth, 38-53, in which the following six principles for reading biblical texts ecologically are set out and discussed:The Principle of Intrinsic Worth The Principle of Interconnectedness The Principle of Voice The Principle of Purpose The Principle of Mutual Custodianship The Principle of Resistance. 5 Elaine M. Wainwright, “A Transformative Struggle towards the Divine Dream: An Ecofeminsit Reading of Matthew 11,” in Readings from the Perspective of Earth, 162-174. 6 Adrian M. Leske, "Matthew 6.25-34: Human Anxiety and the Natural World," in The Earth Story in the New Testament, 15-27. 7 Robert Barry Leal, Wilderness in the Bible: Toward a Theology of Wilderness (Studies in Biblical Literature 72; New York: Peter Lang, 2004). See also his Through Ecological Eyes: Reflections on Christianity’s Environmental Credentials (Sydney: St. Pauls, 2006) in which ecological readings of biblical texts and themes are interwoven with broader theological reflections. 8 Anne F. Elvey, An Ecological Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Luke:A Gestational Paradigm (Studies in Women and Religion 45; Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2005). She develops her approach more fully in her most recent book, The Matter of the Text: Material Engagements between Luke and the Five Senses (Bible in the Modern World, 37; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, forthcoming). 9 Elaine M. Wainwright, Women Healing/Healing Women: The Genderization of Healing in Early Christianity (London: Equinox, 2006). 10 Elaine M. Wainwright, "Healing Ointment/Healing Bodies: Gift and Identification in an Ecofeminist Reading of Mark 14:3-9," in Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics, edited by Norman C. Habel and Peter Trudinger (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 131-40; and “Unbound Hair and Ointmented Feed: An Ecofeminist Reading of Luke 7:36-50,” in Exchanges of Grace: Essays in Honour of Ann Loades (Natalie K. Watson and Stephen Burns, eds.; London: SCM, 2008), 178-189. 11 Ilaitia S. Tuwere, Vanua: Towards a Fijian Theology of Place (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 2002). 12 Ama’amalele Tofaeono, Eco-Theology: AIGA – The Household of Life—A Perspective from Living Myths and Traditions of Samoa (World Mission Script 7; Erlangen: Erlanger Verlag für Mission und Ökumene, 2000). 13 Winston Halapua, Waves of God's Embrace: Sacred Perspectives from the Ocean (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2008). 14 Nicola Hoggard Creegan, “God, Strings, Emergence, and the Future of the World,” in The Global Spiral, online http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10814/Default.aspx, accessed 28 September, 2010; and “On Being an Animal and Being Made in the Image of God” Colloquium 39, no. 2 (2007): 185-203. 15 Neil Darragh, At Home in the Earth: Seeking an Earth-Centred Spirituality (Auckland: Accent, 2000). 16 Denis Edwards, Jesus the Wisdom of God: An Ecological Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2005); Breath of Life: A Theology of the Creator Spirit (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2004); and How God Acts: Creation, Redemption and Special Divine Action (Hindmarsh: ATF, 2010). 17 Nasili Vaka’uta, “Fale-‘o-Kāinga: Rethinking Biblical Interpretation Eco-wise.” Paper delivered at the second conference of the Society of Asian Biblical Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 14-16 June 2010. 18 Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (Studies in Feminist Philosophy; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 20 Code, Ecological Thinking, 25. Daniel Hillel, The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures (New York: Columbia University Press), 278, n. 1, defines ecology as “the interrelationship between living communities and their habitats” nuancing this with a further term “cultural ecology” which for him “describes the mutual influences of the environment and the culture of a society.” 21 Code, Ecological Thinking, 37. 22 Kate Rigby, "Earth, World, Text: On the (im)possibility of Ecopoiesis." New Literary History 35, no. 3 (2004): 436, discusses the four ways that Heidegger proposes that the earth pushes up into a literary work, one being “as that which withdraws and remains hidden.” The other three ways of earth becoming visible in text that Heidegger highlights and which Rigby lists are (1) as “the ground upon which we make our dwelling”; (2) as “matrix…which supports the relation of all natural beings in their corporeal interconnectedness with other beings”; and (3) “in its own materiality.” 23 See Sandra M. Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (2nd ed.; Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999), 97-179, in which she explores the world behind the text, the world of the text and the world before the text, providing an overview of the development of biblical studies during the twentieth century. Elvey, Ecological Feminist Reading, 6-10, critically engages Schneiders’ work nuancing it in light of an ecological approach which recognizes the subjectivity of Earth and that the worlds of author, text and reader are plural, each in their own turn. 24 Code, Ecological Thinking, 5, notes that the approach which suggests that “text is best explained when it is inserted into or returned to context,” fails, from an ecological perspective, because it “bypasses their reciprocally constitutive effects.” Even though she is not addressing biblical studies, her insights are important for this discipline in which text and context have been and are central. 25 Code, Ecological Thinking, 100. 26 The intertextuality that functions ‘behind the text’ is one that is familiar to the biblical scholar. When I speak of those intertexts ‘in front of the text’ I refer to “texts” brought into the interpretive process by the reader. 27 Vernon Robbins, Exploring the Texture of Texts: A Guide to Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1996) for his entire approach which I have significantly modified but whose overall approach has influenced mine. 28 Since developing this approach, I have learnt that Tat Siong Benny Liew has already used this terminology in his book Politics of Parousia: Reading Mark Inter(Con)Textually (Biblical Interpretation Series; Lieden, Brill, 1999). My use differs significantly from his in that his focus is on texts being interpreted in contexts in which power relationships are always operative, especially when those contexts are characterized by a history of colonialism and while power will be an important aspect of inter-con/textuality, my use of it is much more comprehensive. 29 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 54. 30 Elaine M. Wainwright, “From Wilderness to Waterfront: An Ecological Reading of Matt 3,” forthcoming. 31 Edward W Soja, "Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination," in Human Geography Today, edited by Doreen Massey, John Allen and Philip Sarre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 260-278. 32 Patrick D. Nunn, Keimami Sa Vakila Na Liga Ni Kalou (Feeling the Hand of God): Human and Nonhuman Impacts on Pacific Island Environments (3 ed. Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1997), 3-5. 33 Leal, Wilderness in the Bible, 135-171. 34 It is important to note that the Australian indigenous peoples have lived in its interior desert/s for 40,000 or more years prior to European invasion. 35 Soja, “Thirdspace,” 271. 36 Marianne Sawicki, Seeing the Lord: Resurrection and Early Christian Practices (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994), 136, also makes this point very explicitly as I do in this reading. 37 Mark McVann, "One of the Prophets: Matthew's Testing Narrative as a Rite of Passage," BTB 23 (1993): 14-20, in which he reads the fasting and the testing of Jesus through the lens of the ritual process constituting Jesus as a prophet. One critique that I would bring to McVann’s article from an ecological perspective is that he sets up a contrast: Jesus’ “submission” to the devil in “nature” so that he can overcome him “in culture” (17). It is just such a divide that has shaped much of the oppression of both women and Earth. 38 McVann, “Matthew’s Testing Narrative,” 17, represents such a reading when he claims in relation to 4:4 that “fidelity to God’s word supersedes even basic necessities such as food.” 39 Walter Bauer, Frederick W Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (3rd ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 45; hereafter BDAG. Accessed in Version 8.0.2 of Oaktree Software.See also, Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2000), 109, who recognizes that “[t]he verse does not disparage human hunger” nor is it proposing “a dualism of physical and spiritual needs.” 40 Matt 3:15 associates the unfolding of Jesus’ story in terms of ‘fulfilling all righteousness” and such righteousness or right ordering or justice will characterize Jesus’ own preaching (see 5:6, 10, 20; 6:1, 33). Reading from an ecological perspective, such right ordering will not be seen solely as right relationships within the human community and between the human community and God but all Earth’s constituents will be included in the interconnected web/s of right or just ordering. 41 The text does not speak against such manipulation but puts it into the complex of right relationships that Jesus constructs. It challenges the human community to careful ecological evaluation of the scientific and industrial processes it puts in place. It also raises questions such as those of Carl Knappett in relation to the agency of material culture. See Carl Knappett, Thinking through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Archaeology, Culture, and Society (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, 2005) and Carl Knappett and Lambos Malafouris, Material Agency: Toward a Non-Anthropocentric Approach (Berlin: Springer, 2008). 42 See Elaine M. Wainwright, “Place, Power and Potentiality: Reading Matthew 2:1-12 Ecologically,” Expository Times 121, no. 4 (2010): 159-167. 43 The LXX of Ex 17:2 uses the verb peiradzō which is being used in Matt 4:1-12. 44 See Halapua, Waves of God’s Embrace, for a fuller exposition of this relationship. 45 Carter, Matthew and the Margins, 110. The Romans adopted much of Greek mythology but with changes of names. 46 BDAG, 257. 47 For an analysis of this text from a feminist perspective which I will discuss further below, see Elaine M. Wainwright, Shall We Look for Another? A Feminist Rereading of the Matthean Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1998), . 48 BDAG, 587, give the meaning of latreuō which occurs in the text of Deut 6:13 cited in Matt 4:10 as servitude or cultic service. 49 For much more extensive analysis of this imagery, see Silvia Schroer, Wisdom Has Built Her House: Studies on the Figure of Sophia in the Bible, translated by Linda M. Maloney and William McDonough (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2000), 132-163. 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