The Easter enigma (10 days and counting…)
Last time,
we discussed the fact that the Gospel stories of Easter must be considered in
light of the fact that the followers of Jesus continued to speak of him as Israel’s
Messiah even after his death. The New Testament Gospels are Messiah stories and
yet they are a new variant on the genre of Messiah story. That is to say, the Gospel
stories are something very different from what was expected about the Messiah –
both in terms of what the Messiah would do (and how) as well as what the
results of the Messiah's action would be. No one expected the Messiah to die. As
I said last time, a dead Messiah was a non-Messiah, a failed Messiah. Then
again, speaking of Jesus as Israel's Messiah means that the Gospel writers see
Jesus as playing a key role in Israel’s story. The evangelists link the story
of Jesus with the ancient (hi)story of Israel as recounted in the Jewish
scriptures – what Christians call the Old Testament (of the Bible). If we wish to understand how the Gospel writers
understood the resurrection of Jesus, we must grasp the larger story within
which the evangelists place this remarkable event. So, what kind of story is
contained in the Jewish Scriptures? Let’s
jump in.
Executive Summary
In what follows, I (briefly) tell the biblical story of redemption/salvation,
understood as being the fulfillment, in and through Jesus of Nazareth, of the
promises of God to Abraham (around the 20th century B.C.). One could define the (Hebrew) Bible as being
the story of how the Creator God promised to save/rescue the world through
Abraham and his descendants, and the “New Testament” as being the story of how
God fulfilled those promises in and through Jesus, understood to be the Messiah
(promised King) of Israel and therefore, the Lord of the world. As far as biblical soteriology is concerned, it’s all about Abraham (and by
extension, the nation of Abraham’s descendants, Israel).
So who wrote the Bible?
Which community produced, read and handed on these texts over the
centuries? Answer: the ancient people of Israel.
The Bible takes on the big questions of life – Where did we come from?
What’s wrong with the world (and with me)? What can be done about the
mess we’re in? When will the solution
arrive? How should we live? What does it mean to be human? How should society be organized? How should we worship God? How do we know what is right and wrong? Etc.
The answers that any culture gives to these questions together make up
that culture’s worldview, i.e. their way of understanding the world as well as their
place within it. So, the Bible contains
the worldview of ancient Israel (and,
in the New Testament, the worldview of the early Christians).[1]
The “chosen” people: the question of
the “election” of Israel. The ancient Israelites believed that their
nation had been “elected” by the Creator to be his “chosen” people, endowed
with a special destiny/vocation.[2] The Israelites believed that they had been
called by Yahweh (God’s personal
name) to represent him to all the other nations of the Earth (cf. Ex. 19.5-6) –
in a word, they were the true humanity and
they were called to demonstrate to all nations what genuine humanness looked
like. Israel’s understanding of its own identity as a nation was inseparable
from its understanding of Yahweh.
Historians debate the exact origins of the Hebrew/Israelite people – did
they originate in Mesopotamia or in Egypt?
The way that the ancient Israelites told the story (the way the Bible
tells the story) of their origins as a nation was to begin with the calling, by
God, of a Mesopotamian man named Abram (Abraham). The story of the first 4 generations of
Abraham’s family is found in the book of Genesis, chapters 12-50. At this early stage of Israel’s history,
Yahweh was known as “the God of Abraham (Isaac, and Jacob)” and the “nation” of
Israel existed only as the promise
that Abraham and his wife Sarah would have a son despite their advanced age and
that their family would grow and become a “great nation” (cf. Gn. 12.1-3;
15.4-6).
Which god? Yahweh & the idols. The Bible is
very aware of the fact that the word “god”[3]
is not univocal; i.e. during the biblical period, just like today, the word
“god(s)” means different things to different people. Every tribe or nation or civilization throughout
history has had its own pantheon of divinities,[4]
most of whom represented different aspects of the natural world, e.g. the
goddess of fertility, the god of thunder – the Sun itself was sometimes
worshipped as being divine. Monotheism –
the belief that there is only one God (capital “G”) – developed gradually
during Israel’s early history. Before
encountering the god who called him to leave his country and journey to the
“Promised Land”, Abraham was a
typical Mesopotamian polytheist; i.e. he worshipped many different gods (cf.
Joshua 24.2). There is no indication in
the Abraham story that he ever became a strict monotheist. At no point in the story does the god who
called him tell Abraham that he is the only
God. What Abraham knew was that this god
was his god, that this god had called
him and had made promises to him.
The one true God. Centuries
after Abraham, after rescuing his people from slavery in Egypt through the
leadership of Moses,[5]
Yahweh reveals himself to the Israelites at Mt. Sinai as the one true God and
prohibits the manufacture of idols (Ex. 20.1-6). “There is one God, and Israel is his
people”. It was common practice in the
ancient world for gods and goddesses to be symbolized by statues, before whom
their worshippers would offer both animal and human sacrifices. As Yahweh gives his “law” to Moses and the
Israelites, a unique change is occurring
in the history of the Ancient Near East – a people will commit itself to
worshipping only one God and they will do so without building an idol of their
God, without representing him with a statue.
So, the (Hebrew) Bible emerged from the nation of Israel and tells the
story of this people and the God they worshipped – the God who had called
Abraham to be the “father” of the chosen nation and had revealed himself to
Moses as the one true God.
In the
beginning… The Bible begins with a story of God creating
“the heavens and the earth” (i.e. all of reality). At the end of each of the seven days of
creation, God declares that everything he had made was “good”. God rejoices over his creation and is pleased
with it. Human beings are said to be
created “in the image of God”, are blessed by the Creator and are entrusted
with ruling over the creation and caring for it and cultivating it. The logic of the (first) Genesis creation
story is that in order for creation to flourish, it must be well “governed” by
humans, who reflect the Creator’s glory into the world and reflect creation’s
praise and thanksgiving back to God. However,
as the story continues, we discover that all is not well in paradise. Evil makes its entrance into the world through
the first human couple’s grasping after equality with the Creator. As a result, the humans as well as the
created order are cursed – toil, suffering, frustration and death are
introduced into the world.
What about the other nations? God’s
promise to Abraham to make of him a
great nation included hope for all the
nations of the Earth. God promised
Abraham that through him and his descendants, all the nations of the world would be “blessed”. In the context of the book of Genesis, to say
that someone or something will be “blessed” is to say that that person or thing
will experience healing from the “curses” pronounced on humankind and all of
creation after Adam & Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden (cf. Gn. 3). After the “fall” of Adam & Eve, the whole
world finds itself under a divine curse – doomed to corruption, decay, violence
and death. The Creator’s intention in
making the world was that it be a place of life, light, beauty, justice, peace
and vitality. The Bible tells a story
about the Creator’s plan – beginning with Abraham – to once again “bless” his
world and undo the effects of the curse.
We will
continue the story tomorrow…
[1] Before
we go any further, it’s important that we differentiate between ancient Israel, on the one hand, and the modern state of Israel, which was
founded on May 15th, 1948, on the other. There are indeed links between ancient and
modern Israel – the most important link is the geographical link, the strip of land along the Eastern coast of the
Mediterranean Sea which is home to the two modern nations of Israel/Palestine
and which was also home to the ancient Israelites during (a portion of) the
biblical period. Another link between
ancient and modern Israel is the Hebrew
language. Israel’s Scriptures were
written (for the most part) in Hebrew, a language that “died” following the
removal, by the Romans, of all Jews from Palestine in the second century AD. Following these events, Jews spoke the
languages of the various countries in which they settled. However, the appearance of the modern state
of Israel in 1948 caused the Hebrew language to be “resurrected” and updated, and
it is once more a spoken language, used by many Jews in Israel today.
[2] The idea
of a nation or an individual being possessed of a special destiny/vocation is
an idea that originated with the ancient Israelites. Unlike other ancient Near Eastern cultures,
ancient Israel did not have a fatalistic outlook on life and the world; i.e.
they didn’t believe that things had
to happen a certain way, due to divine determinism, etc. The ancient Israelites believed that they
could chose to create their own future, a future that was open-ended and not
pre-determined.
[3] When the
word “god” is spelled with a capital “G”, it is assumed that the author is
discussing (the god who is perceived by a certain person or group to be) the
one true God.
[4] It
appears that most ancient cultures were polytheistic, i.e. they believed in
several gods. However, there are some
researchers that claim that there is evidence that monotheism (belief in one
God) existed in many ancient cultures before degenerating into polytheism over
time.
[5] To whom
the God of Abraham had revealed himself as “Yahweh” (“I AM”, “LORD”): cf. Exodus
3.1-15.
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