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DonateOctober 23, 2005 |
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Deuteronomy
34:1-12
Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
I Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46
The two passages from the Christian Old Testament are linked superficially through their supposed connection with Moses. The first is the story of his death. The second is a psalm attributed to him.
Perhaps there is a deeper connection at the level of reflection about mortality. Here there are similarities and differences. Moses was a hundred and twenty years old. The Psalm considers seventy or, at the most eighty, to be the human life span. For Moses death comes as a kind of fulfillment of a brilliantly successful life. The Psalm emphasizes the transiency of life and its insignificance in the grand scheme of things. Yet, as so often in the Bible, the ambiguity of life shows up in both.
Moses is shown just that future home of the Israelites that he, himself, had been forbidden to enter because of his sin. Seeing it and the assurance that it would indeed become the land of Israel was compensation for this lack of fulfillment of his mission. The Psalm begins with a vision of human mortality as trivializing any human claim to importance. but it ends with asking God to “prosper the work of our hands.” Apparently the lives of short-lived mortals, even the details of those lives, can make some claim on the interest and attention of the everlasting God for whom a thousand years is like a single day.
Putting these two passages together can leave us with a certain democratic feeling. Moses is understood by Jews as their greatest leader. In this passage it is said explicitly that there has never been another like him. Yet he was flawed so seriously that God would not allow him to complete his work by leading Israel into the Promised Land. People in general live and die and leave little trace behind them. Yet God may prosper even the work of their hands. In both cases it is clear that God uses human beings, great and small. God does not require that they have special qualifications or virtues. The greatness of Moses was not his moral character. It was the greatness of the work God accomplished through him for Israel . It is not our virtue that will make it possible that God will prosper the work of our hands.
The greatness of Moses is affirmed in this passage in terms of his status as “prophet.” Later Jews sometimes spoke of Moses and the prophets, distinguishing Moses’ role as lawgiver from the prophetic one. Christians have typically viewed the insights and messages of the prophets as transcending the law. Jews, on the other hand, even when they distinguish the Law and the Prophets, typically retain the priority of the former. They largely agree that “never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses.”
We have for some time dealt with the questions of similarities and differences between Christians and Jews. Today we are expanding this to speak of the relations among the Abrahamic traditions, thus including Islam. This affirmation of the primacy of Moses among the prophets plays an interesting role here. Muslims grant to Moses a very high status, but for them “the prophet” or the seal of the prophets is Mohammed. In him the whole prophetic tradition comes to its culmination and completion such that there is no need for further prophets.
In Christian ears this sounds strange, because Mohammed seems to have been more a lawgiver and a political and military leader than a prophet. But “prophet” in Islam takes its meaning more from Moses than from Amos or Isaiah. When we understand that Moses was a prophet, it is easier to accept the idea that Mohammed belongs to the tradition of prophets.
Like Moses Mohammed mediated divine law and led a people both politically and militarily. Like Moses he was a human being, but one who was related to God in a most extraordinary way. The Jewish claim that Moses was never again equaled is disputed, therefore, in different ways by Christians and Muslims. For Christians the Christ event brought about a new relation to law that, for Christians, supersedes the one established by Moses. For Muslims, the Qu’ran completes and perfects the law and thereby supersedes the Mosaic law.
This makes Islam more like Judaism than like Christianity. Law plays a similar role in both. Qu’ranic law has many similarities with Mosaic law. The issue is whether Mohammed supersedes Moses as the final lawgiver or whether Moses remains the greatest. For Christians the issue is whether obedience to law is the way to attain righteousness or whether Paul clarified the meaning of the Christ-event to show another and a better way. For many Christians, therefore, the question is not which law is best but what it means to be free from the law in general.
The passage in Matthew consists in additional stories of Jesus debates with the religious leaders of his time. The first is very important for Christianity as a whole and for us today. It has become almost platitudinous, but that does not make it unimportant. Further, in itself it does not distinguish Christians from Jews, but that does not make it unimportant either. We can relate this to the discussion of the law and the prophets above.
The question is about the most important law. Jesus replied that it is the love commandment, the love of God and neighbor. He is thereby depicted as repeating the statements of the Jewish teacher, Hillel, and making an assertion that many Jews find evident. Hence, as an argument with Pharisees it amounts to very little. But as a guide to Christian life it is important that these words are those of Jesus or at least credited to him. They thereby have an authority for the church that would otherwise be lacking.
Theologically, what Jesus says here need not break with the Pharisees at all. They could grant first place to particular laws, and these would be an obvious choice. The break, if there is a break, comes in the phrase “on these two hang all the law and the prophets.” This can mean, and perhaps did mean, that all the particular laws as well as the insights of the prophets are specifications of the implications of these two commandments. In that case, one obeys these two most important commandments by obeying all the others.
However, the phrase can have another meaning, and in the context of Jesus’ practice and other teachings, this other meaning certainly plays some role. It can mean that if one acts out of love for God and neighbor, the purpose of all the law and the prophets is fulfilled. This may entail technical violation of particular laws, for example, when literally observing the laws governing the Sabbath would prevent one from meeting the urgent needs of a neighbor. In this case the many laws may remain as excellent guides to the life of love, but they lose their strictly legal meaning. I this is Jesus’ meaning, then he moves some distance in the direction of Paul.
The second passage is puzzling. It is highly unlikely that Jesus’
engaged in this kind of gamesmanship. But what role did this challenge to
Davidic messianism play in the early church? Is this introduced just to
show how clever Jesus was, or did some group of Christians have a reason
to argue against the Davidic understanding of the Messiah?
If we suppose the latter, we can speculate. In the New Testament we have a
variety several claims that Jesus fulfilled the expectation of a Davidic
Messiah. Paul wrote that he was descended from David according to the
flesh. Matthew provides a genealogy tracing this descent from David
through Joseph. Whether this was convincing to Jews in general, we do not
know. In any case, the view that Jesus was born of a virgin, also
preserved by Matthew, was not compatible with putting much weight on the
descent from David.
More important is that the chief content of the idea that the Messiah would come from the house of David was that he would renew the Davidic monarchy. Obviously, in this sense Jesus did not fulfill the messianic role as defined in this tradition. Perhaps there were followers of Jesus who thought the better strategy for defending the claim that Jesus was the messiah would be to locate Jesus in a different tradition of messianic expectation. Isaiah’s prophesy of the suffering servant certainly played a role. There were also prophesies of a Son of Man (Adam) that did not link the Messiah to royalty.
Ridiculing the idea that the Messiah is a descendant of David might serve to open the way to thinking of the Messiah differently. However, if this was the purpose of this little story, it failed. The church remained committed to the Davidic ancestry of Jesus, even while asserting that Joseph was not actually Jesus’ father, according to the flesh.
The passage from I Thessalonians gives us a glimpse into Paul’s early preaching of the gospel. To relate it to what I have been saying about law and prophets and Moses and Mohammed would require unpacking the gospel that he preached in Thessalonica on the basis of other letters, especially Galatians and Romans. If we can trust the account of his visit in Acts (17:1-9) his glancing reference to opposition is an understatement. His success in attracting Gentile participants in the synagogue by downplaying the importance of obedience to law no doubt angered those for whom faithful observance of law was the very heart of the right relation to God. No doubt Paul was especially offensive precisely because he argued for his views from the very scriptures that called for this faithful obedience. For the great majority of Jews, he was a dangerous heretic.
Paul dwells more here than in most of his letters on the personal
relationship he established with those Thessalonians who broke with the
synagogue and established a house church. He also focuses quickly and
sharply on the anticipated second coming of Jesus. This must have played a
central role in his formulation of the gospel at that stage of his
ministry. Such an emphasis created expectations that were doomed to
disappointment, and this disappointment eventually had to be countered in
some way. The church went through a crisis in this regard, settling down
to live in the world for the indefinite future without formally giving up
its expectation. II Thessalonians suggests elements in this transition,
but in I Thessalonians the exhortation is to remain expectant and
watchful. The ability of the church to make this transition to living in
ongoing history depended on the strength of community and the depth of
personal experience of God’s grace in the present. But the paradox with
which Christians must live is that, without the initial fervor of
expectation of an imminent end, it is unlikely that the church in which we
live two millennia later would have come into existence. We live now from
the by-products of what was initially experienced as central.
John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D., has held many positions including Ingraham Professor of Theology at the Claremont School of Theology, Avery Professor at the Claremont Graduate School, Fullbright Professor at the University of Mainz, Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt, Harvard, and Chicago Divinity Schools. His writings include: Christ in a Pluralistic Age; God and the World; and co-author with Herman Daly of For the Common Good which was co-winner of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.
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