It was to have taken us a year.
How appropriate that was the year of the
Bible.
It’s actually taken us 19 months.
But at last we have arrived!
We have read through the whole of the Old
Testament in the order of the Hebrew Scriptures … and it’s all online, just
waiting to be re-ordered into a user friendly format.
And occasionally one or two people have
actually had a peep.
And that in a very exciting sense is a
point we have reached in our journey.
As we come to an end of the Hebrew
Scriptures we are reaching that moment when the task of compiling all this
wonderful array of writings of all sorts of shapes and sizes and writing styles
into a manageable collection is well under way.
The final set of four books, Ezra, Nehemiah, I and II Chronicles coming as they do at the end of the third section of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Writings, centre around the importance of having a written record of the law and manageable records of the narrative of the people of Israel.
You learn a lot from endings about the
people who were writing these books. You
learn a lot about the world Jesus came into.
And the ending of the Book of II Chronicles comes as a bit of a shock to our
system as Christian readers. After all
II Chronicles ends in a very different place from the ending we are accustomed
to as English readers in the way our Old Testament is ordered in our Christian
Bibles.
That different ending place has a
significance for us as we look on to the story of Jesus.
Our Christian Old Testament finishes in the
Prophets, specifically with the Prophet Malachi and with Malachi chapter 4.
The Christian Old Testament ends on a note
of expectation as it looks to the coming day of the Lord when ‘the sun of
righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.” When people will go out leaping like calves
from the stall. And the wicked will be
overcome.
It’s a time to remember the teaching of the
books of the Torah, the law.
And it’s a time finally to look to the
coming of the prophet Elijah who will herald the coming of that great and
awesome day of the Lord. He will turn
the hearts of parents to their children, and the hearts of children to their
parents, so that I will not come and
strike the land with a curse.
That reading of the Old Testament finishes
with an expectation of the coming of a great Prophet and is full of Messianic
expectation.
Mark takes up that story. Luke takes up that story … and it’s a
powerful story. And we tell our
Christian story with an emphasis on the fulfilment of prophecy, with an emphasis
on the identify of Jesus as the Messiah.
With the coming of the day of the Lord.
But interestingly, that’s not quite where
the New Testament actually starts.
Our New Testament starts with Matthew’s
gospel.
And somehow there’s the feel of a continuation
not so much from the end point of Malachi, as from the end point of II
Chronicles.
Just as the Chronicler uses genealogies to
sum up and recapitulate the whole story of the Jewish people, so too Matthew
opens with a genealogy that summarises that whole story … and leads us
wonderfully to Jesus.
Jesus enters a Jewish world and is very
much part of that Jewish world. One of
the worst things that has ever happened in the history of the church is the
neglect of that truth. As soon as
followers of Jesus started to think of Christianity as another religion over
against Judaism they began to see Jesus as someone distinct from ‘the Jews’.
It’s already beginning by the end of the 1st
century, but it really only becomes tragically hard and fast with the seeds of
anti-semitism in the wake of Constantine
It is really on since the holocaust that
Christian interpreters of the Bible have drawn out the Jewishness of Jesus, the
Jewishness of Paul and the Jewishness of their whole world.
That’s something that becomes very apparent
if we pay careful attention to the way the Jewish Hebrew Scritpures come to an
end.
There is, first of all a wonderful symmetry in the start and finish of the final four books of the writings. It is the very thing that prompted the oh-so logical Greek translators of the Hebrew Scriptures to rearrange the order. In our English Bibles the end of II Chronicles leads beautifully into the beginning of Esra.
In the way these four books are ordered in
the Hebrew Scriptures they begin in Ezra in exactly the way they finish in II
Chronicles 36. It is as if there is a
wonderful over-arching theme. We finish
II Chronicels as we began Ezra. With the
edict of The Persian Emperor Cyrus allowing the return of the exiles to their
homeland and allowing the rebuilding of their temple.
II Chronicles starts with Solomon and tells
the story of the divided Kingdoms without including any of the damaging bits
about Solomon, with little reference to the turbulent times faced by the
Northern Kingdom and with a critical account of the Davidic dynasty in the
Southern Kingdom of Judah.
Then the Hebrew Scriptures reach their
climax with the fall of Jerusalem
22 In the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, in
fulfilment of the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord stirred
up the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia so that he sent a herald throughout all
his kingdom and also declared in a written edict: 23‘Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the
kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem,
which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his
God be with him! Let him go up.’
Notice three things here for us as
Christian readers.
First, the Emperor of the then world Power,
Persia
The emperor is used by God to enable a
house to be built for God – that’s to say, a temple.
And that temple will be in a specific
location – Judah
God will then be with his people.
And the people of God will go up to the
temple in Jerusalem
This gives us a tremendous insight into
what is central for Jewish people. This
is what their Jewishness is all about.
From this moment on Jewish people have had
to live with an often hostile non-Jewish power.
And this gives Jewish people a way of coping with that situation. You will see it on the wall of the Synagogue
in Cheltenham .
You will hear it read at every Sabbath gathering of Jewish people
throughout the land.
A plaque giving allegiance to the monarch –
even though not Jewish, and a prayer of loyal allegiance to the monarch.
That finds its roots in the indebtedness at
this moment to a non-Jewish ruler in Cyrus who was so generous to the Jewish
people. This is the climax of the Hebrew
Scriptures, this is at the heart of Jewishness – and we must respect them for
it. And you see it in Jesus’ approach to
the God-fearing Centurion, in Paul’s words in Romans 13 about obeying the
Emperor and in Peter’s words in I Peter too.
Then there is the focus on the temple in Jerusalem Jerusalem Jerusalem
These few words go a long, long way towards
an understanding of the Jewish people in the state of Israel , their willingness to work with Western
Powers that are non-Jewish, their focus on temple, on Jerusalem
But these are the strands that are
uppermost for us as Christians as we come to hear the Gospel of Jesus in a
Jewish setting.
In Jesus’ day there is a world power. The Roman Emperor. And there is a half-Jewish, half-Idumean,
would be King of the Jewis exercising massive power in Judea and Galilee – Herod the Great and the Herodian Dynasty.
Matthew opens as non-Jewish magi come
seeking a king and they go to Herod the Great expecting him to be in a
palace. Luke opens in the temple, in Jerusalem
And then at the climax to the sequence of
temptations Jesus is taken to a high mountain top and offered by Satan the
kingdoms of the world. This is the
satanic temptation Jesus resists to seize human power and be a world-emperor
power.
It’s in John’s gospel right at the outset
that the minisry begins in Jersualem and in the temple
Destroy this temple and in three days I
will rebuild it.
He was speaking of his own body.
And by John 4 Jesus is suggesting God is
neither located in Jerusalem
Jesus’ ministry opens with each of these
three strands right to the fore.
Jesus is all about the Kingdom coming – but
not in thrall to a human power, not located in a particular location, and not
in a temple made of stone.
But it is in his presence that all these
things find their fulfilment.
This is thrilling and something wonderful
to hold on to.
And there is one more thing.
Where do the Hebrew Scriptures finish? It is with a wonderful promise that God will
be with his people.
And where does our Christian new Testament
begin.
We have an echo of The Chronicler as the
Christian NT opens in Matthew 1 with a genealogy that serves exactly the
purpose of the genealogies that I Chronicles opens with – it serves to sum up
the story so far – from Abraham to David, from David to Exile from Exile to the
coming of Jesus.
Then Matthew goes on to tell us who this Jesus is.
Who is Jesus?
21She will bear a son, and
you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ 22All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the
Lord through the prophet:
23 ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel’,
which means, ‘God is with us.’
23 ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel’,
which means, ‘God is with us.’
God is with us.
The whole story of the Hebrew Scriptures is
finding its fulfilment in Jesus –
Whoever is among you of all his people, may
the Lord his God be with him
Jesus.
Emmanuel. God with us.
Let him go up!
If the first book of our Christian New
Testament starts where the Hebrew Scriprtures in II Chronicles left off, so too
does its ending!
The promise is still there – Whoever is
among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him. But the challenge is no longer Let him go up
to the temple in Jerusalem in Judah
Now the challenge is to go into all the
world and know that Jesus is with us always.
The Jesus who fulfils all the Scriptures,
Law, Prophets and Writings says not just to his disciples but to us …
And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority
in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go
therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and
teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am
with you always, to the end of the age.’
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