Jesus' Guide to Reading 'the Law'

As I was sitting down to prepare this evening’s sermon an email popped into my inbox.

Tackling bullying in schools – a governor’s guide. January 2011.

It ran to 20 pages. And made interesting reading. It would be easy to dismiss the production of such materials as wasteful bureaucracy. But actually it contains excellent guidance, good commonsense, and checklists that demonstrate Pittville School where I am a Governor is doing well in that area.

Much of what is included in the guide is covered in ‘the law’.

There’s legislation for most things in life.

And that’s nothing new.

From time immemorial as people have sought to live togehtrer they have recognised the need for legislation.

There’s plenty of it in the Bible.

The first five books of the Bible are known as the Books of ‘the Law’.

They contain law codes like the ten commandments. Laws about personal living, about living together in society. There are laws about the ritual and worship, about sacrifice, and the observation of religious festivals.

But the books of the Law don’t only include lists of laws. There are no such lists in the book of Genesis. There are stories of the beginnings of things, the beginnings of the world, the beginnings of the people of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There’s the story of Joseph. Exodus introduces us to the story of Moses … and as the title suggests the story of the Exodus from bondage in Egypt to freedom.


In some ways it is unfortunate that those five books have been given the name ‘the Law’ in English.

For they contain much more than a series of ‘laws’.

The Hebrew word for them is the word Torah.

That is a much richer word. Don’t think of it so much as a set of laws and regulations. Think of it as a set of books that through stories, law codes and much more open up for us an understanding of God’s way for God’s world.

The stories come from an ancient world, and we need to enter into that world if we are going to begin to understand what it is they are saying. The law codes come from an ancient world that is very different from our own. We need to enter into that world to begin to sense how God is speaking to us through those stories and all those laws.

You won’t get far before you find things that are not just alien from an ancient world, but things that we simply cannot follow in today’s world. All those instructions on what kind of food to eat. All the instructions on when and how to sacrifice animals. All those instructions on what kind of clothes to wear and what not to wear.

Read through the first five books of the law and you recognise that you have to deal with these books with care.

And as soon as you do that, someone will cry out, ‘You can’t do that.’ If it says it in the Bible, it must mean it for all time. You cannot change one word of the Bible. Change one thing and then you will have to change everything. As soon as you call something in question you have to abandon everything.

That’s where it is interesting to ask how Jesus read the law.

First, he valued it. He didn’t want to change what was in those five books at all. Not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, not one jot or tittle of the law is to be removed … until all is accomplished. He honoured those books. And it is because of that that we keep those five books in their entirety in our Christian bible.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets, I have come not to abolish but to fulfil.

Jesus speaks of fulfilling the law. Of it being ‘accomplished’.

And he sees himself as ‘the fulfilment’ of the law and the prophets. On the cross he gets to the point at which he is able to say, ‘It is accomplished’

Jesus stands by the law, but he handles it with a remarkable wisdom. He does not take up a stone against a woman caught in adultery, but instead gives her the opportunity to start her life all over again. He does not condemn and reject Zacchaeus the thief, but goes to eat with him before he has changed. And it is that loving acceptance that prompts him to change.

He does not hold fast to the Sabbath laws on the grounds that the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. His sacrifice is the sacrifice to end all animal sacrifice, now we look to him as the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, and the detail of the sacrificial laws is no longer applicable. He eats with sinners, and does not hold fast the laws regarding eating. And he is welcoming of gentiles and his followers realise that the food laws no longer apply as well.

These five books of Torah do give an insight into the way of God in the world, but Jesus invites us to read them through his eyes. Value them for the insights they give, honour them in our Bible, but read them carefully.

Nowhere is that approach more evident than in a passage that has to be one of the most familiar in all the gospels.

25 Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus.

Let’s stop there. A ‘lawyer’ in Jesus’ day was not the first century equivalent of a solicitor. He was an expert in ‘the Law’ in the ‘Torah’. We so easily read the Gospels in terms of Goodies and Baddies. And typecast the Lawyer as a baddy. Especially as he set out to ‘test’ Jesus. Let’s give him credit for a moment. Maybe as a teacher of the Law he was intrigued with the approach Jesus had to the law. Maybe he was offended by it. Maybe he thought Jesus was too selective, and so too risky, and so in danger of destroying the law. He wanted to test Jesus out.

* ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’

Notice again, the question. We so often imagine the question to be ‘what must I do to get into heaven when I die?’ And then we see the following conversation as the entry qualifications for access to heaven.

But he doesn’t mention heaven at all. He asks, what must I do to inherit eternal life.

You inherit something from someone who has died. The life he speaks of is not just life after death. It is life in all its fullness, life that is not bounded by death, life that starts here and now, is not bounded by death, and links us to all the fullness of life in God.

He is asking, what must I do to inherit from all those have gone before, from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, from Joseph, from Moses, from David and Solomon, from all those prophets … that life that is lived in all its fullness is not bounded by God and is the life God wants for me and for everyone?

What a question!

26He said to him, ‘What is written in the law?

Let’s stop there again. What is written in the Law? What is written in the Torah. The answer to that is everything from the very start of Genesis to the very end of Deuteronomy.

But Jesus is not only concerned with all those words that are written in the law. He asks a second question.

What do you read there?’

Now that to my mind is a very interesting question. Never mind all those words, let’s get to the nub of the matter. What do you read there? How do you put into a few words the whole of the Torah?

27He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’

That is a classic Jewish answer.

The point is that the whole of the law is capable of being summarised in two clauses. This is the nub of the matter.

Jesus sees it in exactly that way.

28And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

Notice, Jesus does not say. Do this and you will get to heaven. Do this, he says and you will live, you will have life in all its fullness. Life not bounded by death, Life that is one with God.

What’s going on here is I think fascinating. It is something very Jewish. Jesus grew up steeped in the Scriptures of the Hebrew Bible from his mother’s knee. Remember when he was 12 how he got lost and was found in the temple. When he was found he was with the teachers – these very people who were themselves steeped in the law. And he was listening to them and asking them questions. From 12 to 30 he went week by week to the synagogue. That was where you didn’t just hear the Torah read, you heard teachers, rabbis, explaining it. You had the opportunity to listen and to ask questions – to talk through its meaning.

Jesus was more than this man’s equal in his deep and profound understanding of the Torah and more importantly of what is going on there.

What the nub of the matter is.

But this lawyer wants more.

29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’

Jesus responds with the best known of all stories. What is not so often appreciated is that this is again a classic way of teaching. To get across the meaning of scripture you don’t just spell out the literal meaning. You tell a story.

The story Jesus tells reaches its climax when he turns to this expert in the law and asks another question.

36Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ 37He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’

Mercy is one of the watchwords of the Scriptures – it is in fact a favourite in the Prophets it crops up time and again in the writings, in the Psalms. The teacher has got the point of the story.

Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’

This is not just a challenge to social care. This is not just the great principle of inclusive love that breaks all barriers down. What we have here is an insight into the way Jesus sets about the task of reading the books of the Law in what we regard as the Old Testament.

You cannot simply concentrate on what is written. You have to go to the heart of what you read there. And at the heart of the Torah is Love, Love for God, Love for Neighbour. And neighbour includes all. It is all about ‘doing’ mercy.

Tackling Bullying in Schools – A Governor’s Guide runs to 20 pages of detailed guidance on ways to deal with one of the worst kinds of behaviours that every generation will discover for itself.

I could tell you what’s written there. And you would find it interesting.

Perhaps more valuable is for me to tell you what I read there.

What I read there is simply this.

Do to others what you would have others do to you.

Come to think of it didn’t someone else suggests that that is nothing less than the law and the prophets!

Opening the Scriptures

The great thing about a walk in good company is the opportunity it gives to set the world to rights. That’s exactly what those two friends were doing as they made their way from Jerusalem on their 7 mile journey to Emmaus on the third night after the execution of the One they had hoped was the person to redeem Israel, to set Israel free, to liberate Israel.

As far as they were concerned this Jesus of Nazareth had been a prophet mighty in word and deed, but so much more than a prophet.

But their hopes had been dashed as this Jesus had been arrested, condemned to death and crucified.

It was a sorry sight, they walked with a heavy heart. Hardly a brisk purposeful walk, but a dejected walk, their whole purpose in living had been destroyed in that one dark Friday afternoon.

Someone drew alongside them and joined their conversation. They told him everything that had happened, how their hopes had been dashed. For a moment their faces lit up as they described the way some women spoke of finding an empty tomb. There was talk of resurrection. But they were not convinced.

The stranger had no sympathy for their state of mind.

“Oh, how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!,” was his immediate reaction.

“Was it not necessary that the Messiah, the Christ, the anointed one of God, the King in God’s Kingdom, should suffer these thengs and then enter into his glory?”

They had not thought of it that way. And yet what he said rang a bell. Hadn’t Jesus himself said something similar? Hadn’t he spoken of the road to Jerusalem as the road to the suffering and the death of the Messiah?

The ache went from their hearts. It was as if this stranger was re-kindling the enthusiasm that had been dashed in the events of that week. They warmed to him.

‘Then, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.’

It was nothing less than a revelation to them. They had not read the Scriptures that way before. The Scriptures they had grown up with came alive in a way they had never done before. However often they had read their Scriptures, and they had grown up with them, they had always been a little bit of a closed book. The way he brought them all together opened it all up.

Later that same night, after that remarkable moment in their home when in the breaking of bread they had seen with their own eyes that this was the very Jesus they had been following, risen from the dead, they looked back on that remarkable conversation, and as they were making the return journey to tell the wonderfully exciting news of Jesus’ resurrection to their other friends back in Jerusalem they were no longer dejected, but with a bounce in their step, They put it in a nutshell,

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”

The scriptures they were talking about of course, we know of as the Old Testament.

When we find the Old Testament sometimes difficult to get to grips with we can take heart that we are not alone. It was something of a closed book to these two friends and they were steeped in reading it as their Holy Book, their Scriptures. We are not so steeped in the Scriptures of the Old Testament so maybe it should come as no surprise that it can feel a little bit like a closed book and someone needs to open them up for us.

Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to have been able to eaves drop on Jesus as he ‘opened the Scriptures’ to them? I have a feeling if we had been privileged to hear Jesus we might well have found our hearts burning within us and we might well have found that the Old Testament was opened up in a way we had scarcely believed possible.

It is a pity in one sense that we cannot eaves drop on that conversation.

But in a very real sense I think we can go some way towards re-constructing the kind of thing that Jesus shared that evening with those two friends. To do that we need to enter into the spirit of a time team investigation into some historical event in the past.

Those archaeologists start often with an empty field. Looking at it you would never imagine what could be discovered by digging away beneath the surface. As they dig away and use their remarkable tools of historical research they slowly piece together a picture of the story of maybe a medieval town, or a Roman fort. And by the end of their investigation the story has come to life.

I think it is possible to piece together a picture of the way Jesus read the Old Testament. I want to go further than that and say that if we are to read the Old Testament effectively as Christians we need to endeavour to read the Old Testament through the eyes of Jesus.

It is interesting to notice in this final chapter of Luke’s gospel that the two friends on the Road to Emmaus were not the only two people Jesus ‘opened’ the Old Testament to in this way.

When they get back to the upper room in Jerusalem they find the eleven and their companions in the upper room filled with excitement because they too had met with the risen Jesus. Notice not just the eleven, but also their ‘companions’. Judging by the kind of listing of the people who made the upper room their base Luke provides us with in Acts 1 that in all likelihood would have included the women who had been the first to tell of the risen Jesus.

While they were actually talking about everything that had happened to them on the Road to Emmaus and listening to the others tell of everything they had witnessed, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”

Jesus urges them to touch him and be sure that he is risen indeed; he then shares a meal with them of broiled fish.

Then … and this is the very interesting observation Luke makes in his record of what happened that evening … he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you – that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures …”

By the evening of this very first day of resurrection the two on the Road to Emmaus, plus the eleven disciples, plus an unknown number of companions had listened, enthralled, to Jesus opening up the Old Testament in a way that thrilled and excited them, in a way that made sense of it for the first time.

Within 30 years, one of those who was there that evening, Peter, had shared his recollections of the wonderful good news of Jesus with a much younger follower of Jesus who may well have been one of those companions and Mark’s gospel was put together. Ten or so years later it is just possible that one of the eleven, Matthew, then adapted and expanded Mark’s gospel drawing on a collection of sayings of Jesus he had access to as well. Around that time Luke set about researching the story for his friend Theophilus, and on the basis of eye-witness accounts and other records put together his Gospel. Shortly after that the last of the Gospels in our New Testament came into being quite possibly penned by another of the 11.

Some there are who are a little more sceptical regarding the identify of the four gospel writers, but most would accept that they are written within the lifetime of those who were eyewitnesses of these events and that the Gospel accounts draw on those eyewitness accounts to tell their story.

The thing that excites me is first, that Jesus could in the space of a two or three hour walk to Emmaus and later that evening a talk in the upper room, give such an overall view of the Old Testament that it came alive in a new way for the two, the eleven and their companions.

Second, among those who heard Jesus give this remarkable account of the Old Testament are those who contribute to or, as I would argue, actually put together the four Gospels.

In telling that story of Jesus they take into account the insights he has given them into the way the whole Old Testament hangs together and shapes all that Jesus did in his life and ministry, in his death and his resurrection.

So while we may not be able to eaves drop on what Jesus said on the Road to Emmaus, or in the Upper Room later that evening, we can examine the Gospels and piece together the way Jesus handled the Old Testament, and see something of the way he read the Old Testament.

That, I believe, is a way into reading the Old Testament that brings it alive, that makes it speak to us and to our world in a thrilling way. It is a way into reading the Old Testament that opens it up for us as Christian readers that can make our hearts burn within us.

What Jesus shared that evening with the two and with the eleven and with their companions offers us a framework that enables us to see through to the heart of the Old Testament.

The Old Testament spans a period of more than a thousand years, is written over a period of 750 years, and contains no fewer than 39 books. In the church bibles it runs to 927 pages. How do you hold all that together and bring it all alive in the couple of hours it takes to walk 7 miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus?

The clue lies in a conversation I had with my Aunty Nansi when I was 15.

She was an English teacher. I was doing O Levels. I could not write an essay for love nor money.

In half an hour she gave me a method for writing essays and for that matter anything else unlocked the key for me of writing essays and everything else.

Her approach was based on the conviction that you should be able to structure what you want to say around at minimum 3 at maximum 8 points, and usually 4, 5, or 6.

You might want to say 30 or 40 different things. See how you can cluster them into groups and then give what you say a shape around 3 or 4, 5 or 6 points.

That’s exactly the approach Jesus takes to the Old Testament.

And in doing that he is simply doing what Jewish people of the time did in reading their Hebrew Scriptures.

He groups the Hebrew Scriptures into three parts.

Verse 27 speaks of Moses, all the prophets and all the scriptures.

Verse 44 speaks of the law of Moses, the prophets and the psalms.

The Jewish people actually use an acronym to describe what we Christians think of as the Old Testament. They call it the Tanak.

T stands for Torah , the Hebrew word for Law - God's Way in God's World
N stands for Neviim the Hebrew word for Prophets - God's Word for God's World
K stands for Ketuvim the Hebrew word for Writings of which the Psalms is the biggest book - God's Wisdom in God's World


So, we are going to look first for guidelines from Jesus in the Gospels about how we should read the Law. Then we shall move on to the Prophets and the remaining writings of the Old Testament.

May what we read of Jesus in the Gospels open our minds to understand the Scriptures of the Old Testament.

We will explore what it takes to be Messiah, why the Messiah should suffer and what impact his suffering and resurrection makes on the way we respond to a suffering a world. We shall see what repentance entails and why forgiveness of sins is so important that it should be proclaimed in the name of Jesus to all nations beginning form Jerusalem and reaching out into all the world. We shall see what it means for us to be witnesses of these things, and how that will shape the very way we lead our lives.

And as we read the pages of the Old Testament we shall be aware of a God of glory, a God of power, of God most high … and we shall find that we cannot hope to live the life Jesus calls us to live, and follow the way he opens up for us unless we draw on that very power, that very strength.

And the wonderful thing in all of this is that we can be sure that we shall be able to draw on the power and strength of God that may be unseen yet is so very real.