Standing Under the Scriptures
April 5, 2009

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this Sunday are:

Philippians 2.5-11: Jesus’ obedient emptying of himself and his consequent exaltation are recounted in a hymn

Mark 11.1-11: Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on a borrowed colt is acclaimed by the bystanders.

Our readings for last Sunday (Jeremiah 31-31-34 and John 12.20-33) are integral to their respective Testaments, Old and New. Yet they are profoundly connected with each other.

The Jeremiah passage tells of the Lord’s making a new covenant with Israel and Judah, in place of the one which they broke. This one will be internal to them instead of external; the Lord will write his law in their hearts. Instead of having to be humanly taught, the knowledge of him and his law will be within them. They will be his people and he will be their God. And he will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.

We recalled that there had been a series of covenants in salvation history (meaning the history of salvation or the history which itself is saving). First the Lord announced one with Noah and his descendants, presumably all of humanity: no more destroying of the earth as by flooding.. Then he made one with Abraham and his descendants: they would be multiplied greatly. But Sinai’s was the pre-eminent one, made between the Lord and Moses as the representative of the people in the wake of their deliverance at the Sea. And this is the one which the Lord speaks here of replacing, citing his having grasped the people by the hand and brought them out of Egypt.

We considered whether the intention of this passage was to do away with the Sinai covenant (which the people broke and not the Lord), and with it the history that led up to and followed from it. We decided against this possibility, on the grounds that the Old Testament shows history as the realm in which God acts and makes him known. Rejecting the Sinai covenant, which is bound up with this history, would thus mean rejecting the Old Testament and substantially the New as well. For not only is the New also concerned with history, it is shot through with citations, explicit and implicit, pf the Old. (The Marcion of my recent special notice, in eliminating the Old, presumably would have eliminated these citations from his pared-down version of the New.) Further, if the Sinai covenant and associated history are eliminated, the only way for the Lord to bring about the internalized covenant which the passage envisages would be by fiat. And apart from creation, this is not the way that Scriptures shows him as working.

I might have gone on to say that rejecting the Old Testament would be contrary to the explicit position of the church since the 2nd century and to the Anglican tradition as affirmed by the Thirty-nine Articles. It would be contrary also our class premise, which is to be disciplined by standing under the Scriptures and not to pick and choose among them.

How then are we to view Jeremiah’s vision? We decided that it was to be viewed eschatalogically, as coming about not in time as we know it but rather at the end of time, when our time comes to a close. As for the way it will come about, this will indeed be through history, namely the history of Jesus as the Christ. It will be fully realized only in his second coming, but the foundation for it was already laid in his first. And it is with a crucial aspect of his first that our second reading, from John, is concerned.

We noted that it came immediately after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. John’s Gospel, which up to this point has followed a different line from the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), here begins to converge with them. Unlike them, John has no account of Jesus’ prayerful agony in Gethsemane. But in this passage he has an equivalent, in that it similarly concerned with Jesus’ impending death and its significance.

It seems to begin a little strangely. Among the crowds gathered in Jerusalem for the Passover are some Greeks---non-Jews at any rate---who wish to see and presumably talk with Jesus. They approach the disciple Philip who with Andrew (both are Greek-derived names) goes to Jesus on their behalf. Jesus’ response appears to have nothing to do with the Greeks. He simply says that the hour has come for him to be glorified---by his death. He conveys the significance of his death in the agricultural image of a wheat grain bearing “much fruit” by falling to the ground and dying. From here he goes on to the paradox---his sayings in the Synoptics tend to be paradoxical too---that to love one’s life is to lose it and to hate it “in this world” is to keep it for eternal life. Such is likewise the case for his servants, for where he is they will be also. In trouble of soul he questions his Father about the necessity of “this hour;” here is a direct link with Gethsemane. But immediately he answers, “For this hour I have come.” And he describes its double effect: the judgment of the world and the casting out of its ruler and, at the same time, the drawing of all men to him.

The latter effect, as a class member pointed out, may be considered Jesus’ response to the Greeks’ request to see him. He and his gospel would be accessible to them only after his resurrection. And if we consider John to have written several decades later on, when Greeks had in fact come into the church, the point would have been relevant to him and his readers. As for the judgment of the world and the casting out of its ruler, this stands in some tension with John 3.17, which we considered shortly ago: “For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him.” But still it is the world that condemns itself, though its failure to accept Jesus. The ruler of this world would be broadly the human tendency to rely on oneself, collectively as well as individually, rather than on God. This tendency is concretized in establishments, regarded as groups which had a proper leadership role but have turned from it to the furtherance or maintenance of their own position. This would accord with another class member’s suggestion some time ago that Jesus presented himself as sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Matthew 15.24) because not until he had overcome Israel’s religious establishment (through his death and resurrection) could he go beyond Israel,.

Finally this passage enables us to understand Jeremiah’s proclamation of the Lord’s new covenant in our first reading. He was given a true vision of the end time, of how things would be with the coming of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21). But it was not given to him to see how it would come about. This became fully apparent only with the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ (although subsequent to Jeremiah the Suffering Servant of 2nd Isaiah was to indicate this). Thus we see how the Old Testament requires the New for its fulfilment. At the same time the New is undergirded and illumined by the Old---and thus indispensable to it. As alluded to above, their numerous citations of the Old attest that the writers of the New believed so. One has only to look at Hebrews 8.8-11 to see our Jeremiah passage quoted in its entirety---as being realized in Christ.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted