Messianic passages we Christians use to understand Jesus’ ministry.
Amazing the amount of times this book is quoted in New Testament:
46—Gospels
30—writings of Paul
30—in the book of Revelation
Various passages that point to our understanding of Jesus as being
reflected.
New Testament is saturated in the ideas and even language of the Old
Testament
Direct quotes
Indirect references
Allusions
Linguistic Styles
Literary Models
Its hard to understand the New Testament without understanding the
OT—they were Jews who were rooted in the Scriptures of their religion,
the Scriptures of Jewish religion.
One of the great mysteries of the early church was why Judaism
essentially rejected Christianity.
A religion who had its greatest success outside of Israel and the Jewish
people.
Why couldn’t some of the earliest Jewish Christians convince their fellow
Jews that Jesus was indeed the Messiah?
Much of the New Testament letters are an attempt to settle the tension
between Gentile Christians—non Jews—and Jewish Christians. I
Corinthians and Romans.
Why won’t they get????!!!!
A big reason:
Christians went backwards and looked to Isaiah through the eyes of
resurrection faith.
But Jews had not generally seen the same passages we use to point to
Jesus in the same way.
Jews had never really interpreted the Old Testament passages the same
way we see them now.
We think that that Jesus’ life fulfilled certain prophecies, many found in
Isaiah, but the reason why it didn’t convince many Jews was because
they never interpreted the same passages the way we Christians did.
One of the reasons why Jesus was not easily recognized as the Jewish
Messiah is because the church looked backwards, and the Jewish
readers did not necessarily see that these verses as looking forward to
future—or to an individual.
Isaiah 42:1-6
Read it as a Christian
Then read it as it would have been traditionally read by a Jewish person.
Servant Songs—the servant is Israel, according to Jewish thought. For
us, that is Jesus. Israel becomes personified.
Both can and must be true—because remember what I said a few weeks
ago about prophecy as being meaningful for the people present in the
room, the people suffering.
Otherwise, the prophets word’s become meaningless when they were
uttered and have no meaning—no comfort to the people or no word of
warning they can actually heed—and only come true
I think its true for both—it must be if we are going to be faithful to the
text. It speaks of Israel, and for us, a singular one who will do
The importance of paying attention to this issue:
The long history of anti-semitism in the church.
Fifth Gospel & Gospel of John
Deep rooted anti-semitism throughout the Middle Ages
Martin Luther
Eventually found its way into Nazi ideology—it was easy to believe the
Jews were evil—they rejected Christ and then murdered him.
John’s Gospel…you see the beginning of it.
Christian Jews were beginning to be kicked out off the synagogues.
Traumatic—a vein of bitterness you don’t see in the other Gospels.
The beginning of the break-up began: Judaism and Christianity became
separate, though Christians saw themselves as ending a story the Jews
began.
All lumped into the words Jews, rather than the earlier Gospel’s division
of the Jews into specific categories—Pharisees and Sadducees.
Those categories were meaningless to the readers of John’s Gospel in
the late 90’s because of the destruction of much of Jerusalem and the
rebirth of a new way of being religious—synagogue based faith rather
than Temple based faith.
Dangers of anti-Jewish interpretations of the text.
We just need to be reminded that first and foremost, the Jews are God’s
people—and we are in God’s family by adoption. We may be family, but
the bloodline doesn’t literally run through, only figuratively. We are part
of God’s family now as Christians because of Christ, because of his
mission to keep including and including more and more people into God’
s family—and he paid a heavy price to get more of us in the door.
Jewish folks as family, though a different part of the family, and with
different understanding.
College—Joy
Jewish woman in Presbyterian House
Couple of years ago—she called me up and asked me to do her
wedding, in California.
Shocked by her request—I’m a Christian minister!
Wanted someone she knew to do the ceremony. But she didn’t know
any rabbis.
So, should I have done it? would never have done the ceremony of
another religion…
But Judaism is in my faith family…the words of Jewish ceremony were
words that I certainly could affirm, and I believed that I worshipped the
same God.
So, I did it. On a beach in outside LA, I did a Jewish wedding ceremony,
with the hoopa.
Quite a sight—me shaking as I raised up a cup in a ritual. I had done
weddings, but this was something completely new.
But family is family, and I was honored to do it.
To thank me, Joy gave a beautiful coffee table book on gay male
couples—with a beautiful thank you…it still sets on my coffee table.
Family is family
