Matthew 5:17-20
Have you ever read the Bible? Like, really read it? Not just said you’ve read it because that feels like what you’re supposed to say. Not just picked out a few recommended verses here and there. But, really read it, every one of the books, all the way through?
Because, when you do read it, if you take the time to do it well, and if you pay attention, the Bible is – well, it’s complicated. For example, so often people – usually people who already know what they think, who have an axe to grind – people will tell me, “this is what the Bible says” about whatever issue. But, you know, the Bible is an ancient book – which means that it was written to people who were, in many ways, very similar to us, but who were also, in many ways, very different from us, and it was written to a world that had a lot of things in common with ours, but that also was very different from ours – which means that reading the Bible requires us to interpret, to figure it out, to ask – “what do these ancient words for ancient people mean to us modern people today?” Sometimes it’s easy: a commandment not to steal someone’s oxen probably means for us “just don’t steal from people,” but, even that is an act of interpretation – we have to figure it out. And, the extra complicating factor is that the Bible doesn’t speak with just one voice – the Bible speaks in many voices, the Bible isn’t just one book – it’s a whole library of books – and sometimes those books are arguing with each other. The book of Chronicles is arguing with Kings, the book of Job is arguing with Deuteronomy, the book of Ecclesiastes is arguing with Proverbs, the prophets are arguing with just about everyone – the prophets at the same time challenge the Bible’s laws AND, simultaneously, beg us to turn back to those laws. My point is that the Bible is complicated, it’s not an easy instruction manual with a 3-step process for living faithfully or anything like that. The Bible, most fundamentally, is a story – the story of God’s encounter with humanity, and our reaction to it. And, like any really good story, any true story, it’s got some twists and turns, and it’s not always pretty.
So, anyway, the Bible is complicated. And, when you read it, especially if you start at the beginning, one of the things that you may notice pretty quickly is that it’s also messy. In particular, one of the things people mention frequently – one of the things y’all brought up a lot in the questions you asked for this sermon series – is what to do about all the violence we find in the Bible. And, in particular, quite a few of you asked that question this way: if God is Love – which is something that we read in the Bible, in 1 John. So, since we believe that God is love, and we believe that Jesus is the Prince of Peace, the one who leads us into a new community in which everyone is welcome, a new kingdom in which all our divisions are overcome – if that’s true, what do we do about the violence that we see in the Bible? Or, to put it differently – as some of you put it – how do we reconcile a God of Love with the violence that we find in some parts of the Old Testament? Why does God sometimes seem so different in the Old Testament and the New Testament?
I want to tell you: if you’re asking that question, you’re not alone. From the beginning of this thing called Christianity, we have been wrestling with how to fit together the story of God as we have seen in Jesus and the early Church with the story of God’s relationship with the people of Israel, as we find it in what we Christians call the Old Testament.
One early Christian teacher, named Marcion, in the early second century, came up with what he thought was an elegant solution. He taught that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were different gods. The God of the Old Testament, he said, was an evil, lesser, God, who cared about rules and the physical world and who was into violence. The true God, the God of Jesus, was the greater God, said Marcion, and was spiritual – not concerned with earthly things – and all about love.
This teaching seemed to solve a problem – the tension we can sometimes feel between the Old and New Testaments – but, actually, it was just the worst. It’s a bad way of thinking. For one thing, in order to make it work, Marcion had to ignore huge parts of the New Testament – all the parts where Jesus, and the early church in Acts, and Paul in his letters speak highly of the Old Testament, quote the Old Testament, make it clear that the God who they worship is the God of the Old Testament. Marcion basically had to say “no, those parts of the New Testament are fake, don’t pay attention to them.” So, pretty quickly, the church decided “this Marcion guy, don’t listen to him, what he’s teaching is not Christianity. We Christians believe that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are one God – the same God who liberated Israel from Egypt raised Jesus Christ from the dead.”
So, early on, the church established this essential principle: you cannot just throw out the Old Testament. There are lots of good reasons for that: for one, the Old Testament was the only Bible the early church had. Remember, they didn’t have the New Testament, because they wrote it. When Paul or Jesus talks about the Bible, they are talking about what we call the Old Testament. When Jesus says, as he does in our Scripture reading today, that not one stroke of the Law and the Prophets – which means “the Old Testament” – not one stroke of that will pass away, that means that Jesus is saying “this remains God’s word to us.” The early church read the Old Testament, and they saw Jesus everywhere – in Genesis, and in the Psalms, and in the stories of David, and in the prophets, and all over, predictions of Jesus, stories that hinted at Jesus. When Jesus tells his disciples that the greatest commandments are “love God with all your heart, mind, and strength” and “love your neighbor as yourself,” he’s not making those things up – he’s quoting the book of Leviticus and the book of Deuteronomy. When Jesus calls for justice, and tells us to welcome the foreigner, he’s referencing God’s laws in Exodus and Deuteronomy. When the New Testament says that true worship involves living for God and loving our neighbors – not burnt offerings and sacrifices – that’s basically quoting the Old Testament prophets. So, no, you can’t throw the Old Testament away, because Jesus keeps showing up in it. And, the Old Testament isn’t just violence or rules – it’s also a lot of the stuff that we love, that we value about Jesus, it’s right there in the Old Testament. Jesus doesn’t appear out of nothing – he challenges his tradition, but he also builds upon his tradition, is a part of that tradition. So much of who we are as the church, as God’s people, comes from what we inherited, through Jesus, from God’s people, Israel. What Jesus does is invite us into the story of God’s love, the story of God saving the whole world, that is at the heart of the Old Testament. Jesus also transforms that story, and corrects parts of it, and speaks God’s judgment on ways in which it had been misused and abused, but that story, the story of Israel, is essential to who Jesus is, what he does, and who we are. And, beyond that, here’s what the church learned early on, and something that Christians have forgotten too often across the years: when Christians throw out the Old Testament, they tend to be willing to throw out the Jews. Historically, when Christian movements begin to teach that the Old Testament is somehow bad or backwards or not worth honoring, anti-Jewish violence has tended to follow.
Anyway, so, the church decided that we needed to keep the Old Testament – it is the story of God’s relationship with the people of Israel, and Jesus is a child of Israel, he emerges from that tradition – we don’t get Jesus without the people of Israel. And, the Old Testament was Jesus’ Bible, and the early church believe that it pointed to Jesus in important ways – ways we needed to appreciate in order to grasp the wonder and beauty and power of what God does in Jesus Christ. So, the Old Testament is good and important and we need it. But, also, like, it is still different from the New Testament, right?
And that’s the thing – there’s this tension – between holding onto and honoring the Old Testament and also understanding that God has done something new in Jesus Christ. That tension is there, even in the New Testament. Heck, it’s even there in the Old Testament. Like I said already, the Old Testament fights with itself, with different books taking different perspectives, having different ideas of what it means to be faithful. In the New Testament, we see Jesus himself seem to pull in two different directions: on the one hand, as we saw today, he says that not one letter of the Old Testament will be overturned. On the other hand, Jesus himself overturns parts of the Old Testament – by having a loose relationship with the laws of purity, by basically saying that the ritual laws around food – what foods are ritually clean or unclean – that those laws don’t matter anymore. All the people that the religious elites call dirty, unworthy, immoral – claims they make based on what the Old Testament says – Jesus welcomes them, and he quotes the Old Testament, saying “learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” In other words, Jesus challenges the Old Testament’s rules by appealing to the higher standard found within the Old Testament itself – the standard of love and justice and God’s mercy.
Or, think about Paul, who says that “the law is dead” and that we are not saved by following all the rules – in the Bible or elsewhere – but who also tells people to, you know, get their act together and stop acting so terribly. So, basically, it’s Jesus that saves you, not the following the rules, but, could you please try to follow at least some of the rules, because your sin is getting gross. Or, think about the book of Acts, in chapter 10, when Peter has a vision, and God commands him to eat all these unclean foods – foods that, as a faithful Jew, Peter had never eaten – things like shrimp and bacon – and Peter says “no, I’ve never eaten an unclean thing in all my life” – basically, “look at me, God, look how holy I am” and then God replies by saying “how dare you call something unclean when I have made it clean.” And then a gentile – a person Peter would have considered unclean – shows up at his door, and long story short, even though Peter’s Bible – the Old Testament – says that this person can’t follow God unless he becomes Jewish first, Peter sees that the Holy Spirit has been poured out on this person and his community, and so Peter says, I guess God is doing a new thing, and Peter baptizes the dude, and a bunch of other folks. Sometimes God does a new thing, and, in the process, some of God’s old ways of doing things seem to be upended. My point is that, even here in the New Testament, the church is struggling to figure it out: we know the Old Testament is essential, that we need it, that we meet God in it, that it points us to Jesus, but also there are some parts that God seems to be transforming, some parts that are no longer binding, so how do we deal with it?
Well, one way is to say: look, the Bible is a message from God to us, but it is also a human document. So, some of those older stories, they were written in a time when everyone assumed that there were lots of gods – the early Israelites, the people in the Old Testament, seem pretty clearly to believe in lots of gods, and God seems to be OK with that, as long as they only worship the true God, the Lord of Israel, and say that this one God is the best. So, they believe that there are lots of gods, and so, these early folks may have thought the best way to prove that your god is the best is to tell stories about how your God can kill all the other gods and help you win battles against their followers. Maybe, when you’re oppressed, when you’re on the underside, when you’re a slave in Egypt, having a god who fights for you – even if it means doing violence to your oppressors – maybe that sounds like a pretty good deal. Maybe they were so used to stories of violent gods, that when they encountered the true God, they had a hard time adjusting to it. So, maybe, that’s how some people saw things back then, but as their relationship with God developed, God kept working on them, and, over time, they discovered that the violence wasn’t something God told them to do – the violence was something that came from them, and God was pointing them to something else.
Or maybe that way of reading it doesn’t work for you. Here’s another possibility: John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, back in the 18th century, taught that “no Scripture can mean that God is not love.” In other words, if you read a part of the Bible, and it seems to make God seem unloving, then maybe you need to slow down, and read it again, and try to figure it out – have you misunderstood the passage, have you misunderstood what God is doing, have you misunderstood what true love is, or is perhaps an invitation to dig deeper.
Early Christians, in the first few centuries, did this often. One ancient teacher said that “when the literal meaning of Scripture seems to be unworthy of the God we know in Jesus, maybe God is trying to tell you to dig deeper. So, for example, the so-called binding of Isaac – what Jews call “the Akedah” – in which God tests Abraham’s faith by telling him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, before, at the last minute, telling him to stop – this ancient teacher said, “that sounds awful. Perhaps we are meant to read this story as a reminder that, actually, our God never asks us to sacrifice our children [note that, in the end, Isaac is spared] but God willingly sacrifices God’s son to save us.” So, stories about murderous kings in the Old Testament can remind us of how different Jesus, the true king, the Prince of Peace, is from them. Stories of sacrifice can remind us of the ultimate sacrifice, Jesus Christ on the cross. In other words, from the earliest days, the church taught that sometimes the best way to read a story in the Bible isn’t to take it literally. Instead, when we read a story that seems somehow contrary to who the Bible teaches us that God is, we are invited to ask: where is God in this? How does this story point us to Jesus?
I guess, in the end, my answer to the question of what to make of the tension between the Old Testament and the New Testament is this: it’s complicated. That tension is present – and is something people have been wrestling with – since before the New Testament was even written. But, here’s what I know – here’s what we believe: the Triune God of Jesus Christ has always been God. The God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit created the world in love, and liberated Israel from their slavery to Egypt, and gave the law as a gracious gift, and called the people of Israel to be light to the nations – to bring all people to God’s love – and that same God spoke through the prophets, calling for justice; and that same God was born among us, in the person of God’s Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, and moved in the early church by the power of the Holy Spirit. That God was and is and is to come. That God has always been about welcoming the outcast – we see that in the Old Testament and the New – that God has always been about justice – in the Old Testament and the new – that God always been about love – we see that in the Old Testament and the New – and that God has always been in the business of bringing life from death. That’s who God is, that’s what God does. Jesus is there in the Old Testament. Sometimes we have to look a bit harder than others. But Jesus is there. God is faithful. God is love. Always. And that’s good news.