Jesus & The Finger Of God (part 3)

So by his actions, Jesus clearly presents Himself as a new lawgiver, in the mold of Moses.  If one does not want to go that far and speak to Jesus’ private intentions, one could certainly insist that His biographers wished for their audiences to draw that conclusion. 

In Jesus’ case however, His status goes beyond that of Moses.  Unlike Moses, Jesus does not point to the finger of God as having written the commandments in stone at a time in the distant past, thus pointing to an entity separate from himself in the process.  Jesus does not appeal to the ancient working of the finger of God in the way that one may appeal to an established and recognized authority figure.  Rather, Jesus is reported as speaking of Himself using the same finger of God language that was most assuredly meant to communicate something which He believed to be true of Himself.  Undoubtedly, this is what Luke wants His audience to grasp. 

Later on in the same setting, Jesus goes on to say “For just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be a sign to this generation” (11:30).  This use of “Son of Man” is part of a building process within Luke.  That process effectively culminates with Jesus’ linking the coming of the Son of Man, referencing Daniel chapter seven and the Son of Man coming on the clouds to the Ancient of Days in order to receive His kingdom, to the destruction of the Temple, with a repetition of “this generation” in connection with the sign, while also speaking of the Son of Man during the course of His passion (an entirely different subject matter altogether). 

Jesus then, in Luke’s highly structured and structural setting, speaks of Himself in connection to the finger of God (with this functioning on multiple levels), and then speaks of the Son of Man, which can be shown to be self-referential.  Making the connection then, the Son of Man is obviously meant to be understood as a divine figure, and it is the Son of Man (the king of the kingdom of God, the Messiah, the Creator God manifest) that is speaking when providing new laws for the people of that God and casting out demons.       

As this study works backwards through the defining and definitive historical narrative that is the Hebrew Scriptures, the final instance of the finger of God is found in the eighth chapter of Exodus.  There, Moses has struck his staff on the ground, with this striking resulting in the dust of the ground becoming like “gnats throughout all the land of Egypt” (8:16b).  As they had done with the previous signs from Israel’s God that had been provided to Moses in order to prove the veracity of the message he delivered, the magicians of Egypt attempted to match the feat.  However, they were unable to do so.  In response, “The magicians said to Pharaoh, ‘It is the finger of God!’” (8:19a)  

No One Knows The Hour (part 29)

This makes a great deal of sense.  Jesus was painting Himself into a corner, relying on Israel’s prophetic tradition and demanding that He be judged in the same way that all prophets were judged---based on the verifiability of their predictions.  In His actions in the Temple, Jesus presents Himself in the mold of Jeremiah, and does so by making reference to His very words.  Had his words of the Creator God’s judgment against the Temple not come to pass, Jeremiah would have lambasted as a false prophet and held up to scorn rather than honor. 

However, Jeremiah’s words did come to pass, the Temple fell, and even though His words were not exactly grand proclamations for Israel, he is held up as a great prophet of Israel (a prophet being one who calls corrupt powers to account, not necessarily one who makes predictions about the future).  The same standard would have applied of Jesus.  Would anybody listen to Him, or have any use for Him, if the singular distant prediction that He made, which was well understood to be a prediction about the demise of the Temple within the lifetimes of many of His hearers, did not occur?  One would think that the answer to that question would be in the negative. 

Certainly, the Resurrection was and is vital as a witness to Jesus.  However, those that witnessed and interacted with the risen Jesus following His Resurrection were limited in number.  Accordingly, skepticism towards such a claim would be natural and completely understandable, as people simply did not come back to life, especially after undergoing a Roman crucifixion.  While Jesus obviously staked a great deal of validation on His Resurrection, He also appears to have staked a great deal on the fall of the Temple as well (and His biographers seem to have staked much on this claim as well).  

If Jesus staked much on this claim, then His church could do no less.  Not only did He claim that the Temple would fall, but perhaps more importantly, as it concerns the church that would follow Him, He claimed that when the Temple fell, He, as the Son of Man, would go (or have gone) before the Ancient of Days to receive His kingdom, power, and authority (or this event would be confirmation that this had in fact already occurred).  Is this not important? 

Now, to get a taste of where this idea might be headed, it could be said that one gets a sense of this way of thinking in the first chapter of Romans, as Paul declares that Jesus “was appointed Son-of-God-in-power according to the Holy Spirit by the Resurrection from the dead” (1:4a).  The letter to the Romans, of course, was written between the Resurrection of Jesus and the fall of the Temple.  If the early Christians knew that Jesus had staked His claim on the fall of the Temple, explicitly linking its fall with His receiving of His kingdom, then one can easily hear this as Paul speaking about this appointment as an appointment-in-waiting, expecting the validation to come.  One can also imagine Him being quite confident that the validation would come, especially considering the fact that Jesus had risen from the dead and appeared to Paul, which was the basis for Paul’s dramatic transformation from persecutor of the church to its chief proponent and the originator of Christian theology/philosophy, and the complete re-orientation of his life around the claims of Jesus.

It is quite likely that, as the message of Jesus went forth, and as the church presented itself, through and in union with their risen Lord, as the new Temple, that Jesus’ words about the fall of the Temple that was to take place relatively soon had an important place in talk of Him.  Why would this not be the case?  Indeed, it would be odd if this was not the situation at hand.  Why can such a thing be said?  Well, one would have to consider the question in accordance with the fact that the issue of Jesus, as Messiah, was a primarily a Jewish issue. 

Salvation for the world was to be through the Jews, and any proper understanding of the role of the Messiah cannot be divorced from the history of Israel and the Creator God’s role for His chosen people.  Why would the Jews, especially, whose lives were oriented around the Temple, shift their allegiance from the Temple (and therefore the God represented by the Temple) to Jesus?  It is a legitimate question.  If they had the Temple, then why would they need to seek their God in some other place or person?  It was the lack of the Temple, during the period of the Babylonian exile, that forced the Creator God’s people to seek Him.   

Presentations Of Jesus (part 1)

As Jesus “grew and became strong,” being “filled with wisdom, and as “the favor of God was upon Him” (Luke 2:40), and as He began to live out the life of the Messiah within a community that generally believed that the Messiah would be the fleshly embodiment of their covenant making, creative, and providential God, He would undoubtedly have searched (or at least asked for assistance in searching) the collected Hebrew Scriptures for guidance in living according to messianic expectations.  Naturally, Jesus was concerned with how to go about revealing the Creator God to His covenant people. 

That said, it is quite right to here contemplate the “suffering servant” of Isaiah (despised, rejected, suffering pain, held in low esteem/honor, stricken, afflicted, pierced, crushed, punished, wounded, etc…).  With knowledge of the way in which Jesus lived, the way He performed His ministry, the people with whom He surrounded Himself, the subversive challenge that He offered to the powers-that-be of the day (politically, religiously, socially, and culturally), and the way in which His choice of messianic presentation would lead to the way in which He would come to meet what was His presumed demise, it seems to be rather clear that He took the notion of Isaiah’s suffering servant as rather foundational for His mission. 

Likewise, the authors of the Gospels, as they lived in the early days of the church that was growing and serving humanity and enduring threats and persecutions in the wake of Jesus’ Resurrection and ascension and the telling of that story, and as they did so in a time in which oral traditions (possibly informed by smaller written collections of Jesus’ words or deeds) concerning Jesus were circulating, sought to tell Jesus’ story within the framework of messianic (king of Israel/God in the flesh) conceptions (the suffering servant being one mode of telling) that were on offer within the Hebrew Scriptures. 

Just as Jesus, to whom believers are able to look as the Creator God in the flesh, was concerned with properly revealing His God to His people, so too would His biographers be concerned with structuring their stories of Jesus with an eye and an ear to the very same thing.  This notion is not necessarily talking about making Jesus fit within a certain mold, or telling His story so as to make it appear that He is the fulfillment of centuries-old prophecies, but rather, utilizing certain portions of the accepted Scriptures (and the self-understanding that shaped, was shaped by, and governed the reading of those Scriptures) that served to inform the people about the nature of their God, Jesus’ biographers, who believed themselves to be telling the story of the Lord and Master of the whole of the cosmos, shaped their presentations of the stories of Jesus so as to align with the nature-of-God-revealing statements that were part and parcel of the writings of Israel’s prophets, poets, and historians. 

Surely, it is not at all difficult to understand that the Gospels offer an exceedingly small glimpse into the life of Jesus, so one does well to consider why it is that what was selected for recounting to and for the church communities, was in fact selected.  Most likely, the structure of the presentation of events in the life of Jesus is taken for granted, with believers enjoying the narrative on offer without ever wondering why certain events follow one another within the Gospel presentation. 

If one takes seriously the fact that Jesus lived as part of a community that took its story very seriously and understood itself according to the story recorded in its Scriptures, while also understanding themselves as the covenant people of the Creator God that routinely and often dramatically enters into history to act for or towards His people as they looked towards a great and seemingly final intervention, then this notion must be brought to a reading of the Gospels which then shapes the way that the remainder of the New Testament is read (though the Gospels and Acts would have been composed and circulated in written form after almost all of the rest of what would come to comprise the New Testament has been composed, though certainly the stories recorded in the Gospels and Acts circulated in what was likely a moderately controlled oral form before the written records were produced).