Simon

Ohh I love this one.

Craig

You go first then.

Simon

Well, in Luke 4 we read that Jesus is in his home synagogue and reads from the Isaiah scroll. “Today”, he says, “this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing”. And we know that at the end of the story, people are really cross with him and they take him to a cliff nearby and threaten to throw him off. We don’t know absolutely why it is that they got so upset. One possibility is that Jesus cuts short the passage that he’s reading. He brings the good news part of that story and stops it in a way that we often do. You know, when we read the Psalm 137, we always stop before we get to the bit that talks about bashing babies’ heads against the rocks.

I always feel a bit embarrassed about that, but actually Jesus does the very same thing in this passage from Isaiah 61 because it ends with the day of the vengeance of the Lord. Jesus completely misses that out. And if we think about this, you know, right now with what’s going on in Israel and Palestine, this is of more than passing interest. The irony is the situation was reversed in Jesus’ time: Israel was occupied and the Jews were the persecuted people, and they wanted to hear about vengeance. They wanted to hear that one day God was going to punish the people that were occupying their land, and Jesus just completely misses that out, so I can imagine it really upsetting them. To be fair it’s not completely clear what makes them so angry, but it is clear that he stopped short of declaring vengeance against their enemies. And it’s consistent with everything that we know about Jesus that he would stop short. He was reassessing the Hebrew God in in quite radical ways. So it’s important to note that Jesus didn’t just read his scriptures flat. He was actually going a lot further than many of us dare to do and saying “Ohh, I’m just going to ignore that, there’s something new going on here.” So yes, when he’s got the chance to speak, of course he begins by reading the scripture. But by the standards of many parts of our church, he’s very naughty. He just says, “I’m not having that. This is not what my father, my abba (daddy), is like. So I’m not gonna give you the vengeance that you want. Because actually I don’t think that’s what God is about.”

Clearly the scriptures are really important to Jesus, especially the book of Isaiah. We can speculate about exactly what scrolls would have been present in a tiny, tiny village synagogue, but clearly Isaiah was there. So he’s absolutely soaked in it.

But he doesn’t just take it as authority. He’s actually able to go “No, I don’t like that bit”.

Roy

I think that’s brilliant Simon. He was a biblical scholar in that sense wasn’t he, and I love the way in which he challenges what would have been traditional interpretations of scripture. He offers new insights and perspectives. He reinterprets. So, for example, in Leviticus 19 we read about loving one’s neighbour. Jesus takes that well known scripture from the Torah and extends it by including love for one’s enemies. He teaches through Scripture, doesn’t he? He uses scripture and interprets scripture, often with other scripture.

Craig

Yeah, I agree. We also need to bear in mind that there’s another form of editing Jesus is doing. The story that comes to mind is where he and his disciples are walking through a cornfield on the Sabbath and Jesus is castigated for allowing the disciples to eat corn because they’re hungry. And Jesus says no, the law is given for man, not man for the law. 

So as they walk through that cornfield Jesus is teaching them about God: my father has given us permission to eat when we’re hungry because yes, there are rules and there are laws that are helping us to live wisely and not harm others, but they’re not overly restrictive in the sense that you’re interpreting them.

And that reminds me of the many times Jesus had to say to the Pharisees, “you’ve heard it said, but I say to you”, which makes us wonder whether Jesus is picking and choosing, but actually what Jesus is doing is that by the time he was walking the earth, what the Jews had done is they’d taken the holiness of scripture so seriously, because they were so afraid of breaking the law, that they’d added what became known as hedge laws to the written laws. In their desire to be seen as law keepers, the Pharisees had added their own additional laws and were then critical of everyone who was unable to keep them. This is what Jesus meant when he talked about the Pharisees putting heavy loads on others. And he was clear that adding extra laws simply took the focus off the words of his father.

And yet he does exactly the same thing. So, for example, Jesus extends “do not murder” to warn those who are angry, suggesting they have committed murder in their hearts.

In all this he’s saying “let’s get back to the fundamentals. Let’s get back to what’s written down rather than the hedge you’ve put around it because the hedge just gives the wrong impression of God. Like God is basically only interested in pointing out more things that displease him. Let’s be clear about the real meaning behind what you see written in scripture.”

Dave

Can I summarise some of what we’ve just said because Simon’s comment on Luke 4 was so brilliant. You have several things in that particular passage that summarise how Jesus used scripture. First of all, he used Scripture to say, “hey this points to me”, and that’s the first thing. You read the scriptures but you don’t get it because they point to me. They speak of me.

The second thing, and it comes out in this in this passage too, is that Jesus often uses the scriptures to challenge people’s wrong interpretations, people’s misunderstandings of the way it worked and that that comes out very clearly in here too. But maybe the reason they wanted to throw him off the cliff is because he also did something else which he doesn’t do as obviously on a lot of occasions, but he very much does it here. He challenges Israel’s impression that they’re the special ones. Because he talks about there being lots of widows in Israel at the time of Elijah, but Elijah was sent to somebody outside Israel. So he’s basically saying they, are getting it wrong because ultimately God wants this wonderful big thing for everybody.

Julie

I’m going to take the conversation in a slightly different direction. I’m going to give a big shout out to Mary, mother of Jesus, because I reckon she did a lot of teaching. Where did Jesus learn about scripture? He learned from his mother at home.

In the Magnificat, we can see Mary’s understanding of what Jesus will do. I do not view Mary as meek and mild; I see her as a fantastic woman who nurtured Jesus and helped him grow into this person that you’ve all described.

Of course he was divine, but he was also human and raised by his mum who will have helped him to critically engage with the scriptures. She will have saturated him in scripture to use a phrase you used a while ago Roy. Jesus clearly treated some bits of scripture as more important than others. And where did he get that permission? Where did he get that knowledge from? Partly, at least, from his mum.

Simon

We should just say at this point that in every synagogue there would have been the Torah, probably some collection of psalms, but maybe not the 150 that we know. And we can be pretty sure that his local synagogue had a scroll of Isaiah because he’s recorded as reading it and it’s all over the New Testament.

One thing we’ve talked about already is this special Christian idea that human and divine are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps that’s one of the most important things about Christianity compared to many other religions. Jesus is very much a human being. I don’t have a problem with that, nor with the idea that there were scrolls out there that Jesus had never read, which still somehow ended up in our First Testament, our Old Testament. I don’t have a problem with that, that his human reading of the Bible, even from Jesus’s perspective, comes from where he is and what he’s learnt. Jesus is a human being living in community with the scriptures that they knew, and the understanding that they had.

Dave

And once again, just to pick up on something that you said at the beginning, where you mentioned that they probably didn’t have a book with all the scriptures bound together. I think sometimes we forget too, that for the early Christian community when they did their evangelism and everything else, the scriptures that they relied on for their proof texts and everything else was the Old Testament scriptures such as they had. They also remembered how Jesus used those scriptures to point to himself, so they did exactly the same thing. The letter to the Hebrews is a really good example of how this thinking developed.