May 8, 2011

Third Sunday of Easter

Back to the Old Testament

A few years ago, I was involved in a small research project looking at the use of the Bible in the contemporary Church.  One of the findings of this research left me feeling profoundly uneasy: it was the near death of Old Testament preaching.  The Revised Common Lectionary is meant to present us with a balanced diet of Scripture but the Lectionary cannot dictate which of the day’s text the preacher chooses to preach on, and it is clear that many Christians now go faithfully to worship week after week and rarely if ever hear a sermon on the Hebrew Bible.  The rule that the Old Testament readings should take precedence in Advent and Lent is more honored in the breach than the observance.  As one elderly lady put it after our conversation about the Old Testament: ‘thank-you – you have reminded me of things I had long since forgotten’.  As I walked away I decided that from then on I would preach on the Hebrew Bible more frequently, if only to keep the memory alive.

The Easter season thus presents something of a challenge.  For if the rule in Advent and Lent is always to go for the Old Testament, Eastertide presents no such option (apart from the gradual psalm, of course) -- there is no first reading from the Old Testament throughout this season, Acts takes precedence.

Except that Luke, the author of Acts as well as the Gospel that bears his name, always makes it so easy to come back to the Old Testament.  Or, to put it more accurately, the Old Testament is central to Luke’s understanding of the gospel.  Luke is quite direct: you simply cannot begin to understand Jesus until you have understood the Old Testament.  More precisely, you cannot begin to understand the significance of Easter until you have been immersed in the Bible.  Not the Christian Scriptures, but the Jewish Bible of Jesus and those first disciples.  As Jesus is heard to say in today’s Gospel reading, ‘How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe… then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures’.  That’s the Old Testament to you and me.

But that first reading from Acts also takes us right back to square one.  The reading itself is marvelous, as Luke presents Peter taking the men of Jerusalem (no mention of the women, alas) through an exposition of scripture from the prophet Joel through to a slightly massaged reading of Psalms 16 and 110.  And all of this is intended to make just one point: let Israel – and everyone else – know that God has made Jesus both Lord and Messiah.  In other words, if you want to understand the mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus, then read the Bible – the Hebrew Bible.

Then the compilers of the Common Lectionary go and spoil it.  Luke’s fascinating reading of scripture is thought to be too much for the average congregation, it would seem.  So let’s cut to the chase, and all that is left is the moralizing: repent and be baptized.  Such is the power of the Lectionary to distort and dilute our engagement with the Bible.

But Luke will have none of this.  There is no way to understand Jesus without first understanding the Old Testament.  It is when the hearers hear these words of scripture that it all starts to make sense.  God has now acted once and for all to bring the promise of redemption to completion.  The longed-for promise of restoration has been fulfilled, as testified by the outpouring of the Spirit that turns the world upside down and establishes a new order.  No longer is the Word of God addressed only to the men of Israel.  The death and resurrection of Jesus shatters the certainties of a tired parochial world.  Now the daughters as well as the sons will prophesy, and those at the bottom of the pile, both men and women are invited to share in God’s celebration.  This is not the end of an era; it is nothing less than a new Creation that begins when Jesus rises from the dead.  Easter is a call to everyone to share in this new reign of God.

Paul makes much the same point when he says that ‘Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3).  Which scriptures – certainly not the Gospels because they hadn’t been written when Paul wrote that letter to the Corinthians?  The only scriptures Paul knew were the Jewish scriptures.  So where does it say in the Old Testament that Christ died for our sins?  It doesn’t, of course, despite the best efforts of some fundamentalists to suggest that God made known to Moses and Elijah the entire Christian Bible (D. Daniel, The Bible in English, Yale, 2003, p. 765).  Those two disciples on the road to Emmaus had no such advantage, which is why they needed Jesus to make the connection.  The Old Testament is foundational for the Christian understanding of God; but it is the Old Testament as interpreted by Christ.  What Cleopas and that other disciple discovered is that the only way of making sense of our human experience is to re-read the Hebrew Bible in the light of Christ.  This is the key to reading Scripture: the so-called Christological filter, otherwise known as Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord.

That reading from Luke also makes an intriguing point.  If the Jewish Bible by itself is not enough to make sense of reality, neither is the encounter with Jesus taken in isolation.  These two disciples had been there in the front line, according to Luke.  They had known Jesus, but they speak of him in the past tense: ‘we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel’.  So it is only as the experience of the risen Christ and the reading of Scripture come together that both start to make sense.  The two interpret each other.  Growing numbers of scholars are developing increasingly complex hermeneutical theories to demonstrate what Luke presents so beautifully in this powerful story: understanding the Word of God is never simply a matter of reading a text.  Understanding comes from a conversation with the text, conducted in the presence of the Christ.  Encounter with the Word of God is a dynamic process, never a passive exercise of sitting back and being told what to believe.  It is the disciples’ questioning and debating as they meet this stranger that sets their hearts on fire.  The Word of God is not a dead text to be taken literally, but a living experience to be explored in the community of faith which is the body of Christ.

So those two disciples took their new understanding of the Old Testament back to the place it really belongs: worship.  They gather around a table for a meal.  And this unrecognized stranger takes bread and blesses it, and gives it to Cleopas and the other disciple.  And it is enough.  Now they understand the scriptures.  This Eucharistic action finally makes everything clear: Word and sacrament come together to disclose the presence of Christ.  The Lord is risen indeed, and if you want to understand what’s going on this Eastertide, then read the Old Testament – beginning with the prophet Joel.  Amen.