Reading Scripture in the Messianic Community *

The Macbride Sermon, named for Dr. John Macbride, Principal of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, is preached in accordance with an anonymous bequest made to the University in 1848. The rubric for the Macbride Sermon lays down that it is to be preached on ‘the application of the prophecies in Holy Scripture respecting the Messiah to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’.

To the casual observer, this may sound like an impossibly benign mandate, as though one were to ask a group of American grandmothers to extol the virtues of motherhood and apple pie. After all, to speak of how the Christian Bible refers to its own central figure – isn’t this the sort of thing Christian preachers love to do?

In fact, however, more attentive observers will know that the task is complicated, much more so today than it might have been 166 years ago when the bequest was made. In mid-nineteenth century Oxford, in the context of millenarian debates about the role and future of the Jewish people and in light of the overseas missionary movement, ¹ to endow a perpetual demonstration of the evident fulfillment of Israel’s expectations for the Messiah in the person of Jesus of Nazareth might have made good sense. The original terms did not simply require the positive demonstration of the application of Messianic prophecies to Jesus, however, but also added a confrontational further clause: ‘with an especial view to confute the arguments of Jewish commentators and to promote the conversion to Christianity of the ancient People of God’. This form of wording was officially dropped from the statutes in 1997, though it had long been qualified by individuals who offered the sermon before then.

The reasons for this change are not far to seek: since the mid-nineteenth century, we have come to have a much richer awareness of the common ground Judaism and Christianity together share, and the horrific events of the twentieth century have exposed the catastrophic effects of anti-Semitism, to which some Christian theology had contributed in complex ways. And to suggest that interaction with another major faith should primarily have as its goal either conversion or confutation seems today short-sighted. ² If in certain ways it might be true to say that Jews and Christians are two peoples divided by a common Bible, it is undeniable that there still exists a ‘special relationship’ between us.

If we turn now to the positive task at hand, that of considering ‘the application of the prophecies of Holy Scripture respecting the Messiah to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’, we find ourselves confronted with the question of how Messianic prophecy might be understood today. We might distinguish three basic options – the first two, I will suggest, are insufficient, while the third offers a promising way forward.

First, there is a long tradition of employing prophetic texts as proof of the identity of Jesus as the Messiah. Although one finds this line of approach in more or less sophisticated variations, its basic logic is straightforward: the Israelite prophets, inspired by God, foretold the coming of a Messiah. These predictions were manifold in form, ranging from detailed information about his place of birth to indications that he would suffer to offer a vicarious atonement for his people. After years of waiting and watching, Israel finally had the opportunity to welcome their expected Messiah in the person of Jesus, but, mistaking his identity, largely rejected him. His life and death possess such a striking correspondence to the prophetic predictions, however, that the truth of his identity can only be willfully denied. Impartial readers of the Hebrew Bible today should, therefore, be able to discern the nature of these correlations and, reasoning from prediction to fulfillment, judge the claim of Jesus’s messiahship to be valid. So runs the argument.

This approach proceeds as though a reasonably attentive resident of Palestine in the early 30s of the Common Era might have been able to construct a long list of prophecies, marked as ‘to be fulfilled’. Then, following Jesus from a safe distance, clipboard of prophecies in hand, she might have been able to tick with satisfaction each box as Jesus – by coincidence or providence – happened to do what the prophets foretold.

It must be admitted that this is a strategy employed in at least some early Christian literature, though it is not as widespread in the earliest texts as some imagine. But especially from the mid-second century, the ‘proof from prophecy’ argument takes hold, with apologists like Justin Martyr amassing large numbers of fulfilled prophecies as indication of Jesus’s identity. ³ Eventually these come to be used in formulaic fashion in the adversus Judaeos literature, polemical tractates written ‘against the Jews’ which make ample use of prophecy in their attempt to dispossess or disinherit the Jews. ⁴ If a Google search on ‘messianic prophecy’ is any indication, this approach is alive and well on the internet today.

Since the Enlightenment, however, and the concomitant historicization of European thought, ⁵ biblical scholarship has instructed us about the original social setting and function of Israelite prophecy. When the Hebrew Bible is treated first on its own terms, rather than as the Christian Old Testament, the referent of prophecy can often be found in the prophet’s much more immediate context. So, to take but one well-known example in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus and his family return from their exile in Egypt after the death of Herod, in order to fulfill what was written in Hosea 11:1: “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” When one turns to Hosea, however, one finds there not statements about the plight of an expected Messiah, but poetic reflections on the exodus of Israel directed to assuring Israel of divine election in the midst of the political turmoil of the eighth century bce. In fact, it is not at all clear how this text could be straightforwardly considered to be predictive, and so in need of fulfillment. ⁶ Similar examples could be mustered.

This realization that much of Israelite prophecy was directed not toward the coming of Jesus but rather toward problems on the prophets’ more immediate horizons led some to reconsider the nature of the early Christian appeal to prophecy. So, secondly, we find an approach that, rather than emphasizing the proof from prophecy, suggests that early Christians may have simply invented or forged many of the correspondences. Rather than discovering history prophesied in advance, what we find in early Christianity is prophecy historicized, as the evangelists create events in the life of Jesus on the basis of scriptural texts in an ex post facto manner. ⁷

One need not fully subscribe to a hermeneutics of suspicion to see the strength of this position. A number of the putative fulfillment texts seem quite clearly to betray early Christian scribal activity, and this realization significantly lessens their appeal as ‘proof’, at least in any objective sense likely to convince anyone who was not already a believer. For some, such historicizing realizations have led to quite radical reassessments of the truth of Christian faith. One thinks of Thomas Hardy’s memorable poem, “The Respectable Burgher on ‘The Higher Criticism’,” in which the speaker, after considering the numerous unsettling discoveries of biblical criticism, finally resolves:

Since thus they hint, nor turn a hair,

All churchgoing will I forswear,

And sit on Sundays in my chair,

And read that moderate man Voltaire. ⁸

But is there a middle ground, or perhaps better, something beyond these two extremes of the evidentialist foundationalism of prophecy as proof on the one hand, and the searching skepticism of historicism on the other? To opt for the former seems to reduce the voice of the Old Testament to that of the New, while to choose the latter threatens to allow the Christian Bible to disintegrate into merely unrelated parts. Is there a way of thinking about messianic prophecy today that can do justice to this complexity? The task is too large to address appropriately in this space, but we can make a beginning.

Seeing the fulfillment of Scripture is a hermeneutical discipline of Christian faith, an appropriative reading strategy that follows from a self-involving stance toward Scripture that eventuates in action, rather than a mere neutral discovery that might be used to convince outsiders. This is a shared set of practices that find their place most naturally in the community of Christian belief. It is worth saying a bit more about this.

Reading a set of ancient texts as Scripture involves above all an act of appropriation. To read a text as Scripture means in some way to inhabit it, to find oneself addressed by it, to say, as Israel did when the law was read at Sinai: ‘we will hear and we will do it’. There is in other words inherent in the act of confessing a text to be Scripture a self-involving claim to relate oneself to that scripture in a posture of deference.

To describe the set of Israelite texts as ‘the Hebrew Bible’ is to signal one’s intention to read them neutrally, or at least in a publically acceptable way in the religiously plural world. But as the Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine has argued,

[T]erms like Hebrew Bible and Jewish Scriptures serve ultimately either to erase Judaism (since “Jews” are not “Hebrews” and the synagogue reads not the “Hebrew Bible” but the Tanakh…) or to deny Christians part of their own canon…The so-called “neutral” term is actually one of Protestant hegemony. ⁹

There must be a legitimate place for such attempted neutrality, but it is also true that to speak of the Hebrew Bible as it has been accepted by the Christian Church is to speak of it as the Old Testament.

For those of us who are Gentiles, to approach the Old Testament through the New Testament is precisely to find oneself included in the people of God to whom that word is addressed, by means of either the Pauline universalism that induces non-Jews to speak of ‘our fathers in the wilderness’, or alternatively by means the Matthean instruction of all nations, in which an attentiveness to the fullness of the law is communicated to non-ethnic Jews. ¹⁰ In this sense, both Old and New Testament open into each other and together comprise a witness to the God of Israel’s action in the world, culminating in the sending of his Messiah.

This is a stance we find reflected already in the New Testament itself, in which Scripture and Gospel are mutually enlightening. Already for Jesus, these dialectics are at work. It is not as though Jesus stepped into a void, empty of expectation, and only afterward did people begin to ask how what he did aligned with what they already knew. Rather, he appeared on the scene in a period of competing ideas about how God might redeem Israel, and he undertook to act intentionally to evoke some of those expectations. Rather than being a means of proving his identity, his enactment of prophecy suggests his vision of the kingdom of God and so invites his followers to join him in his task. So, for example, to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey seems to have been calculated to evoke Zechariah 9:9: ‘Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humbled and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey’. The evangelists – at least Matthew (21:1–11) and John (12:12–16) – recognise and exploit this fact, but the interpretation of the nature of his Messiahship as involving humility seems to predate them and to be rooted in the actions of the historical Jesus himself. Which is to say that Jesus intended to enact prophecy and so initiated the novel Messianic interpretation of his life and ministry that his followers later continued. The author of the fourth gospel even hints as much, writing, “His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him” (12:16).

But it is also the case that Jesus did and suffered things that were not associated with Messianic expectation. There is a theme in the Old Testament of the ‘righteous sufferer’ (e.g., Pss. 22, 37, 42, 43, 69, 140, etc.). But it is not, so far as our evidence allows us to discern, associated with specifically Messianic expectation before the Christian period. It seems that the story of Jesus – who was both identified as the Messiah by some of his early followers and seen to have suffered in righteousness – had a kind of deep gravity that attracted multiple aspects of the prophetic vision, and so enabled a Messianic reinterpretation of texts in a retrospective fashion from the standpoint of faith in him. Like a newly formed star that pulls the surrounding matter into its orbit, the life of Jesus became the focal point for the interpretation of prophecy.

This also means that asking after the application of Messianic prophecy is a community-forming activity. Just as we observe in the ancient group at Qumran the formation of a community with a common strategy of reading the Hebrew Bible as directed toward their present day, reflected in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, so also among the earliest Christians we find a group activity of seeking to understand the meaning of the surprising life of the one they confessed to be the Messiah, by searching the Scriptures for correspondences and new insights, precisely on the basis of their preexisting faith in and experience of Jesus as Messiah. Theirs was a faith seeking Messianic understanding. We are the heirs to those searching activities, and the task of understanding the Christian Bible as in some sense testifying to the God of Israel’s action in Jesus as Messiah is an ongoing one. The Christian Bible, consisting of both Old and New Testaments, therefore comes to the Christian church not as a set of answers or proofs, but as a set of possibilities and tasks.

Followers of a crucified Messiah have no business indulging in narratives of triumph, over Jews or anybody else. If the apparent progress of human society once made it palatable to believe that history itself was progressing teleologically toward some immanent eschaton, achievable perhaps by human cooperation, gradually from below, those hopes are now shattered. This year we mark the centenary of the First World War, only one of the most eloquent displays of the human need for redemption from beyond ourselves. Among the prophecies in the Old Testament that one might consider Messianic, at least in a broad sense, we find a substantial number that envisage not simply the coming of an individual, but the coming of a new age, an era of peace among nations, of human flourishing, and of the very presence of God. ¹¹ As Christians we confess to have seen a glimpse of that new age in the coming of Jesus, whom we call the Christ, but we share with our Jewish friends an expectation that the full coming of the Messianic age is yet to arrive, and so we live together in expectation of the restoration of all things.

And so we live, stretched between past and future. We are ever reaching backward, attempting to make sense of our shared confession that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel by listening attentively to the witness of Scripture. And we are ever reaching ahead, seeking in community to anticipate the full Messianic coming in some small measure, to enact the eschatological peace and justice and harmony in some minor way here and now, as a shadow of its coming, as an outpost of what will be, as a sacramentum futuri. And as we stand, arms stretched out, to the past and to the future, we live in the present, experiencing the crucifixion of the Messiah in the tension between the ages.

The application of Messianic prophecies, then, must be a set of embodied practices, neither the mere argumentative proof from prophecy that all too easily remains formalistic and unengaged, nor the detachment of critical judgment that keeps the question at arm’s length, but an existential commitment that causes us as a community to look forward as much as back, to think about the task of what is unfulfilled as much as what has been fulfilled. We face the future not with an optimism based on a hunch about human progress, but rather inspired by hope in the God who has promised to be with us in Christ. And in this period when so much is darkness, in the long vale of tears, we recall with Paul that ‘we are heirs of God and fellow heirs with the Messiah, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him’ (Rom. 8:17).