Abstract
In consumerist cultures the ‘new’ is almost always preferred to the ‘old’. New is better. A new car, a new computer, a new dish washer are faster, do more, look better, are more economical to run and more environmentally responsible (unless it’s a VW diesel). New sells. Yet sometimes the old still has something to offer. In the 1890s my grandfather, a civil engineer, building railways linking Australia’s coastal towns, bought a steel hunter pocket watch in Port Douglas, Queensland. He carried the watch through Salonika when he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War One and was still using it when I was born in the 1960s. It still works. What percentage of watches made today will still be working in a century? Yet the value of the watch is not only that it is still telling the time. The watch is a link, a wonderfully tangible object that connects the life stories of my family, past and to come. I keep the watch—own seems not quite the right word—and hope to hand it on to my own children.
The church’s lectionary links biblical passages together in a living conversation between the new and the old. The terms ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament’—sometimes ‘Old’ and ‘New Covenant’—pass before the eyes of Christian people so regularly that we have stopped seeing what they originally meant. The terms originate with Jeremiah’s articulation of the promise made by God of ‘a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah’ (Jeremiah 31:31). Both Luke (Lk 22:20) and Paul (1 Cor 11:25) tell us that Jesus spoke of a new covenant in his blood as he blessed the cup at the last supper. By the fourth century, the old covenant (in Latin, ‘testamentum’) was being used to denote the Hebrew Scriptures, the law and the Prophets, and the new covenant to denote the Christian scriptures. But even before this usage came about, the question of the relationship between the old and new scriptures was being warmly contested in the Church. The Gnostics believed the new superior to the old; the Old Testament, they maintained, had been replaced by the New and could now be discarded, as one discards an old pair of shoes. Some contemporary Christians think this way still.
But, when it comes to the Bible, a pattern emerges of a complex, subtle, and beautiful interweaving of old and new. Far from replacing, in the Bible the Old is woven into the new, giving it contrast and colour. Today’s readings are as good an example as can be found of the mutual dependence of old and new in the Church’s testimony to God. As Luke tells the story of Jesus raising the son of a widow of the town of Nain, he draws on the story from the first book of Kings of the prophet Elijah healing the son of a widow of Zarephath, whose illness was so severe ‘that there was no breath left in him’. The parallels between the two stories in structure and content are so striking that there can be no question that they are intentional. The extent of the modelling of Luke’s account of Jesus’ miracle in the story of Elijah and the widow’s son becomes even more striking when one reads the Old Testament story in the first-century Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint. Luke borrows upwards of a dozen phrases from the Septuagint exactly, including, for example, the ‘punch-line’: and Jesus ‘gave him to his mother’.
Why does Luke borrow from the Old Testament in this way to shape the way he writes of Jesus? One reason is that he wants us to understand that in spite of apparent similarities between John the Baptist and the prophet Elijah—similarities that Luke tells us later worried Herod (Luke 9:8) so much he was willing to behead him. What Luke wants us to take on board is the way that Jesus fulfills Elijah’s ministry. Indeed, as will become plain on the mount of the transfiguration in chapter 9 of Luke’s gospel, Elijah, the greatest prophet, and Moses, the giver of the law, are simply outshone by Jesus, who alone is God’s chosen Son.
Our Old Testament reading has, in fact, two miraculous stories about Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. There is a drought, and food is scarce. When, according to the normal rules of hospitality affecting travellers, Elijah asks the woman for bread, she points out she has only enough for one meal for her and her son before they must face starvation. Elijah replies that the jar of oil and the handful of meal will not be exhausted until rain comes new food supplies are available.
Some time later, the widow’s only son becomes ill. The widow blames the prophet for drawing God’s attention by his proximity to her sin, with the result that God has taken from her the only support she has. Elijah even echoes her interpretation of events, half imploring, half accusing God for killing the boy. A miracle this certainly is, but it’s one shot through by Elijah’s compassion—and God’s.
For Luke, aside from the relation of Jesus and Elijah, between the Old and the New, the story he tells works to build up the narrative tension of Jesus’ growing fame as his ministry develops. The story begins with Jesus followed by a crowd and ends with that same crowd acclaiming him a great prophet, a sign of God’s favour. Yet here, too, the story turns on Jesus’ compassion for a widow who has lost her only son, the only support and comfort she has remaining. It is a rare mention of Jesus’ emotional life in Luke, a clue to the motivation that leads him to intervene without being asked to do so by the woman herself. We are to make sense of Jesus in relation to the past history of God’s dealings with those in need. Jesus is, like Elijah, a ‘great prophet’. But this is still only an early stage in Luke’s unfolding drama of Jesus’ revelation of himself to the world. Prophet, yes, but not only a prophet: this Jesus not only preaches Good News, he is the Good News that he preaches.
Paul’s position between the Old and New has been one of the most keenly debated questions of biblical interpretation. When Martin Luther came to his ‘Reformation insight’ while reading Romans 1:17 some time between 1517 and 1519, he felt he had penetrated to the central point of Paul’s teaching—that only by faith in the righteousness achieved for sinful humanity by Jesus Christ are Jew and Gentile brought home to God. When he wrote of this moment, decades later, Luther said he felt, on making the ‘discovery’, that he had entered heaven. In this passage from his letter, Paul writes to defend himself against the charge that he was not himself a real apostle, but had everything he preached and taught second hand. But Paul insists that his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus was also a first-hand encounter with the Risen Lord. In making this defence Paul is also underscoring, so forcefully we can sense him scratching with his pen right through the parchment, that the revelation he has received is not only from Jesus Christ, it is a revelation of Jesus Christ. Or, put another way: ‘Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help’ (Psalm 146:3). When Luther came to lecture on these verses in Galatians, it was, unsurprisingly for someone whose own authority to teach had been called into question, this point that he drew out from Paul.
Paul too, in spite of the bewildering transformation of his Damascus road conversion, is still committed to handing on what he has received, a living faith in a living Lord, into which the old is interwoven.