Christians are a people of Scripture. Any doubt on this front should be effectively quelled by the Holy Week we recently celebrated. Palm Sunday gave us several extra chapters of Mark, in addition to our usual three to four readings (more if you chanted Psalms in procession around the neighborhood as we did). Stations of the Cross = even more Scripture. Tenebrae: Lamentations. Maundy Thursday had the standard number of readings, as did Good Friday. But if any of you did the Seven Last Words on Good Friday, there are even more. If you weren’t saturated in Isaiah’s suffering servant by the end of Holy Week, you did it wrong. Go listen to Handel’s Messiah again.
Then there is the Easter Vigil. Many churches do not use all of the readings, but no matter how many there are, it is a Scripture-heavy event. Traditionally, there were 12 readings, each followed by a Psalm. That’s 24 Scripture passages, largely Old Testament, before we even get to the resurrection.
Why did we read so much Scripture during Holy Week? Why so much Old Testament, when it’s the New Testament that tells us about Jesus?
It is popular for people to dismiss the Old Testament as irrelevant, difficult, or too violent to be associated with Jesus, our kind and loving Savior. People often fling around the phrase “God of the Old Testament and God of the New Testament” to separate a loving and forgiving Savior from God’s judgment and laws in the Old Testament.
This is not Jesus’ witness about himself, however. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,” he said. “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17). Holy Week’s readings show us how Christ fulfills them in real time.
And here we are now, post-Resurrection, walking to Emmaus with the disciples, trying to make sense of what has happened. The disciples are well-steeped in the Old Testament Scriptures. But there is not, to them, an obvious link between the Scriptures they hear regularly and the crucifixion (and rumored resurrection?) of the Messiah they have been following for several years.
Jesus joins them on the road and, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). To quote Rod Whitacre, my former New Testament professor, “Now that’s a biblical interpretation lecture I would like to have heard.”
Moses and the prophets, which encompasses the entirety of the Old Testament — the law, the prophets, and the history of Israel — all make sense of Jesus. Without the laws concerning the sacrifices and the building of the temple, without the understanding of what sin and uncleanness do to our relationship with God, we would have no understanding of the need for Jesus, nor what his sacrifice on the cross accomplished. Without the history of Israel, we would not understand God’s nature as both judge and redeemer. Without the prophets, we would not anticipate a Savior, much a self-sacrificing one; we would not have any idea of a God who was powerful over death. The Old Testament provides the framework and the knowledge of God’s nature necessary to understand Jesus as God incarnate, crucified, and resurrected.
Without the Old Testament witness to Christ, we simply have a man who healed sick people, fed hungry people, partied with tax collectors and prostitutes, taught people how to live, challenged the religious authorities, was killed for it, and inexplicably came back from the dead. Separating Jesus from the witness of the Scriptures removes any understanding of the import of his birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension. It erases the prophetic power of the healings in Mark that reversed the human condition of uncleanness. It removes the evidence of divinity in the feeding of the 5,000 and walking on water. It reduces the creation-shaking events of Christ’s sacrifice for all sin, and the inauguration of a new humanity, to the death and resurrection of a single man.
On the road to Emmaus, Jesus connects the dots for the disciples. He begins with the tragedy of the recent events and, beginning with the law and the prophets, opens their minds to understand the works of God. He shows them how he fulfills all the Scriptures and how the Scriptures reveal who he is.
The revelation of Christ in the Old Testament is the subject of a good portion of the New Testament. Many of the epistles (and early church writings and councils), written by various authors inspired by the Holy Spirit, focus on understanding and explaining Jesus in light of the Old Testament Scriptures. To our Western minds, a number of the connections that they make are obscure, dealing with figures and types and patterns rather than the historically or empirically demonstrable data that our modern scholarship has trained us to expect.
But if we sit with the Old Testament and steep ourselves in the symbols and the gritty reality of God revealed through images and shared story and actions, we can find ourselves changed. We find it easier to understand Jesus as revealed in the New Testament through action and symbol and image. We see Christ in Adam, Noah, Job, and Jeremiah. We know salvation in serpents, bread, blood, and boats.
As someone who deeply loves the Old Testament, with all its difficult and gnarly passages, inspiring prophecies, boring repetitions of sacrifices, and long genealogies, I urge you to push through the initial difficulty and boredom and let it saturate your mind and spirit. It will help you know the good news of Christ Jesus more fully.
The Gospels tell the story of Jesus, interpreting his life in light of the simple statement that Jesus fulfills the law and the prophets. If we are steeped in the Old Testament as our history of salvation, as the authors of the Gospels and the Epistles were, we begin to understand Jesus, the shocking revelation of his divinity, the import of his death, and the cosmos-altering results of his resurrection and ascension.
