The Hebrew Scriptures and the Incarnation

The Old Testament Scriptures and the Incarnation

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Nabeel Qureshi’s quote of Ed Komoszewski’s words captured my attention one day while looking over my Twitter feed. It has for some time seemed to me that a belief in the Bible without a belief in mystery, or a belief in mystery without a grounding in the historic revelation found in the Scriptures will both leave us with a less than full Christian perspective. To understand the Scriptures as rooted in history keeps our feet on the ground, living and loving our neighbors as ourselves in a real world. But to appreciate how the faith is shrouded in mystery helps us to realize that ultimately our understanding of God drives us not only to our feet in the walk of faith, but also to our knees in the worship and adoration of a God we can never fully comprehend. The Bible helps us to understand life but it simultaneously drives us to an appreciation that there is more abounding around us than we can ever understand or explain. This is the way we must do theology. We pull open a set of curtains on a vista we can never fully take in. Can we truly give testimony of the glory of God if we give a testimony that seems to answer all the questions? I suspect that the truest testimony concerning God would give us true information, usable information, vital truth and yet would lead us in our spirits to believe there is an infinite more to what we have thus far come to discover.

            In this blog I can only pull back the curtains on a matter I find extremely interesting shrouded as it is in mystery. Have we given thought to the relationship of the Hebrew Scriptures and the incarnation of Jesus Christ? Why, for instance did God wait so long of a time between his first promise of redemption when he told how the woman would give birth to a son who would crush the Serpent’s head and the coming of Christ? Why would God take centuries to fulfill this promise? What was it about this time span that God chose to use? In one sense thinking about such a matter is probably vain speculation. But there is an element about this speculation which I find extremely interesting. It is a matter at the heart of the incarnation, where the Divine Presence enters into the world in the form of human weakness. This Son of God is born the son of Mary. The creator of the universe is made the son of the woman, and this handmaiden of the Lord is made Theotokos – God-bearer. There is Mary to raise her son, and Joseph to train him. The Scriptures make clear that like every little infant, Jesus had to grow and learn. He wasn’t born with complete Divine knowledge of all matters. He was God entered into humanity in the weakness of humanity. We read of his earliest years as St. Luke has written, “When Joseph and Mary had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. “And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom and the grace of God was on him.” (Luke 2:39, 40 NIV)

            Jesus the Son of God had fully entered into human weakness so that he had to learn everything as any child would learn in human weakness. We begin to see a reason for the centuries of human experience, as God revealed to humanity vital truth about himself line upon line and precept upon precept, in the Law, in the Prophets, and in the Writings. Joseph and Mary raised him from his infancy in the Law. The Scriptures became to him the word of Truth, so that by the time he was tested in the wilderness he understood that his food was merely the bread he was to consume for his bodily need but the Word of God by which man must live for man cannot live by bread alone.

            I first began to appreciate how the Hebrew Scriptures revealed in time for more than a millennium between the first promise and the birth of our Lord, had been given not only to train us in our lives of faith, but to guide and train and be a tutor to the incarnate God entered into the weakness of humanity.

            I encountered this thought in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. He encouraged praying the Psalms. He pointed out that the Psalms were Israel’s prayer book and then he described how growing up Jesus learned as a Jewish boy to pray the Psalms. The Psalms taught him how to pray and then in his prayers the Psalms were being fulfilled. There is a fulfillment of the Scriptures that took place when the words written in the book for our Lord to perform were brought to life in his human flesh as he entered the sacred history of Israel and brought it to life and fulfillment as the Divine Presence in human weakness guided by the Sacred Word was fulfilled in the fruit of the incarnate life.

            The Psalmist David seems to have spoken words as if he anticipated that the words he uttered in his prayers within the Psalms were meant for a far greater purpose than merely to express his own words of struggle before the Lord. He was speaking words that were expressing living struggles he faced, but more than living struggles he faced. We are told that among the last words of Kind David, while thinking of his life and his coming to its final moments he reportedly said: “The inspired utterance of David son of Jesse, the utterance of the man exalted by the most High, the man anointed by the God of Jacob, the hero of Israel’s songs: “The Spirit of the LORD spoke through me; his word was on my tongue.” (II Samuel 23:1-2) As David’s experiences led to his prayers and his recording of prayers in the Psalms, he was not only voicing his own words, but the words of the Lord, of the Spirit were on his tongue. Hundreds of years later, Jesus the little Jewish boy was taught to pray the Psalms. In his human weakness he was learning how to pray. In the mystery of incarnation He was learning to speak his words that he had given before he was born in weakness, the son of a virgin. Through the mystery of the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures He was being guided to learn the wisdom and to pray the prayers given to him from before his birth.

            There is so much more to this mystery than we can ever imagine. We think of Jesus’ partaking in the festivals and the fasts of Israel. One can imagine Jesus partaking in the prayers of seeking forgiveness on Yom Kippur. He had not sinned, is the Bible’s amazing description of our Lord. Yet Israel had. He had learned of Adam and Eve’s sin, of Cain’s, of Noah’s drunkenness, Abraham’s lying, of Jacob’s deceit, of David’s adultery, of Solomon’s wanderings. Why had the Scriptures contained such dramatic descriptions of the holy one’s sins? Perhaps it was to train a Jewish child to pray for forgiveness of the generations of men and women before he had been born and after he would die. On Yom Kippur even if he could not dredge up a sin he had committed, he could pray for the generations of men and women who had lived and died, and those who would yet be born and die. Each and every Yom Kippur as he grew up he was being trained to confess, to repent, to seek absolution. One day during the Passover, his Yom Kippur and Passover would be melded together into a prayer, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”. He would be the mediator between man and God, the man Christ Jesus.

            In the ages between that first promise and the birth of Mary’s son, the Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish religion would be fully revealed that this son being born in the fullness of time would be guided in his human weakness as he was also in mystery the Divine Presence in whom the Scriptures would take root and be fulfilled.