Let’s talk a little hermeneutics. I’ve disagreed with McKnight’s interpretation of several of these passages because I disagree with his hermeneutics. He sees Jesus as legislating new laws because Jesus disagrees with Moses on various points. I disagree.
After all, the Law of Moses is really God’s law. Jesus cannot disagree with God. And Jesus himself told us how to read the rest of the SOTM:
(Mat 5:19-20 ESV) 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
What could be crazier than Jesus saying these words and then repealing the Law of Moses to replace it with a better law? Rather, I’m convinced that Jesus is telling us how we should have been reading the Torah all along. He showing us how to do hermeneutics better than the scribes and the Pharisees.
Now, part of his teaching is interpretation of the Law in light of the Kingdom and himself as the Messiah who will die for sinners. Obviously, his listeners at the time did not know that Jesus was going to be crucified for them, but we can see here and there places where Jesus seems to look ahead and ask us to make the same kinds of sacrifices that he’s going to make. That’s doubtlessly part of what’s going on.
But Jesus meant to be understood when he spoke. Surely. And so he is reasoning more from what had already been revealed than from what would soon be revealed. And through the Law and the Prophets (a Hebrew idiom for the OT that emphasizes those two parts of the OT), God had already explained many of the principles that drive Jesus’s lessons. Jesus is telling us to be very, very serious about the Prophets. The Kingdom is dawning, the promises are beginning to be fulfilled, and it’s time to live as the prophets instructed.
Consider —
(Mal 3:1, 5 ESV) “Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. …
5 “Then I will draw near to you for judgment. I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired worker in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, against those who thrust aside the sojourner, and do not fear me, says the LORD of hosts.”
V. 1 speaks of John the Baptist and Jesus, and then v. 5 speaks of the standard of holiness God will expect. For those familiar with Torah, it’s easy to see that Malachi is selecting certain Mosaic commands to emphasize. We hear many of these same commands echoed in the SOTM.
Where Jesus seems to differ with the rabbis is that he reads these commands through the lens of Leviticus —
(Lev 19:17-18 ESV) “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. 18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.”
If we would understand “Do not commit adultery” in terms of “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” then we would be concerned not only with having sex only with our spouses but also with doing no harm to our spouses. Loving your wife means more than divorcing her before you have sex with another woman.
Just so, the Mosaic command to take no vengeance and to hold no grudge anticipates Jesus’s “turn the other cheek.” If you can’t respond to an insult with vengeance or a grudge, what other choice is there?
The command to “reason frankly with your neighbor” anticipates —
(Mat 5:23-24 ESV) So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.
In other words, we would be less quick to say that Jesus is rewriting God’s laws if we knew God’s laws better.
What confuses us is that there are obviously elements of the Law of Moses that did not survive the crucifixion, and Jesus did not give us a paint-by-numbers guide to decide what survives and what doesn’t. We shouldn’t feel bad about it — even the apostles struggled to sort this out. That’s why they needed the Jerusalem council in Acts 15 to work through the alleged need for Gentile converts to be circumcised. After all, Jesus said nothing about circumcision.
Well, Jesus is about to give us the key —
(Mat 7:12 ESV) 12 “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
Again, Jesus is not enacting a new law. Rather, he’s telling us how we should have been reading the OT all along. The Golden Rule “is” the Law and the Prophets. The verb is eimi, which BDAG translates as either “is” or —
to show how someth. is to be understood is a representation of, is the equivalent of; eimi, here, too, serves as copula [linking verb]; we usually translate mean
In other words, Jesus says that the Golden Rule means the same thing as the Law and the Prophets. And so Jesus’s several “but I say unto you” teachings are examples of the Golden Rule applied to various topics.
Why is it wrong lust after a woman not your wife in your heart? Well, how would your wife feel about that? How would the other woman feel? There’s no way that both are good with your thinking that way.
Why is it wrong to swear? How does the person you’re speaking to feel when he realizes that you only tell the truth when you make an oath that’s binding under the complex rules laid out by the rabbis?
Why must I love my enemies? Well, what would your enemy want? What would you want from your enemies?
And so, if we believe Jesus when he says that the Golden Rule restates the Law and the Prophets as correctly interpreted, we have no trouble believing that Jesus was not making new laws in his “but I say unto you” teachings. Moreover, we now have a filter that explains why circumcision did not survive the resurrection, whereas “Do not commit adultery” did. Circumcision is not about love for our neighbors. It’s not included within the Golden Rule.
Now, there’s a more sophisticated answer found in Deu 30:6, which anticipates the receipt of the Holy Spirit, as promised by the Prophets, becoming the circumcision of the Kingdom. (We’ve covered this many times before.)
(Deu 30:6 ESV) And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.
Just so, we know that Jesus, by his atoning sacrifice, replaces the Temple and the rituals performed there with himself. And the church, as temple of the Spirit and the body and bride of Christ, also takes over many of the former functions of the Temple (the church, not the assembly, does this).
Kosher and like laws were designed to separate the Jews and the Gentiles, marking the Jews as God’s distinctive people. They’ve been replaced by baptism and faith in Jesus. Indeed, faith in Jesus “justifies,” meaning it declares God’s verdict of innocence. It marks God’s people just as surely as phylacteries did under the Law of Moses.
This approach to hermeneutics is anticipated by the several passages in which Jesus heals on the Sabbath and his repeated quotation of Hosea 6:6 —
For I desire steadfast love [chesed] and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
This has important implications for many other questions that the Churches of Christ (and others) face, but this is not the place to work this out to the end.
For now, suffice it to say that this approach always applies. Always. And this changes our hermeneutics dramatically. Rather than a hermeneutic taken from civil law and Calvinism, we should find the key to knowing the scriptures in knowing their Author. This is true respect for inspiration.
What I especially appreciate about this post is that it highlights the need for consistency in applying our hermeneutics. Often, it seems to me, I read people who really “adjust” their reasoning to accommodate a conclusion they’ve reached separate from their stated hermeneutic.
We SHOULD be able to find a hermeneutic we can apply consistently, without exception, to understanding the Text and God’s will for us.
I appreciate your emphasis on the inherent relational nature of sin. I recently looked up the occurrences of the English word “wrong” in the NT in connection with a discussion on another blog. All of the eleven occurrences I found were in a context, explicitly or implicitly, of being wronged or wronging another or an unjust act towards another. The phrase “right and wrong” no longer communicates well in our society because it is too broad and abstract. But almost everyone can grasp what it means to be wronged or to wrong someone. People today also relate readily to justice versus injustice and can often quickly identify actions as just or unjust.
Good post. Reminds me a lot of NT Wright’s “Simply Jesus.” My only comment would be in reference to:
“But Jesus meant to be understood when he spoke.”
Not always according to Wright. He often left some of his teaching vague for the masses and only clarified to the Apostles after pulling them aside.
I really like McKnight, but I concur…it makes no sense for Jesus, the word, to disagree with Moses. Jesus effectively. authored the Law of Moses. Strange that McKnight would come to that conclusion.
Indeed, OT customs are no longer essential nor markers of the people of God. They are now merely expressions of thanksgiving that one may opt to use in worshiping God. Foreshadows that now beautifully illustrate the climax-Jesus!
The Law was a tutor to bring us to Christ, so why would Jesus disagree with or go against the Law, but He did fufill and complete it. He taught the Pharisees to respect God by not adding to the Law, and follow the Law as written.We are under the Perfect Law of Liberty, which is lived in faith.
In regards to hermeunutics…it is not as important as we probably make it out to be. Put it this way, the people converted in Acts 2 may have heard of Jesus, but they might not have heard all of His stories, even if His fame had reached everywhere. They also had not been taught by the Apostles in regards to the errors that hadn’t been committed yet in the Letters. They basically went by what they were told by the the Apostels in faith. So hermeneutics was not a defining factor in thier turning to God and being in Christ. Now, we as we dig into words that were written to people long dead many thousands of years ago, do need to apply good hermeneutics to make sense of the scriptures, but mostly to not mess it up. We can read, we can follow and that is good and we can mess it up, but when we read and don’t do anything then we have a much bigger problem.