North of the Shire

…but to fulfill it.

“Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. ” Matthew 5:17 RSV

What does Jesus mean by that?

I received an e-mail regarding a recent post called Deal With the Devil in which I took issue with the idea that Pat Robertson had expressed regarding the earthquake in Haiti, that they had brought it upon themselves by making a deal with the devil in the past.

This was a part of that e-mail and it raised an interesting question regarding the Old and New Testaments;

I’d say that prosperity “gospel” is definitely a blight — with its corollary that disaster implies being cursed by God.
Yet I’d remind you that prosperity gospel (along with many other false teachings) is the result of importing OT truth into the NT. The OT definitely links blessing to faithfulness — which is why the remarks of Job’s “comforters” were so painful to him. In the NT the blessings are spiritual (Eph 1) whereas in the OT they are material.
Jesus was already ushering in NT thinking in the scripture you quote. - bnma

First of all, regarding the subject of the post and the e-mail, if someone deliberately and with full knowledge of what they are doing invites Satan in, or one of his representatives, they can expect consequences. In some sense, all suffering is a result of sin in a general way, often indirectly, but to assign a direct cause and effect relationship to specific disasters and specific sins is wrong, unless of course there is an obvious direct physical cause and effect like drunkenness and a serious accident. Clearly our actions have consequences, and there is a great error prevalent in our time of trying to duck responsibility for those consequences.

There is some gray area as well. For example, we know that Katrina was only a Cat-3 hurricane when made land-fall in New Orleans. It did not cause the damage to the city. It was rising water and the failure of the levees that caused the damage. So when we investigate the failure of the levees we find that corruption and graft and all manner of local politics was involved in the levee construction and as a consequence they were not up to spec according to the requirements given by the Army Corps of Engineers. In that case, we can actually follow a cause and effect chain that led to the death and destruction in New Orleans and there was definitely a human failure component. Katrina was the natural catalyst, but the effective cause was the poor levee construction. Could that then be called a result of sin? I think so.

We have to think in the same terms when we analyze the prevalent belief system in the time of Jesus. Let us remember that everything that the Jews of the day believed was not necessarily from their own Covenants with God, or from the Law of Moses. I don’t see that particular teaching that a man’s sin could cause his own son’s blindness necessarily coming from God’s revelation to the Jews anywhere along the way. Perhaps, in a stretch, we could point to the reference that I made to the “sins of the fathers” and I think perhaps that may have been what the Jewish foundation was for that common belief of the day. But we have to step back and think about this a little more.

This is the same God that we worship, who sent his only son to become one of us and become the final blood sacrifice for sin. When we remember what Father Barron was saying about hell and the God of the Old Testament, it strikes us that if this is the same God, he must be speaking to the people of Israel and to the rest of the world of the day in language they could understand. Or at least his revelation was written down by people who thought and spoke in the language and thinking of the day. Thus, when we see that God brings evil upon the people of Israel we might very well think, according to our perspective today, that this could not be the same God. But if we pause and take stock of the entire picture we see something striking.

Here’s one great example; Joshua at Jericho. Do you remember how Joshua wanted to take a great number of men and lay siege to the city in the normal manner? What did God tell him? Take 300 men. Why? Well one of the reasons we have always been told, and it is true, was because God wanted explicit obedience from Joshua, just as Noah was given explicit instructions as to how to build the Ark, long before the rain started to fall.

But there is also another reason. It would seem to me that God wanted it to be abundantly clear, ridiculously clear, that it was God giving the victory at Jericho. It was God that was going to bring down the walls. He wanted the Israelites and everyone else to see that it was a miracle at the hand of God. What does that mean? He wanted the Israelites, Joshua included, to be reminded that their lives, their future, including the many generations promised to Abraham, were only possible at the direct hand of God. He was not just their friend. He was actively taking a part, miracle after miracle, in their survival and their prosperity. Their covenant was, as covenants are, a giving of themselves to God and his promising himself to them. This is what the covenant means. He was reminding them that they were nothing without him.

Indeed, as a side-note, and this is my own theological speculation here, I believe that strictly biologically the Fall of man was not a real change in us. I believe rather, that without the Tree of Life, which was really the life of God himself, man would die eventually. That was what we saw when God put the angels at the gates of Eden to make sure Adam did not re-enter and eat of the Tree of Life anymore.

You see, all down through the Old Testament we see that God actual fed his people through miracles, physically and otherwise. The analogy of the mother and the young comes to mind, and Jesus himself said that he would love to gather his people under his wings like a hen gathers her chicks. This is where that entire biological function given to the female of most mammal species comes from, the feeding of the young from her own body. God created it that way I don’t think by accident. He has always wanted, ever since Adam and Eve departed, to re-establish that relationship whereby we are dependent upon him, the way a child is dependent on its mother.

In any event I believe that the Covenants with Israel, their walking away from them by times, which God called infidelity, was directly connected to their misfortunes, their slavery and misery in a very specific way. It was always the withdrawal by God of that direct sustenance that caused their problems. He didn’t create their evil circumstances, he allowed it to happen by withdrawing.

While they were in a state of grace, we might say, believing in God, trusting him and worshiping him, he performed miracle after miracle to get them through and cause them to prosper. And yet we don’t draw from that a prosperity gospel except in a very analogous sense. Why? Because Jesus showed us and them the real meaning of the law and the prophets.

His kingdom, to which we belong when baptized, exists now, but is not complete until the new heaven and new earth. The Jews had an underdeveloped sense of the afterlife, and truly, before Christ, their hope was in the coming Messiah. Because they did not understand their own law and prophets they rejected Christ’s kingdom, but as we know, it was all there in the Old Testament. That was what the Boreans were searching out in the Scriptures, by the way.

This is what is meant by Abraham’s faith being reckoned to him as righteousness. (Romans 4:3) It was always about faith for those of the Covenant, about throwing themselves into the arms of God totally, of giving up themselves to God unequivocally. Just as Jesus said, deny yourself and follow me. Give up everything to God and follow in faith and the all these things will be added unto you.

The really funny thing about all of this is that when we truly give ourselves up to God we find that the prosperity is not so interesting after all. The problem with the prosperity gospel is that we are still seeking the prosperity, from God we say, but we should be seeking the God of prosperity rather than the prosperity of God.

So really, I think there has been a distorted picture of the Old Covenant in the sense that it has been portrayed as somehow of the physical realm almost exclusively and the New Covenant is of the spiritual. Rather, the Apostles and the early Church understood Christ to mean what he said, that is, that he had come to fulfill the Law not abolish it. That is really what is at issue isn’t it? What did he mean by that?

Because the Jews, at least in the time of Christ, had missed the meaning of the Law and the Prophets does not mean that the Old Covenant was necessarily just as they thought it to be. And this idea that someone had a physical deformity because of the sin of his father was not exactly what the Old Covenant was given to teach. I heard someone say with respect to St. Paul, that he was not so much a convert to Christianity as he was given the fullness of his Jewish understanding of the promise of God. The one he was persecuting was actually the Messiah he had been waiting for.

In any event, if we understand that in the context of the Jewish understanding of body and soul, there was not such a great gulf between the physical and the spiritual, we can see then that the Hellenized version of body and soul creates a distortion in the way that we view the Old Covenant in light of the New. It is tempting to slide toward the Manichean view without realizing it, particularly if we see the Jews of Jesus time as fully and faithfully representing the Old Covenant. But I would submit that there were fewer times in Israel’s history in Scripture when they were fully acting in Covenant relationship with God than when they were not, which was most of the time. How long did it take them after they had escaped the slavery of Egypt to start complaining?

The point is, the great patriarchs of the Old Testament had faith in God, not just the name of God as their leader. We would agree that sacrifices of animals (no remission without the shedding of blood) was at the same time a foreshadowing of the sacrifice of Christ, the Lamb of God. That sacrifice was physical, intensely humanly physical, and he did actually humanly die.

But we must not forget this part. When he rose from the dead he visited his disciples. We remember that he entered the upper room with the doors locked. What did they think? They thought they were seeing a ghost. But he made it a point to show them that he was not a ghost. He was physically real. He told them to touch him and see and then he asked if they had something to eat.

On the shores of the lake he made breakfast for Peter and the others when he came to them to call them back to their mission. What is clear about this is that Christ was deliberately showing them that he was physical, not just to prove he had risen although that was obviously the main issue revelation to them at that time, but also to illustrate to them the reality that the future is also a physical future, not just a ghostly spiritual one. Right now, as I write, Jesus has a physical body.

Thus the New Covenant is yes, a spiritualization, but a spiritualization of the physical, not to reject it as physical per se, but to raise it up out of its corrupt state to a whole new level, as St. Paul says of the Resurrection that we all believe in; we will be raised incorruptible. (1Corinthians 15:52)

And how is this accomplished? It is a “divinizing” of our humanity, the direct action of God himself, having become one of us for that specific reason. It is not a rejection of the physical at all. In the meantime before that final day when all will be fulfilled, we believe that just as Christ used the physical to channel his power while on earth, it is not only his express statement but it is also fitting, and a fulfillment of the Old Covenant, that he would bind himself to us through the power of his Holy Spirit, and feed us of himself spiritually through the physical elements of bread and wine, just as Adam and Eve were fed by the Tree of Life in the Garden. Indeed, this sacramental understanding has been with us from the Apostles in baptism, in anointing with oil, in the laying on of hands and most of all in the Holy Eucharist. All of these physical elements, through which grace is given to act ex opere operato, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

And through all of this is faith, just as we notice in the Old Testament. The faith in God that gives up the self and hands it over, like Abraham. The sacraments are real in and of themselves by the power of the Holy Spirit, but our reception of God’s grace through them is dependent on that faith.