For the Salvation of Souls:
A Preacher's Contribution

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Jesus was a Jew: an obvious point, but one that has too often been overlooked or under-emphasized in the Christian tradition, not only to the detriment of those who remain Jewish, but to our detriment as well.

That Jesus was fully and completely Jewish is obvious: 1) the names of his family hearken back to the glorious days of the Patriarchs and Prophets 2) he was a decedent of the great King David 3) he was called by those around him prophet / Messiah / Rabbi 4) he was crucified as King of the Jews.

That has some implications of course.

    He would have lived like a Jew, worshiping Yahweh, the God of Israel, whom he considered to be his Father in a special way; praying; and reading the scriptures in the synagogues of Galilee, as well as making occasional pilgrimages to the Temple.

    He also would have normally respected and lived in accordance with the basics of Jewish law, even though we're told that he engaged in arguments over the application of such laws in daily life: so he would certainly not have eaten pork, for instance / he would have respected and kept the Sabbath as a day to give glory to God and to relieve human burdens / and he certainly was circumcised.

So what was different about Jesus, compared to others Jewish prophets and religious leaders?

    It is clear in the gospels that he believed that in his own life Jewish religion had come to a crucial moment, a moment of fulfillment, when it was God's will for Israel to finally and truly become the light of all nations, opening itself up to the Gentiles, and becoming part of a renewed, worldwide salvific covenant between God and human beings mediated through his own life and death, and that thus the worship of God and Jewish religion itself would never be the same again, especially after his death and resurrection.

If the majority of the Jews of Jesus day and their leaders had believed this, there might not have even been a Christian religion at all, but only a renewed, world-wide Judaism recognizing its fulfillment in the Messiah in whom God was personally and uniquely present. But it didn't happen, and we have lived now for two millennia with two side-by-side religions, organically linked but each going its own way.

There were two extremes in early Christianity regarding Judaism:

    1) On the one hand, there were those early Jewish followers of Jesus who were so wedded to the old practices of Judaism that they could not fully see the newness of the situation that Jesus created: they accepted Jesus as Messiah and final prophet, but could not fully embrace the new role of Israel in the world—especially its need to reach out universally to all people. They rather clung to the old practices of dietary laws, circumcision, and ritual purity regulations whose whole point was to keep them separate from and protected from the Gentile world.

    2) On the other extreme, there were early Christians who believed that the newness in Jesus was so great, that the old Jewish religion was itself evil, the OT worthless, and even that some believed there were two Gods: the evil God of the OT (Yahweh) and the good God of the NT (The Father). They insisted that all ties to Jewish religion be broken by the followers of Christ.  BOTH groups were recognized as heretical by early Christianity.

Why all this? Well, it's the context to understand the saying in today's gospel: "Then every scribe who has been instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old." Matthew was probably a Rabbi, writing for an early Christian community made up of both Jew and Gentile converts. He repeats this saying of Jesus because he knew that neither extreme was workable for Christians: that rather although the new is genuinely new and must be embraced as such, it is still rooted in the old, and must be understood in light of it: the newness that is God's revelation in Jesus was to be fully embraced, but in the context of what God had accomplished before in Israel.

This dynamic between clinging to the old and embracing the new has certainly be replicated in the history of the Christian Church. On the one hand, we have Tradition: the various historical forms that our belief in Jesus, our worship of God, our practices of justice and charity, have taken over time. And they are privileged moments, all of which together form our past as Christians, and witness to God's presence in the Church.

On the other hand, we have the Present moment: the necessity that we have to express our faith in Christ in terms of our world of experience, and translate his Good News of salvation in a way that others may understand and respond to. Our present is rooted in the past, but goes beyond it, adding to the ongoing tradition of faith. We make new moments in the Christian tradition.

Throughout its history, the Church has felt a tension between its past and its present: 1) Nicea non-biblical concepts "of one being"; 2) Medieval assimilation of pagan philosophers; 3) Vatican II, one of the most profound and far-reaching moments in Church history, in its attempts to bring out of the past resources to understand and respond to a very new present, and in so doing to once again move the tradition forward.

As always, some during and after the Council—and perhaps increasingly in our own day—have clung stubbornly to the past, ignoring the newness of the present; some have become fixated on the present, ignoring the past. We will always have our "conservatives" and our "liberals", ever trying to polarize the tension between past and present.

I say all of this because I have seen so many of us since the Council clinging to one side or the other of this tension. And I feel sorry for those who do, because of the FEAR out of which they live their Christian lives.

    Some fear what may happen when we take a chance and translate the gospel message in terms that people of our own generation can understand: they fear that the Holy Spirit will abandon the Church, that the Church will lose its identity, its stability.

    Others fear the past: fear that its roots, its standards, and continuity may tie our hands in such a way that we are unable to preach the gospel in ever new ways so that people in ever new circumstances may believe.

I firmly believe that we need to be committed both to the Christian past and the Christian present, both to Jesus as he has been Lord of those who came before us, and Jesus as he is Lord of the present, and that we must leave the fear that characterizes both left and right far behind us.  One of the most vital reasons that the past is important to the Church is that it helps us to understand and respond to the needs of our present, which constantly presents us with new challenges for new gospel responses, that themselves become a part of the ongoing tradition of faith. The Holy Spirit is NOT going to abandon the Church, no matter what we do, so our hearts must not be troubled.

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