If Jesus is the Lens of Scripture, What is the Old Testament?

  Torah scroll  |  Photo credit: Lawrie Cate

In my previous post, I began sketching a Christian program of reading the Bible, designed to avoid the pitfalls of modern evangelical readings of scripture. I wrote that a proper Christian reading of scripture will use Jesus as a lens; the meaning and importance of all scripture must be filtered through him.

As I pointed out, one practical way we can do this is to allow Jesus to resolve explicit contradictions in scripture, like the conflict between loving your neighbor as yourself and the commandment that priests shouldn't go near corpses, by observing Jesus' own commandments as having the highest priority.

What about the rest? There is, after all, a great deal of material in the Bible that doesn't directly conflict with anything else. What are we to do with it all, if Jesus is the lens we're reading with? 

In particular, what are we to do with the Old Testament (OT)? Of the Bible's sections, its relationship to Jesus is the most tenuous. Is it merely a road to Christ, with no inherent value of its own? Is it a collection of Jewish traditions, vaguely related to but not vital for our own faith? Is it a mostly outdated book of laws?* 

As I've noted before, one of the primary reasons I value the Old Testament is that it was Jesus' Bible. Whatever else we may say about it, the OT was crucial to Jesus. He had a unique, radical reading of it—one that combined the figures of the Anointed, the Son of Man, and the return of God as King, in a way no one else had done before—that made others question his sanity and morality, but Jesus' thought, ministry, and life do not exist apart from the OT.

A depiction of Jesus' sermon on the mount, one of many episodes
in the gospels where Jesus explicitly engages with the Old Testament | Source

One of the implications of this is that Christians should seek to read the Old Testament as Jesus read it. Where does he place the most emphasis? What material does he draw from? What does he avoid using or referencing altogether? And, perhaps most importantly, what is he doing with the words of the OT?

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I'll give some answers to those questions in the next post, but before I do, let me get out in front of one potential concern. I'm not saying here that any part of the Old Testament that Jesus doesn't quote, interpret, or reference is worthless, or even that it is worth less than any other part of the OT. This is because of what the OT is—and is not. The OT, like the Bible itself, is not a list of rules or a roadmap for living your life. If it were, we might be able to say "rules C through J don't count because Jesus didn't mention them" or "the southwest quadrant of the map should be ignored because Jesus never references it."

For Christians, the Old Testament is a story.
Better yet: it is the beginning of a story.
Better still: it's the beginning of the Story.

The outline of the Story is familiar, yet endlessly surprising:

• God makes all of Creation, and it is good. 
• Sin enters Creation through humans, which is bad. 
• God chooses a special group of humans, Israel, through whom Creation will be redeemed and restored. 
• Israel keeps messing up, though, so God promises to come and fix things Godself, though still through the medium of God's promised people, Israel. 
• Then, in the person of Jesus, God fulfills that promise, by living and teaching restoration, and by dying and thereby defeating sin.
• Afterwards, Jesus' followers spread this good news, and they begin building communities of people who will participate in and look forward to the completion of God's promised redemption and restoration of Creation.

The Old Testament is a vital part of that Story; its details are all valuable, and none of them is worth less because it is not directly referenced when Jesus, the climactic figure of the Story, shows up.

"Christ Stills the Storm," by Philip Medhurst | Source

What Jesus does is point out the key elements of the Story so far. For Christians, Jesus is the lens that brings the crucial elements of the Old Testament into focus, and without him, it becomes blurry and hard for us to read. Unless we keep in mind that the climax, the focus, the point of the book is Jesus, the Old Testament can start to look like a list of (often conflicting) rules, or a rather poorly drawn map.

Note that "Is it infallible?" and "Is it inerrant?" are not the kinds of questions that one can ask of a story, any more than one can ask of an algorithm, "Is it green?" or of a piece of music, "Is it pointy?" The category of the thing does not bear that kind of description, and it is fruitless to argue about it. A philosophical statement can be infallible; a record of facts can be inerrant; a story can only be true—or not.

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The great blessing of this view of the Old Testament is that it makes the OT indispensable. Every story has to begin somewhere, and without a beginning, a story makes no sense.** The Story begins with the OT, and without it, Jesus is completely incomprehensible. Without the OT, we know nothing of a Creator or a Christ, and the Cross can only confound us. Crucially, the OT is the reason we can answer the puzzle of why God chose to come when God did, and in the person of Jesus.

Because the Old Testament is the Equation to which Jesus is the Solution.
It is the Crescendo of which Jesus is the Loudest Note.
And it is the beginning of the grand Story in which Jesus is the turning point, after which nothing can ever be the same again. 

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*Thanks to my friend Bailey for prompting this line of thought.↩
**I'm aware that in medias res is a thing, but stories told starting in the middle still have a beginning, whether they actually are communicated that way or not.↩