Jesus, The Great Prophet (Luke 7:11-16) Series

One of the kind of delightful things about the Bible, if you are a bit of a nerd, is the way that it echoes. Newer parts of the Bible-- the later biblical authors-- will often find themselves describing their own situations in ways that deliberately echo older biblical language. Or, that language gets picked up, and changed in some way.

Let me give you one example. Let's read from Psalm 8 (RSV, with less concern for gender, is helpful here):

8 O LORD, our Lord,

how majestic is thy name in all the earth!

Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted

2 by the mouth of babes and infants,

thou hast founded a bulwark because of thy foes,

to still the enemy and the avenger.

3 When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,

the moon and the stars which thou hast established;

4 what is man that thou art mindful of him,

and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

5 Yet thou hast made him little less than God,

and dost crown him with glory and honor.

6 Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;

thou hast put all things under his feet,

7 all sheep and oxen,

and also the beasts of the field,

8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,

whatever passes along the paths of the sea.

9 O LORD, our Lord,

how majestic is thy name in all the earth!

So what is man? This incredibly blessed and exalted human being.

And what is God? The one to be praised, for the way he watches over people, and provides for them.

Now let's turn to a slightly less known passage, Job 7 (RSV for a reason):

17 What is man, that thou dost make so much of him,

and that thou dost set thy mind upon him,

18 dost visit him every morning,

and test him every moment?

19 How long wilt thou not look away from me,

nor let me alone till I swallow my spittle?

20 If I sin, what do I do to thee, thou watcher of men?

Why hast thou made me thy mark?

Why have I become a burden to thee?

21 Why dost thou not pardon my transgression

and take away my iniquity?

For now I shall lie in the earth;

thou wilt seek me, but I shall not be.”

So what is man?

Man is this intense object of scrutiny by God, who is constantly watching over him. But to what end? God is the one who watches over Job, waiting for Job to make a mistake, looking for an excuse to make Job miserable. This watching is a burden to God. Job is a burden to God. But Job knows he will get the last laugh, in a pyrrhic victory of sorts. One day, verse 21, Job will die, and God will have no one to keep seeking out like this.

It's a dark passage. Right? But notice that Job here is echoing Psalm 8, in a way that twists it, and bends it. And it's only if you see this echo, that you can really appreciate Job. We hear Job's words, and the way they echo Psalm 8, and we find ourselves shaking our heads. We know that when God "visits" his people (an accidental, kind of amusing verbal link), when he watches over them, a different outcome is expected.

A much bigger example that Matthew develops, is the connection between Jesus and Israel. Israel was God's first-born son (Exodus 4:22-23). And when Israel was in Egypt, they were under an evil king, who killed all the male babies. God saved his people from this evil king, by calling them out of Egypt (Hosea 11:1), into the wilderness to be tested, and then across the Jordan.

All of this is echoed in Matthew. In Matthew, Jesus is God's son. He was born under the reign of an evil king, who kills all the male babies. God saves his son from this evil king, by calling this little family into Egypt (using a verse from Hosea that describes Israel as being "out of Egypt"). When he's older, after being baptized in the Jordan, he goes into the wilderness to be tested. What is Matthew doing, in deliberately telling his story this way? These aren't coincidences, or random. And Matthew isn't copying/pasting the OT into his story, exactly. Matthew is echoing the basic storyline of the OT. And what he's signaling to his readers, is that Jesus is God's faithful son, in a way that Israel wasn't. And in some sense, I think, Jesus, as representative of Israel, is rebooting the story of God's kingdom, and God's people, on earth. Or, maybe, we could say that Jesus is the mulligan, a way that God gifts Israel a do-over.