“Then he said to them, “These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.” Luke 24;44-45 (words which come a little after our gospel reading this evening)
Why was the resurrected Jesus so keen to explain to disciples that the events leading to the empty tomb and his reappearance on Easter morning were predicted, both by himself as at Caesarea Philippi when Simon Peter was so shocked, and perhaps more significantly by “Scripture”- the Law and the Prophets? Did those predictions help to explain the nature of what had happened? Did the fact that it had been prophesied in scripture, mitigate the agony of the last few days? I doubt it and I doubt too whether the enigmatic and unpalatable statements at Caesarea Philippi really registered at the time or made their coming to pass any more bearable. So why do Matthew and Luke give such prominence to this aspect of the Resurrection?
Why too, if it mattered, are we not told in any detail just how it was that the crucifixion and resurrection are foreseen in Scripture? It’s not obvious how they are, and we may note that despite Jesus’s explanations on the way to Emmaus, it was not those explanations but his breaking bread that revealed who he really was. I have not read the whole of the Old Testament, but the best the footnotes in my Bible can come up with is a reference in Hosea
“[The Lord] has stricken, and he will bind us up.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him.”
One can see the similarities, but this hardly amounts to a prophecy of the crucifixion and resurrection; crucially, it’s about what God will do to, and for, us, not what he does to his son or himself. In the later part of Isaiah there are a series of poems about a Suffering Servant who it’s possible to identify as Jesus and foreshadowing the Passion (and it’s very clear that the authors of the Passion narratives in our Gospels had those and similar writings in mind when giving their accounts of Jesus’ trials) But again it’s hard to see these connections as a full foretelling of the death and resurrection of Jesus – and it’s far from clear, anyway, who the “suffering servant” is.
The immediate need to explain the crucifixion and resurrection in scriptural terms must, I think, have been to explain to those Jews, which must have been most Jews, who were waiting for the appearance of the Messiah, that Jesus was that person, notwithstanding all conventional appearances to the contrary. That need would have been particularly acute for his own followers. With the benefit of hindsight (and the Gospel writers), we can see that very little in Jesus’ career thitherto suggested a military or political leader; it may have seemed otherwise to some of his followers. It’s often suggested that Judas might have been one such. It’s easy for us (like most Christians throughout the two millennia of our history) to forget that the epithet “Christ” which is the more usual name for Jesus, means Messiah or the Anointed. The idea of a messiah as saviour of his people means little to us but it was important to Ist Century Jews and Christian Jews in particular. The idea of, and longing for, a Messiah is of little other than historical interest and we are not imbued in the Law and the Prophets; at most, we may be reasonably familiar with the bits of the Old Testament which the Christian Church has over the years thought appropriate to read at its services.
I suggest that we do not give the Old Testament enough attention; I see the Gospel as fulfilling the historical and mythical promises made by God and his people. The myths of the creation and equally legendary stories of the several covenants between Noah, Abraham and by Moses are the grounding of our own religious ideas and we cannot make sense our own condition and the salvation achieved by Jesus’ death and return from the dead without understanding the fundamental concepts set out in the Old Testament. Those are, that we are creatures of a loving creator and the acceptance of the love and grace which that creator offers. This entails not so much obligations to that creator (and respect for our fellow creatures) as an awareness that if we do not respect God and creation, we will face catastrophe. Which is just what we do face right now.
It was to fulfil that covenant and demonstrate the full extent of that unconditional love and undeserved grace that God came into the world as a man and suffered all that a human being can suffer and yet emerged to show us what a new life and permanently meaningful life could be. It was that, I believe, explained with far more articulation and eloquence than I can muster, which Jesus related to his disciples when he said “These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” And that matters as much to us and every generation as it did to the disciples in the upper room. Amen