“And So Was Fulfilled What the Prophet Had Said”

This kind of language is common in the New Testament. Jesus did this or that in order that “scripture may be fulfilled”.

I used to hear these parts of the Bible in a way I never examined. I used to hear them as lists of proofs to convince doubters that Christianity is true and Jesus is God. I remember as a kid growing up in the church, going to Christian school, imagining that the reason people decided to be Christians, go to church, not beat their wives or neglect their children was because a prophet said something years before that came true in Jesus’ day.

It was like why we might or might not believe in Nostradamus or a fortune cookie or a horoscope.

Prophesies and fulfillments are all about proving to skeptics that a favorite person or group is right, or has insider information and the others are wrong. It’s about tribal warfare.

Reverse-Engineering Jesus

Later I would imagine that God kept a list. Better have Jesus go to Egypt, do this, do that, better route him this way because we’ve got an Old Testament check list to keep up with.

The trouble was that there was LOTS of stuff in the Old Testament and it hardly read like a straightforward formula which resulted in Jesus. Have you read Isaiah or Jeremiah from cover to cover?! You can see how Jesus’ followers SAW Jesus in Isaiah but if we were to simply try to construct Jesus from Isaiah things would be tough. We need to be a bit less judgmental towards the Pharisees and teachers of the law imagining that WE would have gotten it right even though they couldn’t see it. They knew their Bible pretty well.

Constructing Identity

Here’s another way to think about it.

There’s a lot of discussion about what is the self. Does the self exist? What is it? What is it made of? The answers aren’t as easy as you might assume and in fact these discussions have been around the world for quite a long time. It’s a rather interesting thing to talk about.

But let’s imagine what the gospel of Matthew is doing in chapter 2 with all of his Old Testament quoting. What is he trying to do? Why is he trying to connect Jesus to Israel and Jesus to the Old Testament?

Modern Americans love to imaging our “selves” or identities as things we freely construct. Why have my gender determined by my genes or my genitalia? Some Americans think there is deep within us a true “self” that we need to discover and then assert against imposing and impinging powers against us like social norms. We play with these ideas all the time.

Ancients of course far more often saw themselves as receiving identity and figuring out how to fulfill a received self. What am I to do as the son or daughter of this parent or ancestor?

Locating Jesus in the Story

One of the very interesting things to track in the gospels is the struggle for Jesus’ identity between nearly everyone else (crowds, disciples, political powers, religious powers, family etc.) and Jesus himself.

I think when we imagine Jesus we think that he’s self-defining. Is he to make wine because mommy says so? Is he a wonder worker because the crowds reward this behavior? Is he a political messiah because the disciples want to have power in his new coming administration?

We imagine Jesus, like a modern American, self-defines. Jesus either follows some imagined “inner compass” which most American movies vaguely appeal to “listen to your heart…” or some self-determining identity that springs out of his ambition or desire for greatness “be all that you can be”.

The gospel writers don’t find Jesus’ self that strange. Jesus’ self is given by God and his identity is created by the longer story of Israel as told by “the prophets” (and they’re usually broad and generous on that designation). Jesus is located in the longer, greater story, is acted upon by divine providence and then moves providence forward according to the larger story.

Self within a Story

This is far less simplistic than the older versions I assumed of “fulfilling”. It also informs how we might think about our own selves.

In many ways our own contemporary mythology is laughable even by much of what we say we know.

• I am deeply conditioned by my historical location and cultural context
• I am deeply conditioned by the genetic code I received from my biological parents
• My perceptions are deeply conditioned by my cultural context
• Even my sense of self is a necessarily interpretive framework by which I can successfully perceive, engage, and make changes in the world around me.

Imagining my self is somehow freely achieved closes my eyes to all of this.

At the same time a self is an actor in a story with choice and will and responsibility.

Seeing Jesus within a much broader story invites me to see myself in a broader story as well.

What Christians assert is that there is a divine story author who is writing a interactive story that continues to unfold. We are characters in it. We are free in many respect but not completely free in others. We living within the story, find our identity and selfhood within the story.

To see Jesus, a very central figure within the story in the context of other larger stories, like the story of Israel, should not be surprising to us. The larger story shapes Jesus’ identity for us and we find our place in the story though his place in the larger story.