Thursday 27 October 2016

Psalm: Psalm 37:12-29

Background

Sometimes Jesus could be very cryptic! To make some sense ofthis enigmatic passage we need to remember that there are threedistinct ways of reading a Gospel: what it might reveal of theoriginal 'Jesus story'; what it might have meant to its firstreaders; what we might make of it today. The first is fairlystraightforward: Jesus almost certainly would have engaged in thiskind of 'rabbinic' debate with the Pharisees and Sadducees, whowere two significant groups in 1st^-century Judaism.Pharisees were enthusiastic interpreters of the Jewish Scriptures,believing that their interpretation added to it, whereas Sadduceeswere more conservative, insisting that Scripture alone (and not itslater interpretation) was the only authority for living as a Jew.For Jesus, as Messiah, his interpretation of Scripture was right,and binding - both the Pharisees and the Sadducees were wrong,although Jesus did agree with the Pharisees about the resurrectionof the dead.

What about"the sign of Jonah"(v. 4)? Jesus was probably not, atthis point, making a connection between Jonah's famous three daysin the belly of the fish and his own resurrection - in any event,Jonah was buried "in the belly of the fish three days and threenights" (Jonah 1:17), but Jesus was only buried for twodays and nights. Rather Jesus was probably referring to God'sjudgement of Nineveh (Jonah1:1), threatening divine punishment for Jerusalem and for "anevil and adulterous generation" (v. 4). And for Matthew's readers,this had already happened when, in AD70, Jerusalem and the templewere destroyed by the Romans, and Matthew's Jewish Christian churchsaw itself as the 'new' Judaism, with Jesus as the Messiah, and inopposition both to the 'old' Judaism of the Pharisees andSadducees, and also to the gentile Christian church championed byPaul.

Where does this leave us as modern readers? Well, at the veryleast we should be careful when we try to decide 'what the Biblesays' - and be aware that this familiar piece of meteorologicalwisdom a very ancient!

To Ponder

• "We need to remember that there are three distinct ways ofreading a Gospel." Do you find this approach helpful? Why?

• As a modern reader, who do you identify with in the story?Why?

• How might you identify 'false teaching' in the churchtoday?