Unlocked

IC XC
✙
NI KA

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

O Antiphon for 20 December

THE MESSIAH IS THE KEY. The line comes from Isaiah 22:22, which – it needs ot be pointed out – is not connected with the Messiah by available rabbinic commentaries. Yet Christians see this as a prophecy fulfilled in Jesus. How is that? Look at St Paul, writing to the Ephesians claiming that Jesus has broken down the wall of division between the People of Israel and the Gentiles.

So, as I mentioned in the previous post in this series, we can view the “Jesus mission to the Gentiles” as an Evangelical Outreach of Jewish teachers to draw Gentiles into the community. This verse then can be read as declaring the irreversibility of that process. But that claim is a two-edged sword. The Messianic reading of this text – that the Messiah will open and no one can close – is not the claim that the Gentiles will replace the Jews, but will be brought into the existing fold. That the two shall be come one. The “wall of enmity” torn down. The people who dwell in the darkness of idolatry are not those who have the light of God’s teaching.

What, then, is the door opened (never shut) and closed (then never opened)? Which doors are these? These are the divisions between us – between Jews and Gentiles. And while in the Ancient world we were divided between those who had the Torah and the Prophets and those who did not have them, today we are divided by that text we both share.

What changes, though, is how we read things. Here’s a part from the Church’s document on “The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible”

For all the currents within Judaism during the period corresponding to the formation of the canon, the Law was at the centre. Indeed, in it were to be found the essential institutions revealed by God himself governing the religious, moral, juridical and political life of the Jewish nation after the Exile. The prophetic corpus contains divinely inspired words, transmitted by the prophets and accepted as authentic, but it contained no laws capable of providing an institutional base. From this point of view, the prophetic writings are of second rank. The “Writings” contain neither laws nor prophetic words and consequently occupy third place.

This hermeneutical perspective was not taken over by the Christian communities, with the exception, perhaps, of those in Judeo-Christian milieux linked to Pharisaic Judaism by their veneration of the Law. In the New Testament, the general tendency is to give more importance to the prophetic texts, understood as foretelling the mystery of Christ. The apostle Paul and the Letter to the Hebrews do not hesitate to enter into polemics against the Law. Besides, early Christianity shared apocalyptic currents with the Zealots and with the Essenes apocalyptic messianic expectation; from Hellenistic Judaism it adopted a more extended, sapientially oriented body of Scripture capable of fostering intercultural relations.

What distinguishes early Christianity from all these other currents is the conviction that the eschatological prophetic promises are no longer considered simply as an object of future hope, since their fulfilment had already begun in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. It is about him that the Jewish Scriptures speak, in their whole extension, and it is in light of him that they are to be fully comprehended.

¶11

It’s that last part that lines up with even very Protestant Scholars like Jon and Tim at the Bible Project. “The Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus” is their tagline. But that same document, avoiding triumphalism and replacement theology, makes this clear conclusion:

In the New Testament, God’s love overcomes the worst obstacles; even if they do not believe in his Son whom he sent as their Messiah Saviour, Israelites are still “loved” (Rm 11:29). Whoever wishes to be united to God, must also love them.

¶86 Emphasis added. (The entire document is worthy of contemplation.)

Whoever wishes to be united to God must also love the People of Israel. Love makes things complicated. But love must be real, genuine, and open. It must meet the people of Israel where they are – not where we would have them – and must also be honest about who we (Gentile followers of Jesus) are. We do offer something unexpected. To jump up to an earlier paragraph in that same document:

In reality, in the mystery of Christ crucified and risen, fulfilment is brought about in a manner unforeseen. It includes transcendence. Jesus is not confined to playing an already fixed role — that of Messiah — but he confers, on the notions of Messiah and salvation, a fullness which could not have been imagined in advance; he fills them with a new reality; one can even speak in this connection of a “new creation”. It would be wrong to consider the prophecies of the Old Testament as some kind of photographic anticipations of future events. All the texts, including those which later were read as messianic prophecies, already had an immediate import and meaning for their contemporaries before attaining a fuller meaning for future hearers. The messiahship of Jesus has a meaning that is new and original.

¶21

How do we come, then, to the unity that God desires between his Chosen People and the rest of us? It is, as St John Paul II put it, an “internal dialogue” we (both Christians and Jews) tend to see this as an “us vrs them” conversation. St John Paul insists that we’re both in this together in a very different relationship than either of us have with anyone else. “The encounter between the people of God of the Old Covenant, which has never been abrogated by God, and that of the New Covenant is also an internal dialogue in our Church, similar to that between the first and second part of its Bible.” (¶86) We will find the answer in the following verses, O Oriens (December 5), and O Rex (December 10).