Before we look directly into the New Testament, we take a short look into the section of Old Testament books the early Church fathers called “books worthy of being read in the Church” or “the readables.”
But the question that normally arises is the value of these books. Luther did not consider them as Scripture (although he never removed any texts from the Bible, Old or New Testament). And since Lutherans have stopped reading German Bibles, these books are no longer found in our Bibles (however, our liturgy and hymns still use Apocrypha texts as sources). So why bother?
Simply put, we bother because the Apocrypha is part of the Old Testament–and has always been so in our practice until about 100 years ago. We also bother because we find Jesus in the Old Testament Apocrypha just like we do in the rest of the Old Testament. Those books also give us an encounter with Christ.
Wisdom
Today, we will look briefly at one book, the book of Wisdom. Wisdom is a series of poems meditating on the glories of God’s Law as true wisdom. The book’s general theme is that faithfulness to God (and resisting the secular, Greek wisdom that leads away from God) is the path that leads to life.
In the second chapter of Wisdom, we find the struggle between opposing worldviews (not unlike today). In Wisdom, we find the “ungodly,” those whose worldview was defined by secular Greek philosophical thinking of the day, rejecting faithfulness and even persecuting the faithful.
In this meditation, the secular cynics conspire together to “eat, drink, and be merry,” embracing a life of callous self-indulgence, enriching themselves by exploiting the helpless.
This exploiting way of life did not stop at anything, even including killing the man of integrity who gets in their way.
[The ungodly] said to themselves, as they reasoned incorrectly: “Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no cure for the death of a man . . . When the spark is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and our breath will disperse like empty air. . . . Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are here. . . . Let us have our fill of costly wine and perfumes. . . . Let us oppress the righteous poor man; let us not spare the widow. . . . Let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless. Let us lie in ambush for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our deeds; he denounces us for our sins against the law and accuses us of sins against our upbringing. He claims to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. . . . the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his life is not like that of others. . . . He considers the end of the righteous as blessed and boasts that God is his Father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life. For if the righteous man is the son of God, he will help him, and deliver him from the hand of his foes. Let us test him with insult and torture, so we may find out how gentle he is and test his patient endurance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him.” So they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their malice blinded them. (Wisdom 2:1-21)
As we read these words, we cannot but hear them as a prophecy of our Lord’s crucifixion. It is as if the entire course of the Lord’s Passion were recorded in advance.
But here is where the irony gets thick! During Jesus’ crucifixion, St. Matthew records the Jewish leaders saying this: “He [Jesus] trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” (Mathew 27:43)
Wisdom 2:18: For if the righteous man is the son of God, he will help him, and deliver him from the hand of his foes.
Wisdom 2:18 is the only passage in the entire Old Testament that tells of an expectation that the Son of God would be rescued and delivered from those persecuting him. Knowing that, the Jewish leaders quoted that passage to mock Jesus, saying that if He were the true Son of God, God would deliver Him from the cross.
That Matthew quotes the Jewish leaders saying that also shows that Christians considered that passage from Wisdom as being a Messianic prophecy of Christ. However, unlike the Jewish leaders who were mocking Jesus, expecting rescue from the cross, Christians see the resurrection as fulfilling that text from Wisdom!
– Discussion.
The New Covenant
God had made an “eternal covenant” (2 Samuel 23:5) with David. God promised that He would raise up a son of David to reign on David’s throne forever (2 Samuel 7:8-16; 1 Chronicles 17:7-14), and that his kingdom would extend over all nations (Psalm 2:8; 72:8, 11). He had promised that this son of David would be His own son, the son of God (Psalm 2:7), that he would build a Temple to God’s name and be a priest forever, like Melchizedek, the priest who offered the sacrifice of bread and wine for Abraham’s victory over his enemies (Psalm 110: 1, 4).
But after the reign of David’s son, Solomon, everything had fallen apart. The kingdom split in two, and the people suffered corruption, invasion, and exile. Even when God brought the people back from exile, centuries continued to pass without any sign of the great Davidic king that God had promised.
When Jesus was born, there was no kingdom to speak of, no Davidic heir in the wings. Still, the devout awaited for God to fulfill His promises, awaiting the consolation of Israel–the coming of the new son of David and the resurrection of his fallen Kingdom (Luke 1:69; 2:25,38; Mark 11:10; Isaiah 40:1, 52:9, 61:2-3).
Jesus, the Fulfillment and the Covenant
Right at the beginning of the New Testament, St. Matthew sets us straight: “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Notice that Jesus is the son of David, not a son of David. From the get go, Matthew wants us to know that Jesus fulfills the Davidic and the Abrahamic covenants. That was Matthew’s way of saying the Jesus is the Fulfiller of all the Old Covenants God made with His people.
But the New Covenant involved more than that. Isaiah foresaw God’s special servant becoming a covenant.
- Isaiah 42:6: “I am the Lord; I have called you in righteousness; I will take you by the hand and keep you; I will give you as a covenant for the people.”
Jeremiah spoke of the law being written on people’s hearts.
- Jeremiah 31:33: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.”
Ezekiel predicted a new Spirit being poured out on God’s people.
- Ezekiel 36:26-27: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”
We now read from St. Luke’s Gospel to help understand how Jesus began His New Covenant.
Read Luke 22:7-8
Read Luke 22:14-20
We see Jesus moving from the Old Covenants God made with His people to the New Covenant. There are many connecting point connections that Jesus makes with the Old Covenants.
The most obvious is the connection to the Passover. Jesus instituted the New Covenant within the context of a Passover celebration. Jesus also referred to the sacrifices at Sinai when Moses confirmed the Old Covenant with the people of Israel. At the foot of Sinai, Moses sprinkled the blood of the lambs on God’s altar and on the people, saying, “Look! The blood of the covenant!” (Exodus 24: 8). Jesus said something similar, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” Once more, it’s the blood of the covenant, only this time it’s Jesus’ blood and the covenant is “new.”
What Jesus was doing on Mount Zion with the Twelve Apostles was even more significant than what Moses did at Mount Sinai with the Twelve Tribes. Jesus was fulfilling and remaking the covenant relationship with God!
Jesus said, “This cup is the New Covenant.” Through those words, He drew a straight line back to Jeremiah 31:31-33, the only place in the entire Old Testament that speaks of a “New Covenant.” “What Jeremiah predicted,” Jesus was saying, “I am doing right now.”
But Jesus continued. He said, “The New Covenant in my blood.” In other words, this New Covenant consists of His blood! What Jesus says here also applies to His body, which he gave to the Apostles a few verses earlier. The New Covenant consists of His blood and his body, which is His very self.
What Isaiah predicted was coming true–the servant of God is becoming the covenant itself (Isaiah 42:6). What Jesus begins, of course, needs to be completed at the cross. At the last Passover and the first Lord’s Supper, Jesus gives his body and blood sacramentally; at the cross, He will give His body and blood physically.
So, the Lord’s Supper is the center of the New Covenant of God with His people. That is why the Lord’s Supper should be the center of worship during the Church service but also the center of one’s life in Christ (This is not to minimize the Service of the Word). Every Sunday, we get life from the New Covenant in God and from there our new life in Christ is lived out in the world.
This is a far cry from seeing the Lord’s Supper as an optional “add on” to the worship service. When we see Jesus make the Lord’s Supper the “new covenant,” then we realize that the Lords’ Supper is the epicenter of our life with God. For that where Jesus enters us in a real way through His real presence.
The Temple Tie In and the Crucifixion
Read John 19:34
Jews in Jesus’ day would have been familiar with a stream of blood and water. During Passover, tens of thousands of lambs were sacrificed in the Temple, and the huge amounts of lambs’ blood drained out the side of the Temple Mount and down into the Kidron brook that ran along the valley below. So, Jews visiting Jerusalem at Passover would see a stream of blood and water flowing from the temple.
In John 2, Jesus had said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” So, Jesus is also the fulfillment of the Temple, for His body is the temple! And so it makes sense that God would reinforce this by having blood and water flow from His side just like it flowed from the Temple during Passover (also making Jesus the Passover Lamb!).
Yet, there’s more to it, though. The prophet Ezekiel had a famous vision of the new temple of the end times. In that vision, a miraculous river, the river of life, flowed out from it (Ezekiel 47:1-12). That river of life is nothing other than the Holy Spirit, which flows from the body of Christ. The blood and water from Jesus’ body on the cross was not the Holy Spirit itself but a sign of the living river of the Spirit that poured out for us by Jesus’ death.
This points to Jesus sending the Holy Spirit to all believers in the New Covenant. The blood and water from the side of Christ also stand for the sacraments: the blood in the Lord’s Supper and the water of baptism. It is through the sacraments that the Spirit comes to us. It is both the river of the Spirit and the river of the sacraments.
Ezekiel’s “new Spirit” is the Holy Spirit, given in the waters of baptism, which cleanse all “uncleanesses,” in other words, sins. This is also what Jeremiah said: “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34).
