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PROMISE—THE FOUR GOSPELS
  

Just this spring, my wife and I decided to throw the older of my two
sons a high school graduation party. While we enjoy having company, we
are generally not big party-givers. But since most people I know only
graduate high school once in life, this time we made an exception. We had a
lot to do. First, we had to set up the rented tables and chairs; oh, and let’s
not forget the 20’ x 20’ outdoor canvas tent (a setup that, when done
singlehandedly in your own front yard in broad daylight for all the
neighbors to observe, can be a rather humbling experience). Second, comes
the food, which—bless her heart—was mostly my wife’s department. We
had twelve different kinds of appetizers for fifty people: some hot, some
cold, all made one at a time. Now I know why caterers sometimes charge
more for appetizers than for a meal. That mystery: officially solved.
Thankfully, the party turned out to be a huge success (if I say so
myself), but with all the work and rigmarole involved in such an event, you
might wonder: Would we do it again? Yes, we would. In fact, we will when
my second son graduates in two years. Now he might want a different sort
of party, but a party he will have, not least because the precedent has now
officially been established. This is the way it works in our family: Whatever
we did the first time around for son #1 pretty much became a benchmark
for how we did it for son #2. While we as parents have never said that we
would treat each child exactly the same, we strive to be as consistent as
possible. Besides, when you raise two boys seventeen months apart and you
have inconsistencies in how you deal with them, there is a decent chance
that one of them will let you know soon enough!
This is also more or less the way God’s redemptive purposes across
history work. In ancient Jewish thought, whatever Yahweh had been willing
to do for his son Israel in the past set a benchmark for what Yahweh
intended to do again in the future. This means that if God provided an
Exodus in the past under Moses (which he did), he would also—given
analogous circumstances—provide an Exodus in the future under another
redeemer figure. This line of thinking was pretty well established both
before the advent of Christianity and afterward, too. According to one
rabbinic testimony, a certain Rabbi Berekiah declared: “As the first
redeemer was, so shall the latter redeemer be. What is stated of the first
redeemer? ‘And Moses took his wife and his sons, and set them upon an
ass’ [Exodus 4:20]. Similarly will it be with the latter Redeemer, as it is
stated, ‘Lowly and riding upon a donkey’ [Zechariah 9:9]” (Ecclesiastes
Rabbah 1.28). Berekiah went on to adduce numerous other parallels that
will be drawn between the first Moses (the Moses of history) and the
“second Moses” (the messianic Moses of hope). For the rabbis, as it was for
the first Moses, so it would be for the still-to-be-revealed Moses to come; as
it was for the first Exodus, so it will be for the last Exodus. God will
implement two Exoduses (at least) for the very reason that we as parents are
determined to throw as many graduation parties as we have graduating
children: consistency. Or to use a more biblical sounding term, we might
say: faithfulness.
This is also exactly how the Apostle Paul thought when he wrote to the
Corinthians about their excesses at the Lord’s Supper. Speaking of the
Exodus generation, Paul says that those ancestors had all drunk from the
rock in the desert and that that rock was Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4). For the
Corinthian believers, Paul argues, Christ again plays the role of that rock,
this time through the bread of the Lord’s Supper. Did the disciples see
differences between “then” and “now”? Obviously. But the principle is the
same: What the God of Israel did for his people in the first Exodus reveals
much about how God intends to operate in any subsequent God-initiated
Exodus. As it turns out for Paul, Jesus Christ is something like a new
Moses, the instigator of a new Exodus.
One Step Forward…
In my book, The Exodus Revealed, I explored the historical backdrop
to the most magnificent rescue operation in world history. In this case,
Yahweh was the rescuer, Israel was the rescued, and Moses was the
rescuing agent through whom this monumental event took place.
Ultimately, Moses had not only freed the twelve tribes from bondage but
had also brought them together as a new people, a “royal priesthood” (1
Peter 2:9). God did this not simply because he pitied the Israelites but also
because he wanted to extend mercy to the whole world. According to the
terms of the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 12, 15, 17), all the nations would
be blessed through the seed of Abraham. This blessing promised to reverse
the curse of the Fall, a fall that had brought creation to the brink of utter
collapse (Genesis 3—11). Thus, the Exodus story was not only a story of
Israel’s deliverance but also a story about the redemption of creation.
Most of us know the story of where and how everything went wrong.
It began one day in Eden when the primordial couple took the serpent’s
advice and disobeyed Yahweh’s clear command regarding the Tree of
Knowledge. From there, things fell apart pretty quickly. Quickly, yes, but at
the same time the shockwaves of Adam and Eve’s sin would also continue
to reverberate down through successive generations. Setting things right
would take years, indeed centuries and millennia. The process initiated by
the covenant with Abraham was a kind of down payment demonstrating
God’s deep interest in restoring creation. This restoration was not to happen
through the flip of a switch. No, instead salvation would have to come
through the descendants of Abraham, the promised “seed.”
At the end of Genesis, we find the “seed” down in Egypt. They were
more or less driven there on account of a famine in Canaan and God’s
providential working through Joseph’s life. Who knows what would have
become of Abraham’s descendants apart from Joseph. But because God had
more or less planted Joseph in Egypt, not just in Egypt but in the very court
of Pharaoh, his brothers and their kin were able to join him in a land that
was well provided for. And so all Israel was saved—at least for the time
being.
Eventually, the Pharaoh who knew and respected Joseph died, and a
new Pharaoh came into power, one who “knew not Joseph.” In time, Israel
clearly—painfully so—was no longer welcome in Egypt. More exactly, if
the Israelites were welcome at all, it was only as conscripted, unpaid
laborers. Pharaoh had a number of building projects scheduled, and, seeing
all the potential of an enslaved army of able-bodied men, God’s chosen
people were reduced to a life of oppressive service. Part of Pharaoh’s hope
in doing so was that the population of the twelve tribes would decrease.
Much to Pharaoh’s dismay, however, the population did the opposite, and so
he did what was in his power to do: He instructed his foremen to work them
all the harder.
From the Israelite vantage point, at least two things were wrong with
this picture. First, the people of God had been consigned by a pagan ruler to
grueling bondage, a gross injustice in its own right. Second, on a more
fundamental level, the promise made to Abraham—that Abraham’s
descendants would be released from slavery and returned to the land of
Canaan—was being frustrated. So they cried out to Yahweh both for their
own sakes and for the sake of the Promise. In response, Yahweh raised up
Moses who, after a series of confrontations with Pharaoh, finally secured
Israel’s release. After passing through the Red Sea, the tribes entered into
the Sinai desert and received the law. This event we call the Exodus.
In retrospect, the day that Israel passed through the waters was not just
a day of escape; it was also a kind of graduation day. Having stepped into
the Red Sea as little more than a frightened mob, the twelve tribes emerged
as a fully redeemed people, now duly educated in the power of God. More
than that, they had also received a new constitution at Mount Sinai. If Israel
had been formed as a people under Abraham, under Moses they had
become a bona fide nation. Yet this was not be any ordinary nation. Rather,
this was to be Yahweh’s special people. In the companion volume to this
book, The Exodus Revealed, I stated that the Exodus experience (including
events up to the ratification of the covenant in Exodus 24) had conferred
onto Israel three distinctives: a statement of purpose (worshipping Yahweh),
a status of priesthood (serving God), and a set of principles (obeying God).
For at least the next forty years, all this would be carried out and celebrated
within the confines of a rather large outdoor tent called the tabernacle. So
far as God’s redemptive purposes were concerned, the Exodus was a big
step forward.

… Two Steps Back

 With that background in place, let’s fast-forward to the early first
century A.D., the years leading up to the ministry of Jesus. How was Israel
doing now? Not so well. True, the people of God had a permanent temple in
place instead of a tabernacle, but the only problem—a rather major problem
—was the people who ran it. Countless first- and second-century Jewish
witnesses agree that all the wrong people were at the helm of the temple.
According to these sources, the higher levels of the priesthood in Jesus’
time were populated with greedy, self-aggrandizing, and sexually immoral
men. Rather than serving God, they were in fact serving themselves and
desecrating the temple along the way. It was all a big mess, a big mess that
was preventing Israel from accomplishing its God-given purpose of
worship.
One of the aggravating factors here was the occupying Romans. As
anyone who knows even a little Roman history can tell you, the Romans got
to where they did through a lot of smart planning and even more brute
force. Keeping a watchful eye on its subject territories within the
boundaries of its far-flung empire, the Roman imperium had learned to
maintain stability and peace through the same combination of brains and
brawn. Yet flexing a few muscles was still preferable to actually having to
use them. The Romans knew that the most effective way to remain in
control of their huge empire was to find some local leaders who could keep
shop for them; that is, they could help keep things running smoothly on the
ground with minimal disruption. For the Romans this meant, on the one
hand, extending special privileges to your “shopkeepers” and, on the other
hand, holding them to a high standard of loyalty.
In Jerusalem, the shopkeepers representing Rome’s interests in Judea
were the members of the high priestly family. Perhaps this was not
necessarily so bad in theory, but in practice the members of the high priestly
family went well beyond representing Rome: They embraced her. All the
while, they would put on a brave and pious face so that people would keep
coming to the temple and, more importantly, keep paying their tithes and
annual temple tax. Counting all the inhabitants in Palestine and all the Jews
in the Diaspora (Judaism as it existed throughout the wider world), clearly
the tax and tithe system generated considerable revenue for the temple. And
who else would keep the books but the high priests? Some people think that
when Jesus overturned tables in the temple a week before his crucifixion, he
was only upset because the leaders had let the cattle into the sacred area.
That may have some truth, but the issue of the high priests’ fiscal abuse was
an even more significant prompt for Jesus’ holy rant in front of the
moneychangers’ tables. Like many others in his day, Jesus had become
convinced that the temple elite had been helping themselves to the temple
cash reserves. If he was right (and I think he was), then this in itself would
have profaned the temple by Jewish standards. And a profaned temple is a
non-functioning temple.
So much for the priesthood, but what about the rest of Judaism, the
ordinary folks of the rank and file? Here, according to the gospel accounts,
the record is decidedly mixed. For example, if we think about Luke’s
extended introduction to his gospel, pious Jews like Zechariah and
Elizabeth quickly come to mind, those who were “upright in God’s sight”
(Luke 1:6). Just a bit later we also find Simeon who was “righteous and
devout” (Luke 2:25). But evidently, at least by the gospel writers’
accounting, such individuals were more the exception than the rule. In this
connection, I think, for example, of several scenes in the Gospel of Mark. In
Mark 1, we find John the Baptizer offering a baptism of repentance and the
whole Judean countryside, including Jerusalem, turning out in exuberant
response (Mark 1:5). So far, so good. Yet notice, first, that in the midst of
John’s baptizing activity, only Jesus receives any divine approval (Mark
1:10–11); second, that Jesus later in the gospel warns against receiving the
word with joy only to backslide later (Mark 4:16–17); and third, that by
gospel’s end, the very same masses who had once been baptized by John
are now crying out for Jesus’ crucifixion (Mark 15:13–14). While the
people at first responded positively to the Baptizer’s preaching, we see later
that their repentance turns out to be shallow indeed. (Likewise, in John
6:66, we learn that many who were initially interested in Jesus eventually
bailed on him, thus betraying the superficiality of their faith.) According to
the New Testament writers, the people of God were not in much better
spiritual shape than their official leadership. If a priest’s first job is to image
God to Israel, and if Israel’s first job as the people of God was to image
God to the watching world, both departments had failed miserably.
Now let’s think back to the Exodus and the very constitution of Israel
when the people were called to be a “holy nation” and a “royal priesthood”
(1 Peter 2:9). At least from the perspective of many in Jesus’ time, Israel
was fulfilling neither role. The mixed response Jesus would receive from
his preaching would make this clear soon enough. All this gives us further
insight into just why Jesus walked into the temple and started flipping over
the moneychangers’ tables. This dramatic action was not just a protest
against keeping livestock in sacred space, nor was it simply about fiscal
malfeasance; above all, Jesus’ temple action was an enacted prediction of
the destruction of the temple. Here Jesus was simply operating by a biblical
logic. When Yahweh’s temple chronically fails to fulfill its purpose, that
temple must be shut down. Of course this is exactly what happened in
dramatic fashion in A.D. 70, some four decades after Jesus’ death: The
Roman army destroyed the temple and much of Jerusalem with it.
According to the gospel writers, Israel’s failure to stay true to its
purpose and priestly function overlaps with its covenantal disobedience.
Disobedience was the root issue. Despite the stellar examples of faith and
righteousness in the pages of the gospels, we meet far more individuals who
struggle to obey. Take for example, all those who are violating the Ten
Commandments (Decalogue). Here we might think of Herod who took his
brother’s wife (violating the seventh commandment, “Do not commit
adultery”); the rich young ruler who preferred his wealth over Jesus
(violating the tenth commandment, “Do not covet”); and Jesus’ enemies
who used the Sabbath not to give life but to think about how they might kill
Jesus (violating the fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath”). The
list goes on. This Decalogue that Yahweh had given to Israel on the
mountain was supposed to have defined the people of God. But now all too
few were paying these commandments any mind. Something was foul in
the spiritual state of Israel.

Back to the Drawing Board

When you consider Israel’s lot in Jesus’ day, it was almost as if the
Exodus had never happened. Think about it. When we first meet Israel in
the opening chapters of Exodus, they are a people who are politically
oppressed by a pagan ruler, socially disempowered through his oppressive
policies, economically suppressed by being unable to acquire assets, and
spiritually distressed by succumbing to the temptation of serving Egypt’s
idols. When we first meet Israel in bondage, they hardly seem to be a
people at all. To be sure, they had stories from the past, but they had little
sense of destiny or purpose, little sense that their lives mattered beyond
their ability to make bricks. They were utterly boxed in and going nowhere
fast, with no way out.
This is more or less the same situation in the early first century. Israel
was supposed to control its own political destiny as the people of God;
instead, they were under Roman rule and occupation. While they were
supposed to be established in the land and holding their heads high, now
they were living in a situation where if a Roman soldier came by and said,
“Walk with me one mile,” they would have to do so by law. Now, instead of
enjoying the land’s bounty (as promised in the covenantal blessings), the
people of God had to sit by and think about some aristocrats in far-away
Italy making off with the best fruits of the land. While Israel was supposed
to be worshipping the one true God, those at the top had given this up for
political pragmatism; others had given up altogether. In theory, Israel’s
motto was “No god but the God of Israel,” but in practice Caesar functioned
as their god. Rome was squarely in control, and for all intents and purposes,
Israel was metaphorically right where it first started: back in Egypt. What
the Jews of Jesus’ day needed was nothing short of a fresh start. What they
needed was a new Moses and a new Exodus. Indeed, not just a new Moses
and a new Exodus, but a final Moses and a final Exodus.
To be sure, first-century Judaism was well aware that while Moses had
inaugurated the first Exodus, Israel had experienced other Exoduses since,
modeled on the initial one. The most significant of these was the resolution
of the problem of the exile, which had befallen both the northern (722 B.C.)
and southern (587 B.C.) tribes. According to the prophets, the tribes were in
exile because they had broken the covenant. Reneging on their calling as
the people of God, they had forsaken their purpose, priesthood, and
principles. In due course, Yahweh in his mercy would superintend
international affairs and human hearts so as to ensure the return from exile
in 537 B.C. But when I say “return from exile,” this does not mean
everybody came back—far from it. We estimate that only about 10 percent
of the Jews returned to the land, and among these returnees the northern
tribes were not even represented. Still, it was at least the start of a fresh
start.
Something was deeply ambiguous about this new start, however. To
begin with, the pillar cloud of glory that had departed the temple (Ezekiel
11:22–23) had shown no signs of ever having returned to the newly built
second temple. Second, Israel’s relocation back in the land did not seem to
coincide with the deep obedience that prophets like Ezekiel and Isaiah had
anticipated in their beatific visions of the future. The anti-climactic reality
became evident enough, for within a hundred years of the geographical
return from exile, the prophet Malachi would be calling out God’s people
for failing to offer proper worship. And once Malachi signed off, the
prophetic voice went off-air altogether. Over the course of the centuries that
followed, the silence became more and more deafening. Numerous texts
from the so-called Intertestamental Period (the four centuries leading up to
the time of Christ) imply that despite Israel’s geographical relocation back
in the land, the definitive return from exile had still not occurred (Tobit
13:3–6; 2 Maccabees 1:27–29; 2 Baruch 1:4–5). Such texts seem to concur
that God had stopped speaking because Israel had stopped listening. Maybe
in a sense they had never really spiritually recovered from the first exile:
other ancient Jewish texts like Jubilees and 1 Enoch would suggest as
much.
Israel’s continuing state of exile was only confirmed by the fact that its
quest for political autonomy—its quest for establishing a theocracy that
recognized no king but Yahweh—had hit a dead end. After having secured
independence from the oppressive Seleucid Empire in 142 B.C., the Jews
realized how short-lived such freedom could be. By the time the Roman
general Pompeii had trudged into the Holy of Holies (the innermost room of
the temple, where God was said to dwell) in 63 B.C., Israel found itself
once again under Gentile control. This was bad enough in itself. What made
things worse was the way in which such political circumstances created all
kinds of temptations for the reigning high priest, who with a little
compromise here and there, could make himself a useful but handsomely
rewarded puppet under the iron fist of Rome. More often than not, such
temptations proved too powerful.
Given such a situation, one might think that the first-century Jews
might have been content with Yahweh raising up a provisional Moses-like
figure who could at least deliver Israel for a time—that is, until the next
national lapse into covenantal disobedience. But actually the historical
record shows that the Jews were expecting Yahweh’s next move to be
definitive. Jewish apocalyptic texts in particular express the conviction that
when God initiates the next Moses-style redemption, this would not only be
a more glorious redemption but a once-for-all redemption. Consider, for
example, a text like Daniel 2, which envisages a large divinely sent rock
crushing the iron feet of a large statue (patently representing the Roman
Empire) and then taking over the earth. Read widely in the first century,
Daniel provided clues enough that the next Exodus would usher in,
climactically and decisively, the long-awaited Age to Come. If the first
Exodus from Egypt was like a beautiful explosion from a firework in the
night sky, then the final Exodus from Rome would be the finale. By the
time we come into the first century (the century in which Christianity was
born), eschatological expectations are high—at fever pitch.

Not Your Father’s (or Mother’s) Moses

Reflecting on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the
early Christians were persuaded that this Jesus, their Jesus, was the answer
to Israel’s basic plight. In other words, he was the long-awaited new Moses
and the inaugurator of a new Exodus: the final Moses bringing the final
Exodus. But how could this be? The common knowledge was that Jesus had
been crucified as a common criminal. And the last time any Torah-
observant Jew checked, anyone who had been “hung on a tree” was subject
to God’s curse (Deuteronomy 21:22–23). True, the Christians agreed, Jesus
had been subject to a curse; he had in fact become a curse (Galatians 3:13).
But this was all part of God’s plan of making him the solution to Israel’s
most pressing problems: escaping their own version of Egypt and fulfilling
the terms of Yahweh’s call given at Sinai.
First-century Jewish expectations for a future Exodus put the claims of
Jesus into sharper focus. People today often assume that the most
provocative talking point of the early Christian proclamation was the
assertion of Christ’s divinity, but the post-Easter church actually had a
much headier claim at the time: namely, that through this crucified and risen
Jesus, the redemptive-historical finale—the last and great Exodus—was
already underway in the present time. (The issue of Jesus’ divinity and what
this meant so far as his co-eternality with the Father was concerned—these
issues were to preoccupy the church at a later date.) In the world of first-
century Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora, it all had to do with one
question: Was Jesus the new Moses or not?
If Jesus really was the messianic inaugurator of a new Exodus, then
this had at least two implications. First, it meant that those who joined
themselves with this Risen Jesus and his community could expect to reap
all the corresponding benefits. Among these benefits, two stand out: (1)
release from the bondage of the pagan sphere, and (2) incorporation into a
new holy nation and a new kingdom of priests. Thus, when first-century
Christians preached Jesus as the new and improved Moses, they were in
effect saying, “If you wish to flee the realm of your present doomed reality
and claim your place in this new movement—a movement defined by
purpose, priesthood, and principles—then come join us by putting your
trust in Jesus.” In the first century, you couldn’t confess Jesus as Lord and
then go on your merry way. To believe in Jesus was to enter into a
community with a very specific agenda, functionality, and norms, all
centered around Christ.
Second, if the Christians were right, if they did indeed constitute the
final Exodus movement, then anyone who chose not to follow this Jesus
would be left out in the cold. As far as the Jesus-believers were concerned,
this potentially had very dire consequences, a point perhaps obvious enough
on analogy with the first Exodus. We recall that on the night of the first
Passover, the vast majority of Israel was obedient in slaying the kid goat or
lamb, spreading the blood on the doorframe, and then joining in the massive
road trip the next morning. At the same time, we have to imagine that not
every last family chose to participate. I suspect some resisted Moses’ stern
warning, saying to themselves in so many words, “Pshaw, they say that if
we kill one of our own flock that the blood will protect us. Well, I would
prefer to keep my animal alive for now and am prepared to take the risk.”
Whoever had decided to take this course or something like it would have
had to pay a dear price by midnight when the Destroying Angel passed
through the land. The next day, they would be left behind burying their
firstborn sons, while the rest of Israel was heading east and south to the Red
Sea. Those who resisted the Exodus would have continued on with life as
usual, grinding out their existence as slaves in a world system dominated by
Pharaoh and his idolatrous gods.
The early Christians also boldly proclaimed that non-joiners were
putting themselves at risk of being left behind. Just as Moses had essentially
presented each Israelite household with a choice to participate or not
participate in the imminent Exodus, so too were the apostles now presenting
Jews and Gentiles of their own generation a similar choice. This was the
message. Would the listening world believe it?
Obstacles to Faith
As we know, a good many people from among both Jews and Gentiles
did believe the message. They heard the preaching of the gospel, responded
in faith, were baptized, and joined the local congregation of the primitive
messianic movement. Having believed, they began to see themselves as co-
participants in this dynamic new work God was doing and began ordering
their lives accordingly. At the same time, of course, many also did not
believe. Exactly why they rejected the message, we will never know; nor
could we know, at least not on a case-by-case basis. Indeed, in our own
setting when individuals, whom we know well, decide against the gospel,
they often do so for reasons that are not entirely clear to us or to anyone,
including themselves. Still, good evangelists and good theologians alike
will have some sense as to what aspects of the gospel draw people in and
what aspects tend to be, at least on first pass, off-putting.
Historians have also speculated on the points of attraction and points
of resistance in the early Christian message. I would like to consider the
latter. In a world informed by first-century Judaism, rejecting the apostolic
invitation to re-enact the new Passover under Jesus could have happened for
at least three potential reasons. The first has to do with the character of
God. That the Israelites had long ago participated in a miraculous Exodus
was a proposition just about every first-century Jew was prepared to affirm.
As to whether God was interested in doing it again in the present time, well,
that was not necessarily a given.
Let’s put this in terms of that graduation party. Imagine for a moment
you are a high school student with an older sibling now in college. You
remember well how your parents had thrown a party for child #1 and now
you are nearing your own final semester at high school. You wonder if your
parents will have a repeat performance of the graduation passage. The
answer largely depends on the parents’ track record. Would having such a
rite of passage necessarily be an important principle for them? If so, why
and how? If not, why not? One cannot even begin to reflect on such a
question apart from thinking back to earlier precedents set by the parents,
earlier precedents and prior narratives.
Now on applying this analogy to first-century Jewish belief, we
suppose that any given Jew could fall within the ranks of one of two groups.
On the one hand, we have those who counted on a new Exodus as a certain
corollary of the faithfulness of God given the present situation. If God
performed one Exodus in deference to the promise he had made to
Abraham, he was virtually bound to perform another one in the face of the
present crisis. On the other hand, others might not have been so sure that
Yahweh was interested in cashing out the promise of a new Exodus after all.
Indeed, if you happened to be among the few Jews who saw themselves as
well-situated in the current status quo (and thought Israel’s status quo
wasn’t all that bad anyway), then this option of non-belief might actually be
more attractive—on any unconscious level—than the option of belief. Let’s
put it this way: If we had been able to poll a thousand of Jesus’
contemporaries and asked, “Do you expect an imminent new Exodus?” we
would have had to allow that at least some of these might have said, “No”
or “I hope not.” To some extent, as a first-century Jew, your readiness to
believe the Christian message depended on your readiness to grant that
things had hit an Egypt-like low in the first place.
But Jews of the day might not believe in Jesus as the inaugurator of a
new Exodus for a second reason: sizing up the one cast to play Moses. In
the biblical text, Moses is an enigmatic, paradoxical figure. On one level,
we can see him as the bold, warrior-like priest who leads his “army” to
victory. We can also see him, however, as an extraordinarily humble, self-
sacrificing man who was painfully aware of his shortcomings but all the
more aware of God’s saving power. Both characterizations are true. So how
you read Moses, whether primarily as warrior-priest or primarily as humble
intercessor, might influence how you imagine the new Moses. Irked to no
end by the Romans, many in Jesus’ day were hoping for a messiah-figure
who would have scored off the charts on any psychometric test assessing
for George Patton–style leadership and military potential. If someone by the
name of Jesus came along claiming to be the messiah (or was claimed to be
the messiah) who did not fit this profile—well for these Jews, you can
forget about it!
Closely related to this is a third potential obstacle: the nature of the
Exodus as the Christians described it. The Jews knew the Exodus story like
the back of their hand: Pharaoh oppresses Israel, Yahweh raises up Moses
and Aaron, Moses and Aaron confront Pharaoh, Pharaoh resists, Moses and
Aaron unleash the Ten Plagues, Pharaoh finally lets Israel go, Pharaoh
changes his mind and chases Israel only to lose a good portion of his army
in the Red Sea. You don’t need to be a professional literary critic to realize
that the Exodus story is a narrative involving a good deal of in-your-face
confrontation between Yahweh’s righteous prophet and the evil pagan ruler
who resisted him. It is a confrontation that climaxes in a final showdown
between Pharaoh and Moses at the Red Sea, even if God is who actually
fights the battle on Moses’ behalf.
So then, if Jesus was supposed to be the new warrior Moses, how
exactly was that supposed to work? After all, Jesus had appeared on the
scene, challenged the authorities, which was a good start, but then—here’s
where the “Oh, I see” comes in—eventually paid the price for all his
contrariety by hanging on a Roman cross. On the face of it, Jesus’
achievement (if you can even use that term) hardly screamed Exodus. We
have to be honest: Any Jew even mildly interested in entertaining the
claims of the early Christians must have had at least some trouble squaring
what they knew about Moses’ approach and what they were being told
about Jesus. The match was less than obvious.
On any account, these three potential problems taken together could
have easily constituted a central apologetics issue for early Christianity. We
could do worse than summarize the problems as three specific questions.
How could the early Christian believers be so sure (1) that God would be
faithful to deliver Israel in the present time, (2) that the alleged new Moses
really matched the profile of the first Moses, and (3) that the alleged new
Exodus really matched the characteristics of the first Exodus? These would
have been reasonable questions for the Jew considering joining the Jesus-
sect and even for a believer who was still working things through.

The Gospels as Sequels to the Exodus Story

Interestingly, the early Christians showed no signs of attempting to
tackle the first of these three questions head on. Instead, they assumed
God’s interest in delivering Israel anew and seem to have ascribed the same
assumption to its broader audience. (In this connection, it’s worth pointing
out that these first Christian believers were equally disinterested in proving
God’s existence.) Judging by the New Testament documents, we see that
the Christians took for granted God’s readiness to launch a second Exodus.
It was a point that did not need to be proven.
In this respect, the early church’s assertion of Jesus as messiah was
directed largely to a certain sector (though a dominant one) within Judaism.
This sector took both the Scriptures and eschatology seriously. Accordingly,
when the early church sought to support its basic claims about Christ, it did
so within the framework of the Jewish Scriptures. Where the early
Christians parted ways from their dialogue partners in Judaism was in their
interpretation of how God had been working all along. Christianity claimed
that the Exodus was here; much of Judaism remained steadfast in the
counter-claim that the final Exodus was still off in the future. The primary
flashpoints between the two groups revolved around how each side
understood (1) Jesus in relation to Moses, and (2) the unfolding story of
Israel in relation to the historic Exodus. Not surprisingly, we find the early
Christian theologians taking every opportunity to shed light on these issues.
In fact, in the above-cited instance of 1 Corinthians 10 where Paul alludes
to the rock in the wilderness, the apostle is doing just that.
Now when I say “early Christian theologians,” I am referring not only
to individuals like Paul but also to the four evangelists (Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John) who, like Paul, were also writing with theological purpose.
Of course at the same time they were also very self-consciously functioning
as historians. All four wished to tell the Jesus story like it was; all four had
different angles—reflecting four slightly different theological agendas—on
how to tell that story. Three of those angles (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are
somewhat similar in appearance; the fourth angle (John) marks out a boldly
different approach. Whatever their similarities and differences, all four told
their tales as hard-nosed historians (wanting to get the Jesus story straight)
and as soft-hearted theologians (wanting to redress the pastoral and
missiological needs of the church). How did the gospels come about?
There’s no recipe answer. But if we had one, it would go something like
this: take these four inspired individuals, sprinkle in the needs of the
church, add a scribe with lots of paper, stir well, let simmer for thirty years
or so and—voilà, four theologically shaped histories of Jesus.
If this crude account of the formation of the gospels is basically
accurate (and I think it is), then we have to ask whether the evangelists were
also interested in sorting through the Exodus question. In the remaining
pages of this book, I will show that indeed they were. For each of the four,
themes of Exodus and Moses loom large, not simply because there are neat
parallels between what Jesus was doing and what Moses did, but because
these parallels are theologically meaningful.
 Outside of the church, some rightly wondered whether, in fact, this
Jesus of Nazareth could possibly be the long-awaited new Moses. Likewise,
others inside the church needed further grounding in the faith they claimed
(who doesn’t?). Given the less-than-obvious comparison between the
original Exodus and the Jesus movement, each evangelist thought he
needed to include some kind of account as to how exactly Jesus and the
early church fit the bill after all. Since each of the gospel writers was
patently setting out to write a story and not a formal theological treatise, we
would expect their accounts to be more implicit than explicit. This does not
mean that the gospel writers were interested in burying deep, hidden
meaning within their gospels; it does mean that they recognized one of the
basic principles of storytelling—namely, that indirect showing is usually
much more effective than direct telling. What this means for us is that in
reading the text closely and attentively, we may well find a new Exodus in
Jesus.
As it turns out, all four gospel writers were considerably helped in
their projects by the fact that the historical Jesus saw himself as a new
Moses. In fact, Jesus not only saw himself as a Moses redux, but he also
went out of his way to position himself accordingly. Some of this
positioning was achieved through Jesus’ choice of words, some of it
through his own engineering of circumstances, and some of it just simply
through providential serendipity. Thus, when the four evangelists are
painting Jesus with the Mosaic cloak, their individual touches may be their
own, but the cloak was one with which the historical Jesus himself was
quite familiar. In other words, the situation is not so much that the gospel
writers projected this template on Jesus, but rather that they, through the
inspiration of the Spirit, recognized the Mosaic and Exodus features in all
that Jesus said and did. In sum, the evangelists perceived what Jesus had
already known about himself: He was the true Moses. In fact, he was even
more Moses than Moses himself (as strange as that sounds). Jesus was
beyond Moses in every way. While Moses was to be “like God” (Exodus
4:16; 7:1), Jesus was God.
In the next four chapters, I shall focus on the four gospels, almost in
their canonical order: Matthew, Mark, John, and Luke. The reason I have
treated the gospels in this order is because I believe that each evangelist has
specific emphases, not only relating to their understanding of Christ in
general (Christology) but also relating to their specific depiction of Jesus as
Moses. For Matthew, Jesus is at once a royal figure and, paradoxically, a
persecuted figure (Chapter 2: Prince and Pariah). For Mark, Jesus is a new
Moses in a prophetic sense, even more so than the one who confronted
Pharaoh. Jesus jumps into the heat of controversy and refuses to back down
(Chapter 3: Prophet). John’s Jesus is also like Moses, as he relies on signs
and wonders to convey his message of salvation (Chapter 4: Plagues).
Finally, in the third gospel, we will take note of Jesus’ meals. Luke has a lot
of eating, and this is no accident, for the evangelist is eager to present Jesus
as the inaugurator of a new Passover (Chapter 5: Passover). Four gospels,
four snapshots, four different angles—each with its own take-away.
If you have read The Exodus Revealed, you will see immediately that
the table of contents of this book is quite similar to the table of contents in
that book. This is intentional. At the risk of appearing contrived or forced, I
wanted to underscore the parallels between the Exodus story as we have it
in Exodus and the new Exodus story as we have it across the four gospels.
Another common feature in both books is my attempt to keep Scripture
fresh by providing my own translation of the original language. But I hope
that readers of both books will detect an even more basic complementarity
between the two. In the prequel to this book, The Exodus Revealed, I argued
for the historicity and theological significance of the Exodus under Moses.
In the present volume, I will take up issues of history (what it means) and
theology (what it means today), even as I linger a bit more on the latter. As
I hope will become clear throughout the course of this book, Jesus intended
to take Israel’s “graduation party” to a whole new level.
“But then,” I can almost hear the thoughtful reader ask, “even if
connecting Jesus with the new Exodus was important in the first century, is
it still important now, that is, for us twenty-first-century folk today?” That
is, just because the first-century audience had a specific concern with
mapping the new Exodus/new Moses onto the old Exodus/old Moses,
should this necessarily be something for the rest of us to get exercised
about? This is a fair question and one that I will answer ahead of time with
an unqualified “Yes!” While I trust this “yes” will be sustained by
reflections to follow, in the meantime it is enough to say that if Jesus is
indeed to be found in the Exodus and yet we fail to find him there, then we
have overlooked an important aspect of who Jesus is and what he is about.
 FOUR GOSPELS
The canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were all written in the first century, all
within living memory of the time of Jesus. While we may wonder why God left us with four gospels
as opposed to one, many theologians throughout history have remarked on the appropriateness, even
necessity, of having four. For example, according to one church father, Matthew had to be written for
the Jews; Mark, for the Romans; Luke, for the Greeks; and John, for the universal church. Others
have highlighted the distinct themes: Matthew—Jesus as the promised Messiah; Mark—Jesus as the
Servant of God; Luke—Jesus as the Son of Man; John—Jesus as the Son of God.
Though the four gospels come together as a unified chorus, we are further enriched by
approaching each gospel individually so as to appreciate each distinctive voice on its own terms. We
want to know how each gospel-writer connects the dots of Jesus’ mission and Exodus.

To what can this be compared? It would almost be like going to a party

where you’re not sure why you came. But actually, it’s not so bad; you meet
people, you eat, you drink, you converse, you enjoy the shade of a 20’ x 20’
outdoor tent—you have a grand time. Then, just as you decide you’ve
stayed long enough and it’s time go, you decide to thank the host on the
way out. And as you do, and only as you do, you discover for the first time
that this party was in fact thrown to mark a significant event: someone’s
passage from high school. It was a graduation party, and you didn’t even
know it. You enjoyed the party, but missed what it was all about.
I confess, sometimes church feels like a big party with lots of people
and lots of activity, but I get the feeling that not everyone there knows what
the party is about. To switch metaphors, sometimes it feels as though we are
gathered into a big tabernacle in the spiritual desert, but precious few have
any sense that the tabernacle is actually supposed to end up in a specific
place (the Promised Land) with a specific purpose (worship) along with a
specific M.O. (the Decalogue). Maybe a book like this can help. If we are
willing to roll up our sleeves and do the work of finding the Exodus in Jesus
and Jesus in the Exodus, our theology and missiology, our worship and our
witness, will be all the more enriched. The new Exodus is our graduation
party. We need to find out just what this means.
PRINCE AND PARIAH—GOSPEL
OF MATTHEW
  

When Nelson Mandela died in December of 2013, the people of

South Africa mourned—and all the world with them. Embodying the hopes
and aspirations of countless victims of systemic racism from around the
world, Mandela was an icon of freedom. Though born to a royal family and
destined to rise to the presidency of South Africa, Mandela spent the bulk
of his best years languishing in prison. In the early stages of his nearly
three-decade prison term, his days were spent in forced labor; his nights, in
stretching out on the concrete floor of his 7’ x 8’ cell. Eventually, when
Mandela was seventy-two, he was released from prison and entered the
arena of South African politics. From there he would rise to become the
nation’s top leader, where he would dedicate five years to overseeing the
transition from apartheid to justice. Having done time both as a prisoner and
president, his life was fraught with paradox.
In this chapter, we shall consider a similar paradox in the life of Jesus,
brilliantly illuminated in Matthew’s gospel: the twin truth that Jesus was
both rightful messianic king yet also the persecuted one par excellence. As
might be expected, the first evangelist does not come right out and state this
explicitly. Rather, he shows it, not least by drawing certain comparisons
between Jesus and Moses. Such comparisons are not drawn for their own
sake, as if Matthew is simply being clever; rather, he hopes to shed light on
a larger theological point. In order to prove my case, I will only rely
principally on the first four chapters.
Jesus as the True Israel
Entering into the first gospel through the front porch of Matthew’s
extended genealogy (Matthew 1), alert readers may notice right away a
conspicuous interest in exile. As is clear from this genealogy, the evangelist
sees Israel’s history as a cycle of highs and lows. The initial point of
departure is Abraham. Israel started in the body of Abraham (Matthew 1:2)
with little more than a promise. Yet under Yahweh’s blessings, Israel’s
fortunes would blossom, reaching their peak under the rule of King David
(Matthew 1:6). From that point on, Matthew’s audience knows full well,
things began to go south. The kingdom split; the people turned away from
Yahweh’s ways by fits and starts. Finally, it all hit rock bottom with
deportations (Assyrian and Babylonian) and exile (Matthew 1:11).
As Matthew’s genealogy hints, though exile was certainly a low point
on Israel’s national trajectory, it was hardly the end of the story. Within this
litany of names (some familiar and some not so familiar), Matthew draws
particular attention to three figures (Abraham, David, and Jesus Christ) and
one event (exile). Jesus Christ is the culminating point (Matthew 1:16). If
exile had reversed what David had accomplished—namely, the establishing
of the kingdom in the land—then the implication is that Jesus Christ would
reverse the conditions of exile, effectively establishing the Kingdom of
God.
“How exactly will this happen?” Matthew’s first readers may have
asked. As if anticipating this very question, Matthew does not wait long
before providing an answer. We need go no further than the account of
Jesus’ miraculous conception and birth. Matthew 2 begins with certain magi
(sorcerers? astrologers? pagan priests?) who, having just come off a long
road trip from an unspecified land in the East, have put the word out that
they are seeking to worship the newborn King of the Jews. Soon enough,
Herod the Great catches wind of this. Then, putting on his best pious front
(I wonder, did he rehearse this a few times in front of a mirror?), he consults
with the Jewish scribes and requests that the magi pass along any
information they might have pertaining to this newborn “King of the Jews”
(Matthew 2:7–8).
Not about to be thwarted by Herod’s malicious intentions, God
redirects events by granting two visions. One vision is given to Joseph
where he is told to pack up the family immediately and go down into Egypt
so that the newborn Jesus might be kept safe. It is a vision Joseph promptly
obeys (Matthew 2:13–14). But God also sends a dream to the magi in which
they are instructed to leave Herod waiting while they proceed back east by a
different route (Matthew 2:12). They do so. And a few strategically
deployed visions save the day.
Outwitted, Herod then implements a Plan B by ordering the
eradication of all boys two and under within the vicinity of Bethlehem
(Matthew 2:16–18). Of course, the intended target, Jesus, is not among this
number, so Herod’s drastic measures hardly accomplish their intended
purpose. Not long after this grim massacre, Herod passes away (a rather
agonizing death, Josephus informs us). When the news of the king’s demise
finally reaches Joseph and Mary down in Egypt, they pack up their
belongings once again and head back to Judea. Although Joseph and Mary’s
repatriation appears to be a mundane detail within the narrative, their move
prompts a curious editorial comment from Matthew, as he draws on Hosea
11:1: “So that that which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might
be fulfilled: ‘Out of Egypt I called my son’ ” (Matthew 2:15).
For some readers, Matthew’s citation of Hosea 11:1 is to be regarded
as a parade example of wooden proof-texting, supposedly providing a clear
instance in which a New Testament writer has wrenched the Old Testament
text out of context in order to support a dubious theological point. Only the
most tortured logic, so the argument goes, would allow Matthew to infer
Jesus’ identity as the Son of God from a rather far-fetched correlation
between Joseph and Mary’s departure from Egypt and Hosea’s mention of
Israel’s Exodus. When Matthew first wrote Matthew 2:15, little could he
have realized how later skeptics would consider this verse a regular go-to
text for demonstrating the alleged absurdity of the Bible. Perhaps even
those of us who uphold a rather high view of scriptural authority can
understand why, centuries later, it has become just that.
Sometimes the problem with our being “centuries later,” however, is
that we presume to understand what Matthew is doing but in reality have no
clue. First, we need to take a step back by appreciating the respective
contexts of Hosea and Matthew. In Hosea 11, the prophet is reflecting on
the first Exodus in order to dissuade the northern tribes from their
covenantal infractions. Unless Israel changes its ways, the prophet warns, it
will end up being deported to Assyria, forced to re-experience the trauma
the nation had previously experienced under Pharaoh. Unfortunately,
Hosea’s warnings fall on deaf ears. Israel, the Son of God, would soon
enough find itself back in “Egypt” (a.k.a. Assyria). For his part, Matthew is
attempting to describe a series of narrow escapes for the young Jesus. On
these summaries of Hosea and Matthew, I think, all interpreters can agree.
Before taking up the question of Matthew’s aims with 2:15, perhaps a
word or two is in order as to what he is not doing. First of all, by linking the
infant Jesus’ emergence out of Egypt with the first Exodus, Matthew is not
suggesting that Hosea was predicting a specific future event that only
miraculously came to pass on Jesus’ return from Egypt. While Jesus
certainly fulfilled certain predictive prophecies, we need not assume that
Matthew is only interested in fulfillment in this narrow and restricted sense.
Nor is Matthew drawing on Hosea 11:1 to prove that Jesus is the Son of
God in our present-day theological sense; that is, in the sense that he is the
second person of the Trinity and co-substantial with the Father. To do this
would involve injecting a meaning into Hosea 11:1 that could not possibly
have been there in the first place (Hosea lived centuries before the concept
of the Trinity took shape). Both these reading strategies are, in my view,
quite a stretch.
So I propose that Matthew 2:15 intends to draw attention to the fact
that Jesus’ escape from Herod presents itself—with no little help from a
sovereign God—as a recapitulation of and analogue to Israel’s national
experience in the Exodus. The analogy is hardly implausible. Just as the
first Exodus from Egypt occurred in the aftermath of Pharaoh’s hard-
heartedness, Jesus’ move from Egypt was associated with the ruthlessness
of another Pharaoh-like ruler. And just as Pharaoh had ordered the
execution of all Israelite boys as a way of nipping in the bud any possible
threat to his own rule (Exodus 1), Herod tries something very similar in
murdering the children closer to his own neighborhood. In both cases, after
the rulers’ malicious intentions have been providentially frustrated, an
escape from Egypt occurs. For Matthew, Jesus fulfills Hosea 11:1 because
Jesus, feeling Herod’s hot breath over his shoulder, is making the very same
moves that Israel made in order to escape Pharaoh—a significant point for
any Jewish reader convinced that redemptive history tends to repeat itself.

Passing through the Waters

 On finding John the Baptizer baptizing in the Jordan River, we recall
that John’s baptism was “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of
sins” (Mark 1:4; Luke 3:3). Those who responded positively to this baptism
could at least hope to be included among the righteous elect come judgment
day. According to John, many of his contemporaries had been relying on
their DNA, thinking it would be enough to claim genealogical descent from
Abraham to be reckoned among the faithful within the Israel, that is, within
the true Israel of God. John, however, had a different take. He insisted that
simply to have Abraham as one’s father was not enough; one must also
exhibit accompanying spiritual fruit (Matthew 3:9–10). Who would be the
true seed of Abraham, members of the true Israel and the true Son of God?
Answer: the one who bears fruits and fulfills the terms of true
righteousness.
Enter Jesus, who has come to John to be baptized. The Baptizer is
understandably reluctant to baptize his cousin, but Jesus insists: “Let it be
for now, for in this way it is appropriate for us to fulfill all righteousness”
(Matthew 3:15). John complies. Then, as soon as Jesus is baptized, he goes
“up out of the water,” witnesses the Spirit visibly descend, and hears the
voice from heaven designating him as “my Son” (Matthew 3:16). This
three-fold chain of events is reminiscent of Israel. In its own day, Israel had
also gone up out of the water to escape Pharaoh; Israel had also witnessed
the same Spirit, then in the form of the pillar cloud, visibly descending on
the entrance to Moses’ tent of meeting (Exodus 33:9); finally, as a nation
called to worship, Israel was also called God’s Son (Exodus 4:22–23). In
short, Matthew records the baptism scene in such a way so as to fuse the
Exodus and wilderness traditions and associate the entire package with
Jesus. In passing through the waters, Jesus is designated as the true Son of
God, true Israel.

Into the Wilderness

The next stop is the wilderness where Jesus is tempted (Matthew 4:1–
11). Interestingly, when the tempter comes, Jesus responds by drawing from
three different Scriptures (in their order: Deuteronomy 8:3; 6:16; 6:13), all
underscoring the analogy between Jesus’ own temptations (involving forty
days) and those endured by Israel (involving forty years). The parallels
between the kinds of temptations facing Jesus and the kinds of temptations
that faced Israel in its wilderness experience are more than obvious.
First, whereas Jesus hungers for bread in the desert, so too did Israel
(Matthew 4:2–4; Deuteronomy 8:2–3). Just as Jesus was put to the test, so
too were the Israelites (Matthew 4:5–7; Deuteronomy 6:16). Finally, as
Jesus was tempted to worship someone or something other than the one true
God, the same temptation had beset Israel (Matthew 4:8–10; Deuteronomy
6:13–15). At the end of it all, the angels come to “serve” (diakoneō) Jesus
(Matthew 4:11). This too is likely in reference to Israel’s wilderness
wandering. Since the Greek verb here (diakoneō—“serve”) connotes meal
service in particular, the implication is that the angels themselves cater
Jesus’ long overdue meal. The only other humans to go down in history as
having eaten the “bread of angels” (otherwise known as manna) were the
members of the Sinai generation (Psalm 78:25). Thus, in both his
temptations and in his sustenance, Jesus is again essentially re-dramatizing
the story of Israel.
Whereas Israel had been tempted three times in the desert and had
failed each time, Matthew’s Jesus meets the very same temptations head on,
and in each case, he overcomes. Remember that the main idea of Israel’s
calling as God’s son was obedience. While Israel surely had some isolated
success stories, their overall track record was abysmal. In Matthew’s eyes,
Israel had proven itself unworthy of the calling of divine sonship. But Jesus,
having been declared the Son of God at his baptism, now sufficiently
proves his qualifications for that role by successfully resisting Satan’s
onslaughts. Called out of Egypt in Matthew 2, brought through the waters
in Matthew 3, tempted (and proven) in the desert in Matthew 4, Jesus
sustains the claim made for him at his baptism: He alone is the true Israel,
the sole spiritual survivor of the final Exodus.

Why Israel?
So why would Matthew care to convince his readers that Jesus is the
ongoing embodiment of Israel? Why would this matter to anyone? A
number of points can be made here. I will highlight two.
First, we need to understand that in first-century Judaism, many pious
Jews pined for Yahweh to re-establish the Davidic kingdom but also felt
that the key to such deliverance was to be found in Israel’s corporate
success in keeping the covenant. This conviction is expressed, for example,
in a rabbinic sentiment that if all of Israel kept even one Sabbath properly,
the Messiah would come in a moment (Pe’ah 1.1). On this line of thinking
(presumably common in Matthew’s own day), God was waiting for Israel to
obey, and once Israel did so, he would respond by delivering the nation and
cashing out the whole bundle of eschatological promises. This is not to say
that ancient Jews believed that individuals could earn their own way into
eternal life. (I am not sure we have sufficient proof for that.) It does seem
clear, however, that for first-century Judaism, corporate salvation ultimately
rode on Israel’s corporate efforts—the people of God as a whole had to be
obedient. No other way was possible.
But by setting Jesus up as the singular embodiment of Israel, Matthew
is saying “No!” to this way of thinking. “So long as Israel looks to itself and
its own obedience,” Matthew says, “it will remain consigned to exile. Israel
as a nation does not have righteousness sufficient to please Yahweh; only
the Righteous One, Jesus, can play that role.” Jesus proved this by his own
suffering of persecution (Matthew 2:15), passing through the waters
(Matthew 3:13–17), and keeping the demands of the covenant in the face of
severe temptation (Matthew 4:1–11). Yahweh had always promised that if
Israel would keep the law, he would bless Israel. Now, finally, it turns out
that Israel can now keep the law and keep it perfectly. But here’s the catch:
Israel is actually the person of Jesus. And thus Jesus’ unique obedience is
what serves as the only basis for this new, long-awaited Exodus.
Consequently, only by attaching ourselves through faith to this perfect law-
keeper can God’s people hope to participate in this new Exodus.
For us no less than Matthew’s original audience, this is incredible
news, for it frees us from the bondage of self-preoccupation and its equally
ugly twin, self-righteousness. Our most valiant attempts to be righteous will
prove futile so long as we look to ourselves and our own “righteous
activities” (Bible reading, prayer, church attendance, and so forth) as the
key. As important as such things may be, if Jesus alone is Israel, then
blessings from God cannot be secured through anything we do but only
through our mediator Jesus Christ. He is all our good, and all our good
comes from him.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

In Romans 10, Paul says that when Moses describes the righteousness that is by law, he is describing
Christ. By this he means that Christ is actually the only one who fulfills the law. He embodies the law
or in the apostle’s words, “Christ is the end of the law” (Romans 10:4). While Israel thought that the
law was made for their keeping, it is closer to the truth to say that the law was made for Christ’s
keeping. This means that the whole law is actually a picture of Jesus Christ—even if a black-and-
white negative. Today, when we look at the law, we are looking at Christ.

This does not mean, however, we can then forget about righteousness.
On the contrary, Matthew’s Jesus himself warns us that unless our
righteousness surpasses that of the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, we have
little hope of entering the Kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:20). Practical
righteousness still very much matters! But the good news is that now with
Christ we have the power, granted through our vital participation in the
Risen Lord, to keep the demands of God’s law (cf. Romans 8:4; 13:10).
Standing in the power of Christ, we need not see the exacting demands of
the Sermon on the Mountain (Matthew 5–7) as an unrealizable ideal.
Instead, that sermon can now become the story of our lives (even if
sometimes a rough story), just as it is the story of Christ’s life. In The
Exodus Revealed, I explained that the goal of the Exodus was for Israel to
achieve its destiny as the obedient Son of God. Through Christ, the Exodus
begun under Moses finally comes fully into its own.
Here’s the second point: Jesus is the messianic king. How do we know
that? Well, Matthew has dropped more than a few hints along these lines,
not least by starting out his story with the magi’s quest for the “King of the
Jews” (Matthew 2:2) and closing it out with Jesus’ assertion that “all
authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18).
But another route leads to the same conclusion and that is by saying, as
Matthew does, that Jesus is Israel.
In the ancient Near East, the king and the king’s people enjoyed what
historians call “corporate solidarity.” What was true of the people was also
true of the king—and vice versa: nation and head were essentially one
entity, one person. This principle comes to the surface in, among other
places, the story told in 2 Samuel 24 where David sins by taking a census,
but Israel has to pay the price. Of course, not just the ancients thought this
way. For example, on more than one occasion, the nineteenth-century
Queen Victoria was reported to have responded to a story with the words,
“We are not amused.” Even if Victoria was probably never (ever) the life of
the party, as queen she had every right to say, “We are not amused.” If the
queen of the United Kingdom is not amused, then nobody in the United
Kingdom is amused—or supposed to be. In short, if Jesus is Israel, then he
is also the King of Israel. He is also Lord.
Jesus’ lordship may seem like a simple point in theory, but then again
it is a truth that so often eludes us in practice, as in when church squabbles
occur because someone or some parties want things their way and fail to
submit to Jesus’ lordship. Many of us struggle with the burdens of life.
Financial concerns, worries over the life choices of others, relational
upheaval, sinful addictions—all such things can consume us if we’re not
careful—that is, if our allegiances are not carefully ordered. If Jesus is
Israel, then he is also the King who demands our full obedience. In a world
that exalts self-fulfillment over submission and personal rights over proper
respect, this truth becomes all the more difficult to live out, and therefore all
the more important to hear.

Jesus as the True Moses

The parallel between Jesus and Israel hardly exhausts Matthew’s
agenda. The evangelist has other points that he wants to hammer home,
including Jesus’ similarity to Moses. We might think, for example, of
Joseph and Mary’s departure from Bethlehem. As the first evangelist
describes it, his selection of detail in the storytelling also demands a
comparison with the Israelites’ flight at Passover. In the Exodus story, once
Pharaoh comes to the end of his rope, he sends word “at night,” instructing
Moses and Aaron as follows: “Get up! And leave my people, both you and
the sons of Israel!” (Exodus 12:31, LXX). Meanwhile in Matthew’s telling
of the story, the angel appears to Joseph “at night” when he instructs Jesus’
father as follows: “Get up! Take the child and his mother, and flee…”
(Matthew 2:13). That both events occur at night and use the same verbiage
is no coincidence. For the Old Testament author, the nighttime setting of the
Passover is a crucial aspect of the first Exodus; for the New Testament
evangelist, the nocturnal departure is crucial to understanding Jesus’ role in
the new Exodus. In the recounting of Joseph and Mary’s flight, we can
almost feel the preliminary tremors of the epochal movement to come. The
central point of comparison between Moses and Jesus is that they are two
figures on the run.
The Boys Are Back in Town
The same comparison is only reinforced in the subsequent narrative. I
have already pointed out certain similarities between Herod and Pharaoh,
not least their mutual desire to wipe out Hebrew babies if it meant
preempting the competition. Now on comparing Matthew 2:19–21 and
Exodus 4:19–20 (the Greek Old Testament version, LXX), we find Matthew
only reinforcing this connection. Matthew 2:19–21 relates the
circumstances that allow Jesus to return from exile; the Exodus passage
correspondingly relates the circumstances that allow Moses to return from
his exile.
 
    Exodus 4:19-20
  Matthew 2:19–21  
(LXX)  
   19 Now when Herod died, suddenly an angel of   And after those many days, the king of Egypt
the Lord appeared in a dream and said to Joseph in died.
Egypt, 19 And the Lord said to Moses in Midian, “Go!
20 “Get up! Take the child and his mother, and go Depart into Egypt, for all those who were
to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking seeking your life are now dead.”
the child’s life are now dead.” 20   So taking his wife and his children, Moses
21    So Joseph got up, took the child and his set them on the donkeys and returned to Egypt.
mother, and went to the land of Israel.

The two texts have certain striking parallels. In both Exodus and
Matthew, a divine word is offered immediately after the death of the
persecuting ruler. In both texts, the same divine word includes the
imperative, “Go!” In both texts again, the fathers of the holy families “take”
wife and children and return to the land of origin. But most persuasive of all
is the tight comparison between the stated motive for the return: The Lord
says to Joseph, “For those who were seeking the child’s life are now dead”
(Matthew 2:20), whereas the Lord says to Moses, “For all those who were
seeking your life are now dead” (Exodus 4:19). In Matthew and Exodus,
God had managed to outflank the brutal rulers who threatened to cut short
the lives of his chosen human instruments. In both instances, on the death of
the problematic ruler, God communicates directly and puts into motion a
household return from exile—in both cases, as the return of the family is a
prelude to a much larger escape operation. The evangelist works hard to
draw attention to this.
 A final factor to consider here are the various traditions regarding
Moses’ birth (some perhaps historically grounded, others the stuff of
legend) that had cropped up over time. For example, the ancient Jewish
historian Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews, 2.210–16) reports that Moses’
father, Amram, mindful of Pharaoh’s decreed infanticide, was entirely
beside himself on hearing the news of his wife’s pregnancy. He was beside
himself, that is, until being comforted through a divine vision which would
inform him of his son’s future prophetic greatness. Needless to say, the pre-
Christian story of Amram’s dream-vision sounds a lot like Matthew 1:18–
25 when God instructs Joseph in a dream that he, too, should not be
disturbed in regards to his pregnant fiancée. Eager to highlight any
comparisons he could find between Moses and Jesus for the sake of his
Jewish readers, Matthew needed little convincing to include details like
Joseph’s dream. But again, the main comparison is Moses’ and Jesus’
shared status as refugees.

Back to the Mountain

Although the evangelist has already used the temptation scene
(Matthew 4:1–11) as a way of marking off Jesus as the new Israel, we see
good evidence that he, in fact, tries to get double duty from this event. In
other words, if Matthew’s temptation scene proves that Jesus is the true
Israel, it also proves that he is the new Moses as well. First of all, Matthew
describes Jesus’ fast as occurring over the period of “forty days and forty
nights” (Matthew 4:2), hearkening back to two other fasts in the Bible: one
undertaken by Elijah (1 Kings 19:8), the other by Moses when he received
the terms of the covenant (Exodus 24:18). Before we jump to the
conclusion that Jesus is being compared to Elijah and Moses
simultaneously, I should mention that Elijah’s fast was almost certainly
modeled on Moses’ fast: Moses undertook the original forty-day-forty-night
fast.
For Matthew, one of the key points here is that Jesus is refusing to take
a shortcut on his mission despite Satan’s suggestions. In his day, Moses
ascended Mount Nebo so he could view “the whole land” (Deuteronomy
34:1–4). Later rabbinic interpretation understood Moses’ panorama to
include not just Canaan but the whole world (a fair way to translate the
Hebrew). Yet for Moses, this is exactly what he would not have for himself:
conquering the land would be left to his successors. When Jesus in turn is
shown “all the kingdoms of the world” (Matthew 4:8), he is given the
opportunity to take immediate control of the kingdoms now through Satan’s
direction or to wait, go the way of the cross, and leave the kingdoms for his
successors to mop up (Matthew 28:18–20).
The mountain imagery continues when we come to the Sermon on the
Mount. The text of Matthew 5:1 reads as follows: “Now on seeing the
crowds he [Jesus] went up onto the mountain and sat down.” The act of
“going up” on a mountain is quintessentially Mosaic. In fact, as Dale
Allison points out in his book The New Moses: A Matthean Typology, such
mountain-mounting is mentioned eighteen times in the Pentateuch, almost
always in connection with Moses. Second, although Matthean
commentators like to note that Jesus’ sitting posture reflects his posture as
teacher, less commonly observed is that, according to Deuteronomy 9:9,
Moses also “remains” or “sits” (yāshab) on the mountain when he receives
the law, which he in turn promulgates. This framing of Jesus in Mosaic
terms serves an important theological purpose that Matthew clearly wants
to get across to his readers: Just as Moses had received and passed on the
law of God in his time, now Jesus is passing on the law of God in his own
time, functioning as the new Moses. However, here we clearly see Jesus
having an authority that goes beyond that of Moses, offering his own law,
the authority of which would also effectively supplant the authority of the
Mosaic Law. Jesus is Moses and yet more than Moses—a good bit more.
What does this authoritative Jesus say? Odd things. Statements such
as, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3), and “If someone strikes
you on the right cheek, make sure to turn the other one as well” (Matthew
5:39), and “Do for others what you would have them do for you” (Matthew
7:12). This does not sound like a fierce warrior king who will complete the
original Exodus mission, as most Jews expected. Instead, it sounds like
someone who has voluntarily given up his rights, made a choice to defer to
others, and seeks peace rather than violence. This sounds like a way of life
appropriate not to a person of power but to one who is disempowered. Of
course, this is the point.

Why Moses?
 In comparing Jesus to Moses at countless turns, Matthew underscores
the fact that Jesus shares Moses’ lot as rejected pariah. In the opening
pages of the gospel, Herod attempts to hunt Jesus down (Matthew 2:1–18);
later Satan tries to destroy him (Matthew 4:1–11), and still later Jesus’
opponents seek his life (Matthew 26–28). While Jesus’ exile technically
ends on Herod’s death, as we read through the Gospel of Matthew we get
the strong impression that his exile never actually comes to an end but just
enters into a different modality. The earthly Moses never really made it
home ever; neither did the earthly Jesus. As Matthew puts it, “The Son of
Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). This is integral to who
he is.
As the new lawgiver, Jesus expects his disciples to follow suit. Moses
had one set of prescriptions designed to regulate life once Israel had settled
in the land; now Jesus builds on that law and extends it, but this time the
assumption is that his followers will be decisively unsettled. Jesus requires
that his disciples take up their cross and follow him (Matthew 10:38;
16:24). That means Jesus’ disciples should expect to conduct their lives in a
way that is not entirely different from a condemned criminal. By telling us
to take up the cross, Jesus is asking us to follow him in a new way of life—
a life on the lam. Our job, our possessions, our position, even our friends
and family—all these we hold loosely. That’s what a fugitive must do.

MOSES
As the princely pariah, Moses anticipates Jesus. At the same time, Jesus reveals himself through the
royal but rebuffed Moses. We might say that Moses modeled the coming Christ in rough strokes. The
real Suffering Servant would not appear on the scene until many centuries later. Still, as much as we
find Moses in Jesus, we also find Jesus all over the life of Moses—not only in terms of what Moses
did, but also in terms of who he was.

A Final Word
From all this, we gather that if Jesus is both prince and pariah, then
those who follow this Jesus can expect to assume a similar double role. But
we have a future hope. One day those who have been estranged from home
and kin will return to a new earth and a new family. One day, those who
have rejected Satan’s suggestion to pursue the good life will inherit the truly
good life. One day, those who have humbled themselves will become
greatest in the Kingdom. Indeed, since the Kingdom is already here, such
rewards are already breaking through in the present time. And while we
might wonder at the unusual mix of a Nelson Mandela, prisoner and
president, our lives as believers are to be characterized by much the same
paradox. We, too, are both prince and pariah. Though sentenced to endure
our own exiles from our own Pharaohs who have no visible sympathy for
the purposes of God, we are being groomed to share the highest office in
the world. In the meantime, Matthew tells us, we have an Exodus to get on
with.
PROPHET—GOSPEL OF MARK
  

It all started on a warm, breezy July night in the ancient city of

Rome. While the Eternal City’s buzz of daytime activity—the frantic bustle
and the shouts of street vendors—would normally give way to a relatively
calm evening, this night proved to be different. For on this night, July 18,
A.D. 64, a fire broke out among some shops near the Circus Maximus, and
it showed no signs of dying down. By the time the Great Fire of Rome had
finally finished running its course six days later, a good portion of the once
splendorous city lay in smoking ruins. Many had forfeited their lives and
tens of thousands were rendered homeless. The toll exacted on housing and
infrastructure was mind-boggling. By all accounts, this was a catastrophe.
Sometimes in the aftershock of catastrophe, people feel the need to
blame somebody. Given the general public sense that something was off
about the Emperor Nero (and the general public sense was right on this
score), people started to blame the reigning Caesar. Even as the ashes were
still smoldering, a rumor spread that Nero, motivated either by a cool
calculus to remodel the city or by a mad desire to pull an entertaining prank,
had sent arsonists out into the night. Was either of the rumors true?
Probably not. But neither perception was particularly flattering, and in
politics, as we all know, perception is reality. An oversensitive soul, if not
pathologically narcissistic, Nero was highly distressed that his unofficial
popularity ratings were dipping (no one did official polls on this sort of
thing in those days, but everyone knew the word on the street). He couldn’t
pin this one on the policies of the previous emperor; he needed another
scapegoat.
So he turned to the adherents of an upstart religion we know today as
Christianity. Members of this strange, new cult—cool toward the traditional
Roman gods and warmly devoted to a crucified Galilean—would make
good patsies. The Roman people weren’t quite sure what to do with them,
and as far as the Jews in the city were concerned, the Christians were only a
source of ongoing conflict. At best, these Christ-devotees were dead wood
who could never quite get with the Roman program; at worst, they were a
public nuisance. No one would miss them; no one would stand up for them.
Besides, Christianity had been noticeably growing over the past few
decades and so now was as good a time as any, Nero thought to himself, to
put out his own PR fire by pinning the literal fire on those miserable Christ-
worshippers.
Wasting no time, Nero went into action with impunity and unspeakable
cruelty. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, the emperor at first
arrested a handful of Christians so as to interrogate them under torture.
Then, on gathering names, he rounded up more. These he dressed in the
hides of wild beasts so that they might make an attractive meal for his
ravenous dogs. Others he nailed to Roman crosses. Still others he would
coat with pitch and light them up as human torches for his evening garden
parties. Suddenly, almost overnight, to be a Christian in Nero’s city was to
be involved in a high-stakes venture.
Imagine you are a Christian living in Rome at this time. As it so
happens, your best friend has just been publicly crucified for being a
follower of Christ. Meanwhile, several others in your local church have
been hauled off and abruptly converted into human torches for Nero’s
personal merriment. You wonder: “Am I next? Is my spouse next? What
about the safety of my children?” Then you wonder whether you need to
take a lower profile in regards to your faith. “Maybe, despite everyone else
coming out of the closet these days, I will be best served by taking my
Christian faith straight back into the closet. After all, God wants me to be
safe, doesn’t he?”
Church tradition tells us that John Mark wrote the second gospel with
input from Peter while both were stationed in Rome. Like a good number of
scholars, I believe this to be credible history. I also believe—again, like
many scholars—that Peter and Mark wrote their gospel in the bloody wake
of the Neronic persecutions. They wanted to tell the story of Jesus anew, but
they also wanted to speak pastorally to the persecuted church at Rome.
Hardly oblivious to the plight of the Roman Christians, Mark was in the
very thick of things. He knew full well the inner turmoil and special
temptations associated with a high-stakes Christian life. As for Mark’s
mentor, Peter, he could hardly have forgotten his own experience of
denying his Lord three times on the eve of Jesus’ execution. The great
apostle must have thought back to that night often—and cringed. Yet at the
same time, Peter knew that the Risen Lord had forgiven him and that as a
result he had long since moved on to a steadier and stronger faith.
Collaborating together, Peter and Mark wondered how this gospel could be
written to strengthen the Christians at Rome so that they wouldn’t repeat
Peter’s regrettable acts of denial.
Holding a copy of the Gospel of Mark in our hands today, we realize
that we cannot reconstruct a single answer to this question. The second
gospel is too complex a text, too intricately composed, to admit a simplistic
one-size-fits-all interpretation. At the same time, when we read between the
lines in Mark’s gospel, we find the evangelist resorting to the very double
story I have been describing in this book: the story of Exodus and new
Exodus. It’s a story that would lend itself well to Mark’s pastoral purposes.

The Cost of a Prophetic Calling

Readers of Exodus will remember how Moses, when encountered by
Yahweh at the burning bush, was asked to perform an imponderable task:
lead the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt, right out from
under the nose of one of the world’s most powerful rulers. The way to
accomplish this undertaking, Yahweh also informed Moses, was by
confronting Pharaoh and putting him on notice that the God of Israel had
called his people to worship him in the desert. Burning bush or no burning
bush, Moses knew as well as anyone that this would not go down very well
back at the palace in Egypt. He also knew that having Yahweh’s calling
card in his back pocket was hardly assurance that Pharaoh would roll out
the red carpet for him, much less roll over. No, the pushback was going to
be considerable. It might even cost him his life (indeed, it almost did).
Serving as a prophet to an unyielding audience, Moses instantly saw the
immense difficulty of his assigned calling.
 Now through Mark’s gospel, the author and his apostolic friend were
hoping to persuade the Christians at Rome that their calling, despite its
difficulties, was also a prophetic calling. Given the horrific turn of events
taking place in Rome, Christians there now found themselves, much like
Moses before the burning bush, at an existential point of decision. The
choice was fairly clear cut: either swim against the current by boldly
proclaiming God’s message despite the risks, or blend quietly back into the
flow of the dominant culture, allowing themselves to be carried along by
the riptides of a pagan society. That was the dilemma.
To all the Christians in Rome who were having second thoughts about
their own commitment, Mark’s message was uncompromising. We know
this because at the gospel’s climactic mid-point, Mark very intentionally
includes some of Jesus’ most challenging words:

For whoever should want to save their life will lose it, and those who
would allow their lives to be lost for my sake, and for the sake of the
gospel, well, that one will save it. For what will it profit anyone to gain
the whole world and yet forfeit his or her life? (Mark 8:35–36)

BURNING BUSH
Moses’ encounter with the burning bush was also an encounter with Jesus. This becomes clear on
considering either Jesus’ transfiguration (Mark 9:2–13) or his reception of the Spirit (Mark 1:10–13),
moments that point ahead to his glorified resurrected state. When the Risen Lord meets Paul on the
road to Damascus, he appears in a bright light (Acts 9:3). Likewise, when he appears to John at
Patmos, his eyes are like “blazing fire” (Revelation 1:14). Given what we know about Jesus’
appearance in these places, we conclude that the pre-incarnate Jesus was in the bush as well. It is
ultimately Christ who instigates the First Exodus, as well as the Last.

Although the Christians’ task of proclamation is similar to the

prophetic task of Moses, Mark never intended for Moses to serve as a role
model, much less as a primary source of inspiration. No, the Christian
believers needed a higher model, a God-Man who gave his life to fulfill
God’s purposes. Since Jesus had given his life for this gospel message, the
implications should be clear enough for anyone wanting to follow him.
 Still, in order to sing and mean “I surrender all…,” sometimes we as
Christians—today as well as in Mark’s time—need something more than a
sheer fact. Sometimes we need a vision, a bold vision that captures our
imagination. Maybe the syllogism, “Jesus did it, and, therefore, you should,
too” should be motivation enough for us to lose our lives. But for many,
however weak our faith, we need not just a logical rationale but a
compelling story in which we can find our own place. To switch metaphors,
just seeing the sheet music on the stand is not enough; we need a tune we
can sing along with.
Mark provides just that in the first half of his gospel. It is the familiar
tune of the Exodus, but this time remixed with new vocalists and different
instruments. Here we might think of the tune as being composed in not one
but two keys, with two verses unfolding before the climactic chorus of
Peter’s confession at Philippi (Mark 8:27–30). The first verse of this song
we may think of as being in the key of “sea” (pun intended); then from
there Mark takes it up a few steps to the key of “mountain.” And just as
every musical key has its own characteristics and feeling, the same is true in
Mark’s ballad. Once we get a better idea of the song, we will also get a
better idea of why the Gospel of Mark played so well in Rome.

By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea

When the second gospel opens, we find Jesus proclaiming the
Kingdom of God and preparing to take on disciples: “As Jesus was going
along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew” (Mark
1:16). The next thing we know, the two brothers—well-situated and
financially secure small business owners—drop their nets and tackle and
follow. Soon after that, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, also working
on the shore of Galilee, follow Jesus, too. We notice that both of these
remarkable encounters happen while Jesus is passing along or by the Sea
(para tēn thalassan—Mark 1:16). This detail is interesting because when
the first Exodus took place, the moment of crisis occurred just after the
Egyptians had hemmed in the Israelites by the sea (LXX: para tēn
thalassan—Exodus 14:9). Is this a coincidence?
I think not. First consider the four fishermen and the impact of Jesus’
calling on their lives. When Jesus invites them to follow him, they willingly
leave behind all their possessions. At this point, for all they know they are
giving up no more than their livelihood. But eventually they will realize that
their faith in Jesus will cost them much more. It will require them to “lose”
their very lives. Even so, as the disciples continue to follow and as Jesus
patiently disabuses them of their false assumptions and re-encounters them
afresh day by day, they undergo transformation. The transformation is
halting, a two-steps-forward-one-step back transformation, but
transformation nonetheless.
The venue “by the sea” is therefore a point of departure; it provides the
setting for the most important decision of their lives. Later, on multiple
occasions in fact, Jesus will teach the crowds “by the sea” as he forces them
to make their own decisions in response (Mark 2:13; 3:7; 4:1; 5:21). Some
who have come to the brink of the sea follow Jesus on his Exodus; others
balk and turn back. This makes sense because in the Old Testament
narrative, “by the sea” is where the children of Israel had to make their own
decision on the spot: Would Yahweh save or not? And of course Yahweh
would—and now so does Jesus. For true disciples, as for the Israelites
under Moses, the sea betokened liberation.
The next time we meet the sea in Mark’s narrative is 3:7: “Jesus
withdrew with his disciples to the sea, and a great crowd from Galilee
followed.” Here again we hear faint rumblings of Exodus. When we picture
Jesus withdrawing (the Greek verb anachōreō connotes escape) to the sea
with a “great crowd” (polys plēthos) in tow, we cannot help but think of the
“mixed multitude” (epimiktos polys—Exodus 12:38) who followed Moses
as he withdrew/escaped “to the Red Sea” (Exodus 13:18). Again, we get the
sense that Mark mentions the sea not because he is obsessed with
geographical detail for its own sake, but because he wants to take advantage
of an image rich in allusiveness.
Gospel scholars generally agree that Mark uses geographical realities
like the sea as structural markers. In this connection, I should mention that
one common structural device used by many biblical writers is called an
inclusio, a fancy term for a wrap-around. Think of television journalism.
When we hear the anchor say, “Monica Schneider has details…,” we know
this is a cue-in for the camera to switch to the reporter on the scene (for
example, standing on the beach covering the hurricane story). Every
standard cue-in has an equally predictable cue-out: “This is Monica
Schneider, CLTV News.” The reporter’s name brackets the segment.
Likewise, when the sea shows up the first time in Mark 1:16, it’s a cue-in;
the second time in 3:7, it’s a cue-out. That means the segment contains
everything in between (Mark 1:17—3:6). To switch back to our original
metaphor, Mark 1:16 and 3:7 contain the first and last note in the key of
“sea,” and everything in between is one refrain.
Once we think of Mark 1:17—3:6 as one section, we can begin to
discern twin themes within that section: deliverance and opposition.
Following the calling of the disciples in Mark 1, Jesus releases people from
their demons and ailments. At the same time, he has to endure antagonism
from the demons (Mark 1:21–28) and even to some extent from his own
disciples as they seek to impose their own agenda (Mark 1:35–37). New
opportunities for deliverance present themselves, and with each new
opportunity come new opponents, in particular, the religious leaders. Jesus
offers forgiveness (Mark 2:1–12), releases from social stigma (Mark 2:13–
17), dissolves outmoded rituals of fasting (Mark 2:18–22), and nullifies the
Pharisees’ ruthlessly strict sabbatarianism (Mark 2:23–28; 3:1–6). When
Jesus forgives the paralytic, the doubters wonder inside whether Jesus is a
blasphemer (Mark 2:6–7); by the time he heals the man with the shriveled
hand, even those who normally despise each other are comparing notes on
how they might kill this Jesus (Mark 3:6).
All these episodes, bookended by the two mentions of “sea,”
demonstrate Jesus’ inner determination to deliver as well as the ever-
increasing hostility from without. Again, this makes perfect sense when
held up against the plotline of the Exodus. After all, in Moses’ situation the
sea served as the final battleground between God and those who opposed
him; the sea also proved to be the very means of Israel’s deliverance.
According to biblical logic, “by the sea” quite naturally points to where
divine deliverance and cosmic conflict go hand in hand.

Healing of the Leper

The healing of the leper (Mark 1:40–45) bears this out. The story itself
is fairly straightforward. In the midst of Jesus’ tour of Galilee, a leper
appears from the crowd and kneels down right before Jesus (Mark 1:40).
We could have cut the tension with a knife. Ritually unclean, lepers were
the great untouchables of the ancient Jewish world. Touch a leper, and you
would spend the next week in quarantine, disqualified for a time from
participating in temple life. What will Jesus do?
 Mark tells us exactly what Jesus does. Jesus stretches out his arm and
touches him, saying, “Be clean!” (Mark 1:41) Presumably, Jesus didn’t
have to do this. We know other healing stories where touch is not involved.
If Jesus’ willingness to touch the leper is not surprise enough—here is
another: the leper is instantly cured. Jesus performs a convincing miracle.
The brief, simple story is magnificent in its own right; no wonder the gospel
writers were keen to preserve it for posterity.
At the same time, I would like to suggest something else is happening
here. In this story, Mark is dealing with two physical realities: a man’s
leprous body and a hand extended for deliverance. Interestingly, we get
exactly this combination of images in Exodus 4:6–7, where Yahweh
instructed Moses to extend his hand inside his cloak and then withdraw it
again so it became instantly leprous, as white as snow. When Moses, again
on Yahweh’s prompt, put his hand inside his cloak and then withdrew it a
second time, it was immediately cured. In the Bible, only Moses (by
Yahweh’s power, of course) had the ability to turn leprous skin into healthy
skin instantaneously—and vice versa—simply by stretching out his hand. In
Exodus, this was the second of two signs to authenticate Moses’ calling at
the opening stages of his prophetic ministry. The first sign for Moses was
his ability to turn his staff into a serpent and, then grabbing the serpent by
the tail, back again (Exodus 4:1–5). Arguably, Mark’s Jesus has already
grabbed the serpent by the tail (so to speak) through his many exorcisms
(Mark 1:21–28, 32–34). Is the story of Jesus next extending his reach into
the realm of leprosy just a coincidence?
Here is another piece to consider. As we know from the book of
Exodus, every time Moses extends his hand, he is signaling a manifestation
of Yahweh’s power. This includes the parting of the waters (Exodus 14:21,
26) but also most of the plagues (Exodus 7:19; 8:5–6, 16–17; 9:22; 10:12–
13, 21–22), which are also called “signs and wonders” (Exodus 7:3) or
simply “signs” (Exodus 10:1–2). The plagues are called signs because they
are meant to testify to the power of Yahweh and the corresponding futility
of continued resistance to his purposes. For this reason, it is all the more
interesting to find, in Mark, Jesus instructing the healed leper to present
himself to the priest—“as a testimony to them” or perhaps better translated
“as a testimony against them” (Mark 1:44). For Mark, when Jesus comes to
deliver the leper from his condition, the miracle itself serves as a kind of
“sign” or “testimony” against the religious elite. The implication is
startlingly clear: Jesus is to Moses as the priests were to Pharaoh’s officials.
Then or now, wherever God is working to deliver, almost always there will
be opposition. How ironic that those opposing are the religious leaders
themselves.

Healing of the Paralytic

In another story, Jesus is teaching in a crowded home when four men,
hoping to find healing for their paralyzed friend, discover that they are
unable to access Jesus on account of the crowd. Undeterred, the four men
climb up to the roof, carve out a hole through the beams, and then plunk the
paralytic down in front of Jesus (Mark 2:1–4). Impressed with their faith,
Jesus declares that the paralytic’s sins are forgiven. The scribes on the
scene, however, are less impressed; in fact, they are particularly
unimpressed with Jesus and his blasphemous presumption in forgiving sins.
Aware of the scribes’ internal response, Jesus confronts his skeptics with a
rhetorical question: “Which is easier? To say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are
forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take up your mat and walk’? But in order
that you might know that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins on
earth…” (Mark 2:9–10). Jesus then instructs the paralytic to walk, and the
man gleefully complies and goes home.
In considering Jesus’ command to the paralytic, we should notice
Jesus’ choice of phrase, “But in order that you might know [hina de
eidēte],” a phrase that recurs with minor variation in the Exodus account. In
anticipation of the very first plague, right before Aaron strikes the waters
with his staff, Moses conveys Yahweh’s message to Pharaoh: “By this you
will know that I am the Lord” (Exodus 7:17). Later, after the second plague,
Moses agrees to pray for the removal of the frogs “in order that you might
know” (LXX: hina eidēs) that none is like Yahweh (Exodus 8:10). In
subsequent confrontations with Pharaoh, Moses falls back to the exact same
wording again and again (Exodus 8:22; 9:14, 29; 10:2; 11:7; 14:4, 18). For
Pharaoh, Moses had made his point—ad nauseam: All the plagues were
executed for Pharaoh and the Egyptians, “in order that you might know” the
Lord. Mark’s Jesus causes the paralytic to rise before the unbelieving
scribes for the same purpose: “in order that you might know” the Lord.
The strange coming together of liberation and conflict in Jesus’ story
must have been a powerful lesson for folks back in Rome. Maybe some
there had heard about Jesus and believed but never dreamed even in their
worst nightmares that this belief would cause them such trouble. Now that
naming Christ comes with a sizable cost, the Roman Christians need help in
orienting themselves amidst all the confusion. Leveraging Jesus’ example,
Mark’s message is simple: We should not be surprised by opposition to this
gospel of liberation. Indeed, we should expect it and plan accordingly. To
follow in Jesus’ footsteps is to follow a path of unmitigated conflict. Of
course, many parts of the world today know this full well. In the West,
given recent shifts in the culture, I believe we also are now coming to new
terms with this jarring truth.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Mark changes key seamlessly from the sea to the mountain. Although
the evangelist resorts to the mountain motif less frequently than Matthew,
he still attaches special significance to this particular geographical feature.
For Mark, the mountain is not only associated with the official temple
(Mark 11:23—when Jesus refers to the mountain being cast into the sea, he
means the Temple Mount), but also the unofficial temple on which Jesus
himself met with Moses and Elijah as he was being transfigured (Mark 9:2–
9). Again, the mountain is set apart for special encounters.
Here I am particularly concerned with a segment in Mark, cued-in with
the evangelist’s first mention of mountain at Mark 3:13 (“he went up on a
mountain”) and cued-out on the next occurrence when Jesus prays on the
mountain in 6:46 (“he went up on a mountain”). When we look at the
content between these two verses, we find teaching on the demonic realm
(Mark 3:20–30), extensive teaching on other matters (Mark 3:31—4:34),
and then a miracle (Mark 4:35–41). Next we find Jesus’ interaction with the
demonic realm (Mark 5:1–20); more proclamation and teaching, plus
miracles plus sending (Mark 5:21—6:14); an interruptive story about John’s
execution (Mark 6:14–29); then finally another miracle (Mark 6:30–44).
From thirty thousand feet, it looks like a mad frenzy of activity without any
immediate discernible shape or contours. On closer inspection, however, we
begin to discern a deeper purpose behind Mark’s descriptions.
Calling of the Twelve
Noting that the official religious establishment is now conspiring to
murder Jesus (Mark 3:6), the thoughtful reader may be forgiven for asking,
“Okay, if those office holders whom we are accustomed to think of as being
on God’s side are actually aligning themselves against God’s purposes, then
who now really belongs to and speaks for Israel?” Mark himself seems
mindful of the question when he next tells us that Jesus then “went up the
mountain” (Mark 3:13). There Jesus called those whom he wanted and they
came to him: “He designated twelve, whom he also named as apostles, in
order that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach
and to have authority over demons” (Mark 3:13–15).
All this sounds a lot like Moses. But whereas Moses ascended the
mountain in order to constitute Israel as a nation around the law, Mark’s
Jesus ascends his own mountain to constitute the people of God around his
own will and calling (Mark 3:13). Likewise, just as there were twelve tribes
of Israel, that Jesus calls twelve, designating them apostles, is not an
accident. The point is not that Jesus is replacing the Israel of God. Rather,
Jesus is refining what it means to be “Israel,” and this involves bringing in
new personnel and refining the vision statement. The Mosaic Law entailed
a clear purpose: that Israel might be holy and thus woo the nations to
Yahweh, that they might come, centripetally as it were, in droves to Zion.
The new vision statement that Jesus issues is equally missions-driven.
But they also have differences. First, in Jesus’ thinking, the flow of
movement is not so much inward (centripetal) as outward (centrifugal).
Along these lines, Jesus never here speaks to issues that tend to preoccupy
so many churches, like the issue of infrastructure, for example. He never
says to the Twelve, “Make sure you have a highly visible church building, a
well-paved parking lot, and an attractive children’s ministry wing.” Instead,
the focus is on outward-direct activities. The missionary task is now also
more specific; with a twofold calling: in addition to the fundamental task of
being with Jesus, the apostles are called (1) to preach and (2) to exercise
authority over the demonic. In my view, this twofold mission statement,
standing both in continuity and in discontinuity with the Mosaic Law,
drives the next three chapters in Mark. For in Mark 3:13—6:46, the
mountain segment, we see Jesus and his disciples first and foremost
engaged in preaching the gospel and purging away the demonic. Two
examples might help clarify this further.

Feeding of the Five Thousand

While Mark 4 and its seed parables (Mark 4:1–34) are an excellent
example of the kind of preaching Jesus enjoined in Mark 3:14, I would like
to focus on another text: the feeding of the five thousand (Mark 6:30–44).
The scene follows on the heels of the grim news of the Baptizer’s death at
the hands of Herod (Mark 6:14–29). Having drawn back the curtain on
King Herod’s dissolute festivities, culminating in the death of God’s
prophet, Mark makes sure that his next step is to tell the story of another
king’s meal, the meal of King Jesus.
Although the initial plan was for Jesus and the Twelve to withdraw
from the crowds to a deserted place, they nevertheless find Jesus—and they
bring their needs with them! In compassionate response, Jesus teaches them
(Mark 6:34). As the day wears on, the disciples counsel Jesus to send the
crowds on their way so that they might fend for themselves for the evening
meal. Questioning their assumption that finding food is the crowd’s
responsibility, Jesus asks the disciples to provide for the crowd’s hunger by
drawing on whatever resources they have on hand. Little do the disciples
know at first that their best and only necessary resource is staring them in
the face!
At Jesus’ bidding, the disciples scare up some bread and fish and
divide the throng into groups of hundreds and fifties. This is reminiscent of
an interesting passage in which Moses’ father-in-law, on the Israelites’
arrival in the wilderness, gives Israel’s redeemer some good advice. “Select
capable men,” Jethro said, “and put them in charge of thousands, hundreds,
fifties, and tens” (Exodus 18:21). The breaking down of the Israelite men
into hierarchical units of varying sizes was not only a shrewd way of
establishing administrative structures for a smooth-running commonwealth,
it was also a sound strategy for any nation preparing for war. The kind of
organization that Jethro was recommending is just what nations do. Coming
back to Jesus’ meal, we know the outcome: By the end of the day, the five
thousand men and their families are well fed, leaving twelve baskets of
scraps behind as leftovers. Jesus has offered his own miraculous desert meal
much as Moses had done in his day through the manna. More than that,
Jesus has now set up a new nation of his own around the Twelve.
Through this action of feeding the crowds, Jesus is preaching more
loudly than words could have ever done. If King Herod throws wild parties
while paying little mind to God’s requirements or the value of human life,
Jesus holds his own party to model what a dinner hosted by the true King of
Israel should look like. It is a dinner where none are turned away, all are
treated equally, and all look to God for his gracious provision. True, Herod
had done his worst to John the Baptist, but news of this tragedy would
neither force Jesus’ community into hiding nor otherwise shut down their
ongoing commitments.
Within days of John’s martyrdom, Jesus and the disciples respond by
hosting a celebratory meal, a Passover meal in the desert (the gospels tell us
that this was Passover time), signifying—now with more significance than
ever—that just as God had delivered Israel from oppressive rulers and
systems in the past, he will do the same in the future. If a word is here for
Mark’s persecuted church, it is that they must stick to the basics, not simply
despite Nero’s nonsense but in some measure because of it. In defiance of
the wicked rulers of this world, the community’s ongoing preaching of the
word and celebration of the sacrament remain the very tokens that Exodus
is still underway.

Exorcism of the Demoniac

Let’s consider another passage, which finds that Jesus has just landed
in the region of the Gerasenes on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee
(Mark 5:1). When the demon-possessed man comes running at full tilt to
meet Jesus (that must have been quite a sight in itself), he calls out to him
as the “Son of the Most High God” (Mark 5:7). In the Old Testament as
well as here, this is a typically Gentile way of referring to the God of Israel.
Thus we infer that this demoniac is a Gentile, subject to the thrall of
unclean, pagan spiritual forces.
Jesus is determined to set him free, however, and to that end he asks
the demoniac his name. The demoniac’s response is as interesting as it is
eerie: “My name is Legion, for we are many” (Mark 5:9). The use of the
term legion is significant, for the word refers to not simply a large number,
but also a standard unit of Roman troops. By identifying himself as
“Legion,” the demoniac is speaking to the severity of the demonic
possession as well as to the ways in which those same occupying spirits are
linked to the occupying Romans. This would not have been entirely
surprising for Mark’s readers because everyone knew that demonic activity
was closely tied to idolatry, and the Romans were nothing if they weren’t
idolaters. Therefore, as I argue more fully in my book, Jesus the Temple, the
face-off between Jesus and this demon-possessed man is no peripheral
footnote in the life and times of Jesus; rather, it is a center-stage battle
between the demonic gods of Rome and the one true God represented by
and in Jesus Christ. (Readers of Exodus will by now get the sneaking
suspicion that they’ve run into this storyline before, though with a different
set of actors.)

PASSOVER BREAD
When the Israelites held the first Passover meal, they were instructed to eat unleavened bread. For the
purposes of the Passover, infiltrating leaven was considered toxic and was to be avoided at all costs.
Avoiding the leaven of sin for their own equivalent to the Passover meal, Christians recall Christ’s
death through the celebration of the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper. But the divine presence in the bread
was not something brand new. The manna in the desert was also thought to have special life-giving
properties, especially since it contained God’s life-giving word. We learn from John, however, that as
extraordinary as this Christ-invested manna may have been, it was pointing ahead to the “true bread,”
Jesus.

If you know what happens next, you know that Jesus then commands
the evil spirits to depart from the afflicted man and enter into the pigs
congregating on the hillside. By his own authority and in a stroke, Jesus
tames the strong man, Satan, just as he had more or less promised earlier in
the gospel (Mark 3:20–30). But there’s more. Now infested by the legion of
demons, the pigs begin to run off the cliff and straight into the water where
they drown (Mark 5:13). This is not gratuitous cruelty to animals on Jesus’
part; it is Jesus engineering a crucial symbolism. Because first-century
Roman soldiers and political leaders right up to the top would employ
images of the pig or boar—whether on coins or on battle standards—as a
kind of logo of their own brute strength, a “Legion-filled” herd of pigs
drowned in the sea has a meaning all its own.
 We can only imagine members of Mark’s first audience at Rome
responding as soon as they hear Jesus’ adversary identify himself as
“Legion.” Perhaps some sit bolt upright in heightened rapt attention; others
audibly gasp; still others simply begin to weep. This story of Jesus, they
soon realize, is also their story; they are the ones in the crosshairs of this
very battle. And as the story resolves with the legion shifting into the pigs
who in turn take themselves to the bottom of the sea, the Roman Christians
get the picture. For they know full well that other story of a pagan force that
tried to take on the God of Israel only to suffer defeat by sinking to the
bottom of the sea. Although the Roman Christians must feel very much
alone and vulnerable to the cruel whims of Nero, now on hearing Mark’s
gospel for the very first time, they are reminded that they are not alone.
Jesus has already gone through this battle ahead of them—and won. And
just as God dealt with Pharaoh, one day he would also deal with Nero and
his diabolical henchman.
Until then, Mark insists, Christians should not be deterred from their
shared mission of preaching and exorcism. Persecution or no persecution,
they must continue preaching the gospel boldly and praying boldly that the
forces of darkness might give way to the Kingdom of light. At the
mountain, Jesus laid out the apostolic marching orders: preach the gospel
and exorcise the demons. This was God’s appointed way to enact the new
Exodus and to force history—through life or death, through acceptance or
rejection—on to its eschatological conclusion.
Sea and mountain—this is Mark’s thumbnail retelling of the Exodus.
At the sea, Jesus calls his disciples to follow him in the dangerous mission
of liberation. At the mountain, Jesus calls them to be faithful in
proclamation (be it verbal or sacramental) and prayer. In the face of
forbidding spiritual darkness, Mark calls his readers at Rome on to the
same. That calling is ours, too, so long as we have ears to hear the strains of
Exodus taking place in our lives—and a willingness to carry the tune.
PLAGUES—GOSPEL OF JOHN
  

David Dahlstrom was living the nightmare. In 1985, the locksmith

from (let’s just say for now) “somewhere in Utah” had lost his wallet. At
the time, it happened to contain his Social Security card, birth certificate,
and driver’s license. Of course any day you lose your wallet is, by
definition, a bad day (I know—I’ve been there). And any day you lose your
wallet while it’s carrying your Social Security card, birth certificate, and
driver’s license is a very bad day. And for Mr. Dahlstrom, this was just the
beginning of a series of very bad days.
Within a few years, as The New York Times tells the story, Dahlstrom
received a letter informing him that his credit card application had been
denied. Only problem was that he hadn’t applied for a credit card. The
following year he received an insurance claim for an accident that—as far
as he knew—never happened. Another insurance claim for another phantom
accident came the next year. Things went from bad to worse. Soon Mr.
Dahlstrom was being implicated for crimes he never knew about, much less
committed: vandalism, burglary, leaving the scene of an accident, and
making a bomb threat. All the while, his credit was plummeting through the
floor and beyond. This went on for seventeen years, climaxing with the
news of a warrant being issue in California for his arrest—again for a crime
he never committed. In case you haven’t figured it out, Dahlstrom was the
victim of identity theft.
Fortunately, the beleaguered locksmith finally found the key he needed
when the identity thief’s girlfriend, in an unguarded moment, revealed her
boyfriend’s real name to a parole officer in L.A. Soon the police were
comparing fingerprints and realized that there really were—much as the
Utah-based Dahlstrom had been insisting all along—two Mr. Dahlstroms:
the real one and the fraud. Eventually, in the spring of 2007, the L.A. city
attorney’s office filed charges against the ID bandit, involving eighty-one
counts of identity theft and fraud. Nightmare over—well, sort of. Because
then the bureaucratic clean-up follows.
About thirty thousand cases of identity theft are reported in the U.S.
every year, involving billions of dollars. I myself have been a victim of
identity theft. (The good news is that my double, also from California, was
not only law-abiding but actually paid his bills on time. I was half tempted
to smoke him out by doing what I could to ruin our shared credit rating to
the point that he would have to sign an affidavit that he was not Nicholas
Perrin after all. That would show him!) Identity theft is no picnic. It’s a
costly and pervasive societal problem.

The Perils of Messianic Identity in Jewish Antiquity

Another kind of identity theft proved to be a costly and pervasive
problem in the first-century world. In this case I’m not talking about
personal identity theft but something else altogether—a messianic identity
theft. While Jews in those days certainly knew nothing about a damaged
credit rating, they were intimately aware of the risk inherent in throwing in
one’s lot with a messianic contender. How did a contender prove not to be a
contender after all? Well, the fact would become stunningly obvious for all
to see: “messiahs” who turned out not to be the messiah after all ended up
on a Roman cross. (The Romans were not happy with identity theft either.)
And those who backed such a messiah could expect trouble as well. In the
best case scenario, this would be a knock on your personal judgment for
having supported the wrong cause; in a less pleasant scenario, it would
involve the Roman authorities knocking on your door. Cases of mistaken
messianic identity can have deleterious effects not just on the claimant but
also on those who supported him. Anytime someone came around claiming,
“I am the messiah; I am your new Moses,” you would be a fool not to think
twice—maybe three times.
In addition to incurring the personal risk of supporting a failed
messianic movement, enthusiasts bore an intangible psychological cost,
sustained on a national level, for repeated revolutionary failure. For behind
the agonized screams of every failed messiah was another much fainter but
nonetheless very distinct sound: the sound of Israel’s dreams for freedom
crashing to the ground. And every time some new brave soul would try to
put the pieces of Israel’s shattered dreams together again, the cracks would
become all the more obvious. The sound of each successive crash would
become increasingly piercing and demoralizing. “We’ve seen this before,”
the people would say with a note of resignation. “This time, let’s just sit
back and see where it goes.” As time wore on, the idea of a victorious
messiah and a newly freed Israel seemed more and more like a pipe dream.
Despite Yahweh’s promise, hope became increasingly hard to come by.
An aggravating factor here was the relative ease with which any
aspirant, given a healthy tolerance for risk, could stake a messianic claim. A
common perception today among the rank and file of Bible readers is that
the ancient Jews knew exactly what they were looking for in the messiah.
This is erroneous. In reality, while certain functions were generally
characteristic of the messiah (or messiah-like figures), the expectations
varied considerably. The variability of messianic profiles in turn afforded a
fairly broad spectrum of approaches for anyone who cared to take a shot at
the Anointed One’s mantle. Every generation seemed to have its
representative hopefuls.
In the meantime, Judaism struggled with the nagging question as to the
appropriate credentials for those entering into this particular fray. In short, if
someone came along passing himself off as the messiah, by what criteria
would you determine the initial validity of that claim? To be sure, there is
no simple answer here, inasmuch as different theological expectations
within Judaism seemed to yield up different approaches. At the same time,
at least some agreed-upon core characteristics are evident.
The Jewish historian Josephus informs us about the activities of
several would-be messiahs in his own time. In a brief account, he describes
(in disapproving terms of course—remember he was writing for the Roman
aristocracy) an otherwise nameless band who dreamed the messianic dream:

These men were deceivers and frauds who under the pretense of
inspiration trafficked in revolution and rebellion; and they persuaded
the multitude to fall under their spell. And so they went before them
 leading them into the wilderness, as if God would demonstrate signs
(sēmeia) of freedom for the people there. (Josephus, Wars of the Jews,
2.259)

Next Josephus touches on the story of another man, one Theudas the
Egyptian, who was executed for religio-political seditious activity within
little more than a decade of Jesus’ death. This Theudas…

persuaded most of the crowd to take along their possessions and to

follow him to the Jordan River, for he had said to them that he was a
prophet and that he would part the river on command and grant them
easy passage through it. (Antiquities of the Jews, 20.97)

The two excerpts from Josephus, reflecting two cases of mistaken

messianic identity, are instructive. In the first instance, political insurgents
had led a crowd into the desert with the promise of “signs of freedom” that
Yahweh would do on their behalf. Even though Josephus certainly had no
interest in glamorizing this abortive venture, one can tell from the historical
report that this particular movement had been preparing to cook up their
own Exodus—the wafting scents of “crowd” (think Moses’ “mixed
multitude”), desert, and divinely wrought “signs of freedom” are hard to
mistake. In the second incident concerning Theudas, we find intimations of
not Moses but Joshua, who parted the Jordan River as he invaded the
Promised Land. Yet this could not be detached from the new Exodus hope.
The Conquest was simply an extension of the Exodus; it was the immediate
goal to which the Exodus had been pointing all along.
Thus, we have two historic reports of two messianic movements, both
setting the scene with an Exodus backdrop. The first of these two reports
handed down by Josephus even has reference to “signs” (sēmeia), the very
thing that Moses had produced in the form of the plagues and sea crossing.
Apparently, anyone in Jesus’ day who aspired to the office of Moses would
have to be ready to show some high-level ID. If they could produce some
evidentiary “signs,” that would be like an affidavit co-signed by God.
Making Sense of Sign Language
In John 6, after Jesus has fed the five thousand and walked on the Sea
of Galilee, the crowds follow him to the far shore. Engaging him in
discussion, they ask, “So then, what sign [sēmeion] will you do in order that
we might see and believe you?” (John 6:30). The question is immediately
followed in the next verse by a suggestion: How about some bread? Note
that after having just participated in a miracle that was essentially a
reenactment of Moses’ bestowal of manna (John 6:1–14), the crowds ask
for a “sign.” Their choice of words indicates that they have already settled
in their own minds that Jesus is bound to operate within the broad
parameters set out by the Exodus narrative. Given the facts that (1) Moses
was the original sign-giver and indeed the sign-giver par excellence
(Deuteronomy 34:11), (2) Jesus has already styled himself as Moses by
providing bread in the desert, and (3) first-century messianic expectation
seems to have regarded “signs” as a prerequisite for leading a new Exodus,
it follows that the crowds are not just looking for more bread (although they
were) but were also hoping to confirm Jesus as their new Moses. This much
is perhaps already implied when John relates that they sought to make Jesus
“king by force” (John 6:15). (Jesus’ declining the offer confuses the crowd,
leading them to ask, “Well, does this guy want the Moses job or not?!”) At
any rate, here’s the point: Exodus and signs go tightly hand in hand.
Whenever the biblical writers express the miraculous through the
vocabulary of “signs,” they are trading very specifically on the person of
Moses.
If this background helps us to understand the crowd’s expectations of
Jesus, the purpose clause within the request (“What sign will you do in
order that we might see and believe you?” [John 6:30]), when set against
the events of Exodus 13–14, also tells us something about the crowd’s
spiritual condition. We recall that right before the Israelites entered the sea,
Moses called on them to be still and believe Yahweh for his deliverance
(Exodus 14:13–14). Yet only in the afterglow of the miraculous sea
crossing, as the Israelites pondered the Egyptian bodies floating up on
shore, did the Israelites come to believe: “Israel saw the great work which
the Lord did against the Egyptians. Thus the people feared the Lord, and
believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses” (Exodus 14:31). While this
may be an endorsement of the Israelites’ faith, it is not a ringing one.
Unwilling to take God simply at his word, the Israelites had to see the signs
for themselves. For them, seeing divine signage was the necessary and
sufficient condition for believing. By requesting a sign that would allow
them to take the step from seeing to believing, Jesus’ crowd shows that it is
operating by the same logic of faith. Obviously, a willingness to believe on
the basis of signs is better than a flat refusal to believe at all, but this is not
ideal faith.
The crowd’s insistence on signs hardly renders them unique. Other
figures in the fourth gospel come to believe only on the basis of signs. Here
we might think of Nathanael (“Do you believe because I told you that I saw
you under the fig tree?” [John 1:50]); the crowds surrounding the royal
official at Capernaum (“Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not
believe” [John 4:48]); witnesses of Lazarus rising from the dead (“Many of
the Jews… had seen what Jesus did and believed” [John 11:45]); and,
famously, Thomas (“Unless I see the impression of the nails in his arms… I
will not believe” [John 20:25]). Thomas receives Jesus’ most explicit
response on this issue: “Have you believed because you have seen me?
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have still believed” (John
20:29). For John’s Jesus, the biggest blessing is reserved for those who
don’t need to rely on what they have seen to believe; signs are a crutch for
the weak of faith. This helps us to put John’s signs into clearer perspective.
It also helps us better understand the nature of Jesus’ relationship to
Moses and indeed Jesus’ relationship to us. When Jesus comes performing
signs like Moses, he is not trying to reach the bar set by a prophetic
predecessor, as if Moses had set the definitive example. Rather, since the
people are expecting a prophet like Moses, Jesus’ performance of signs is
an accommodation to the limited framework of his target audience.
Sometimes God meets us on our own terms, even if those terms are
informed by our own spiritual immaturity. Just because God blesses us in
our own little world, a world in which our perception of God and his
purposes is also very small, those blessings are no permission slip for us to
stay where we are. We need to get past the static idea of faith as a strictly
either/or matter—as something we either have or we don’t, end of story. For
those of us who have faith, we should be aware that this faith is a dynamic
reality that comes in degrees. John forces us to self-examination: Have I
been believing God for bigger things this year than I was at this time last
year?
Creation and Exodus in John
In the first-century B.C. Jewish writing, the Wisdom of Solomon (a text
certainly known by the Apostle Paul and probably, too, by most if not all of
the biblical writers), the author is concerned to re-present the Exodus story
in such a way so as to make it relevant to his own time. Although the author
is aware that Yahweh performed many miracles through Moses, these are
reduced to seven “signs” which are as follows: (1) water into blood; (2)
plague of frogs; (3) plagues of locusts and flies; (4) plague of hail; (5)
plague of darkness; (6) death of the firstborn; (7) sea crossing. In this text,
the last of these, the sea crossing, which is described as the culminating and
decisive renewal of creation, climactically enfolds all the previous signs
within itself (Wisdom of Solomon 19:6). But why has the author of Wisdom
pared down what was originally eleven signs (ten plagues plus the sea
crossing) to seven? This one is easy: because seven is the number of
creation (Genesis 1). Since the Exodus as a whole was seen as an act of re-
creation (not least because it gave Israel a whole new lease on life), it was
only fitting that this new creation act be conveyed in seven-fold form.
In the Gospel of John, we likewise find seven signs. The pattern of
seven shared by both authors not only suggests that John is following suit
with Wisdom in presenting the signs as a seven-fold manifestation of new
creation, but also hints—precisely because signs play such an important
role in the gospel—that the fourth gospel is actually a creation story and,
simultaneously, a re-telling of the Exodus narrative. The hint is initially
confirmed in the Prologue (John 1:1–18), which sets up the argument of the
entire gospel. The well-known opening words of John’s gospel simply drip
with Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God
and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Like his gospel-writing predecessors,
Mark (“The beginning of the gospel…”) and Matthew (“The book of
genēsis…”), the fourth evangelist invokes Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning
God created the heavens and the earth”) and in a stroke introduces his story
of Jesus as the story of creation. The astute reader is made to expect that the
ensuing gospel will tell a tale whose significance parallels or exceeds that
of creation itself.

SNAKES
As recorded in Exodus 7:8–13, Moses and Aaron throw their staff to the ground where it becomes a
snake and “swallows” the snakes of Pharaoh’s magicians (Exodus 7:12). This anticipates the way in
which the Red Sea would “swallow” Pharaoh’s army (Exodus 15:12). Later, in Numbers 21:4–9, we
read of God instructing Moses to hoist a bronze snake on a pole to remediate the sin of the people’s
grumbling. Once again, a snake saves the day. Speaking to Nicodemus, Jesus compares himself to
that bronze snake (John 3:14–15)—and by extension, I believe, to the swallowing snake that judges
Egypt’s idols. As strange as this may sound: Wherever we find Moses handling his snakes, there we
find Jesus.

At the same time, John’s Prologue is shot through with Exodus

imagery. The revelation of the Word made flesh amounts to a revelation of
glory (John 1:14), a glory that has also “been made known” (John 1:18).
This parallels the original manifestation of Yahweh’s glory to Moses,
following his plea for divine presence after the disastrous Golden Calf
incident (Exodus 33:18–23; 34:1–7). Just as Yahweh pitched his tent among
the Israelites through the presence of his glory; so too Jesus, John tells us,
has “pitched his tent”—some translations have “made his dwelling”—
among us (John 1:14). And just as Yahweh revealed himself as “gracious”
(Exodus 33:19) and abounding in “faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6) when he
displayed his name to Moses, so too Jesus Christ comes to all of humanity
“full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Very clearly, John has tapped into
Exodus 33–34 to help set the stage for his Jesus story.
In understanding Exodus 33–34 as a backdrop to John, I think we
should realize that the former passage is centrally concerned with the
renewal of Israel’s covenant. John’s gospel also includes a story of
covenantal renewal, not through Moses this time but through Jesus Christ.
We find this in the so-called Book of Glory (John 13–21), where as part of
the inauguration of a new covenant, the disciples are given a new law (“a
new commandment I give you: Love one another” [John 13:34]) along with
a corresponding new priestly status; they are ordained through Jesus’
washing their feet (John 13:1–7)—the pre-requisite for any priest entering
holy space—and a prayer of sanctification (John 17:6–26). Remember that
the Exodus was not just about releasing the Israelites from their bondage; it
was about getting them into the land set aside for worship. The goal has
always been worship. And where we have worship, we also have new
creation. So John tells us, through Jesus’ renewal of the covenant, that
worship and new creation are now finally possible. In Jesus and only in
Jesus, Exodus is now finally complete.
Reading the Signs
We need to round out this discussion by returning one more time to the
issue of signs in the fourth gospel. John’s recurring use of “sign” (in its
technical Mosaic sense), his appropriation of seven “signs” on analogy with
the seven re-creative signs of Wisdom, and his deep interest in Exodus
motifs overall—all these factors add up to show that the fourth evangelist
wants to say something specific about the signs of Jesus. Although scholars
disagree as to the exact identification of a few of these Johannine signs
(whether or not the walking on water episode and the resurrection are to be
counted as signs is debated), most are beyond dispute, as is the fact that
they are indeed seven in number. Without entering into a detailed argument
or too much controversy, I suggest the following seven signs in the fourth
gospel: (1) the Changing of Water into Wine (John 2:1–11); (2) the Healing
of the Royal Official’s Son (John 4:46–54); (3) the Healing of the Paralytic
(John 5:1–15); (4) the Feeding of the Five Thousand (John 6:1–15); (5) the
Healing of the Blind Man (John 9:1–41); (6) the Raising of Lazarus (John
11:1–44); (7) Jesus’ Death and Resurrection (John 18–20). Even though my
argument will be stronger in some places than others, I believe we have a
considerable amount of evidence to support the fact that the evangelist
intended a consistent link between the signs of Jesus on the one side, and
the signs of the Exodus on the other.

1. Changing of Water into Wine

In John 2:1–11, the evangelist tells the story in which Jesus turns water
into wine at a wedding banquet, an act which was “the first of his
miraculous signs” (John 2:11). Jesus affects this transformation because the
wine had run out, and for the host to ask the guests to sate themselves on
water due to an embarrassing wine shortage would have been socially
unthinkable. In this respect, by changing water to wine, Jesus makes the
wine drinkable so far as the purposes of the party are concerned.
When we think back to the first plague, in which the waters of Egypt
were turned into blood (Exodus 7:14–24), we see an event that bears at least
some similarities to Jesus’ first sign. In both cases, water is instantly
transformed into blood/wine (for Christian readers taking Communion,
these two images are almost interchangeable), which, in turn had
implications for its potability (drinkableness). In the original Exodus story,
we recall that the most pressing consequence of the first plague was its
having prevented the Egyptians from drinking the water (Exodus 7:18).
Interestingly, if Moses’ action had temporarily deprived the Egyptians of
the life-giving properties of fresh water by making it undrinkable, here
Jesus reverses the effect of that plague by taking what is undrinkable (at
least in that social situation) and making it drinkable. At a more basic level,
if Moses’ first plague is an act of un-creation, whereby an aspect of creation
is deprived of its essence and inherent goodness (for more on this, see The
Exodus Revealed), then Jesus turning water into wine takes the inherent
goodness of creation and dials it up a notch.

2. Healing of the Royal Official’s Son

John 4 is a remarkable chapter that tells of the transformation of two
individuals on opposite sides of the social spectrum: a Samaritan woman
who has been ostracized on account of her promiscuity (John 4:1–42) and a
royal official whose rank lands him near or at the top of the first-century
pecking order (John 4:43–54). Surprisingly, perhaps, the Samaritan woman
responds positively to her encounter with Jesus; so too does the royal
official, though he is included in a stern rebuke from Jesus (“Unless you
people see miraculous signs and wonders you will never believe” [John
4:48]). Despite the differences between these individuals and their
respective encounters with Jesus, both acknowledge his person and respond
in faith. Both episodes also straddle Jesus’ teaching in John 4:34–38, where
Jesus says that his food is to do the Father’s will. In the fourth gospel, an
intermediary interlude often serves as a kind of comment on the preceding
and following action. In this case, Jesus finds his satisfaction, his food,
through the responses of the Samaritan woman and the royal official. Both
figures are also evidence of the eschatological harvest that Jesus promises
(John 4:35–38). The faith of both figures is like the fruit of the harvest; it’s
like a good meal in the stomach.
Perhaps the royal official’s relationship to Jesus’ food and harvest
relates to the second plague, the plague of frogs (Exodus 7:25—8:15),
which three times is said to have penetrated the houses of the officials. (The
plagues of flies and locusts also penetrate the houses of Pharaoh’s officials,
but in each case this is only remarked upon once [Exodus 8:21; 10:6].) We
recall that the presence of the frogs in the oven and in the kneading troughs
eliminated food production (Exodus 8:3). Due to Pharaoh’s resistance, the
kneading of dough and the baking of bread was made impossible on
account of the second plague. (Along only slightly different lines, the
author of Wisdom likewise draws attention to the inedibility of frogs, in
contrast to the pleasant fare of quail [Wisdom of Solomon 19:9–11].) Jesus,
however, introduces a new era in which the harvest is plentiful, as is the
food made possible by that harvest (John 4:34). Once made hungry through
Moses’ second plague, those outside Israel are now satisfied through Jesus’
second sign.

3. Healing of the Paralytic

The opening pericope of John 5 tells the story of a man who had been
paralyzed for thirty-eight years and Jesus healing him (John 5:1–17). While
the synoptic gospels recount a seemingly unlimited number of stories
pertaining to physical healing, this is the only bodily healing that occurs in
the fourth gospel (the Healing of the Blind Man is limited to ocular
malfunction). In this respect, this story is unique within John.

OUTSTRETCHED ARMS
For a good number of the plagues, not to mention the crossing of the Red Sea, Moses had to stretch
out his arms. So then, the sight of Moses stretching out his arms was the sight of judgment and
redemption. These repeated acts accompanying the plagues foreshadow Jesus stretching out his arms
on a Roman cross. At the end of John’s gospel, when the Risen Jesus tells Peter that he will have to
stretch out his hands (John 21:18), he is almost certainly predicting Peter’s crucifixion. The point is
clear: When you think of Moses’ outstretched arms, think of Jesus Christ crucified.

While we see no obvious analogue to this third sign of John within the
litany of plagues in Exodus, we should note that the only plague to affect
the human body directly was the plague of boils (Exodus 9:8–12). In
delivering this plague against the Egyptians, Yahweh was very clearly
challenging the Egyptian gods of plague and healing. The God of Israel
wanted to make clear that he alone had the power to bestow health and
cause disease.
 In John 5, Jesus sets out to teach a similar lesson. The story begins
with a man who is superstitiously looking to the disturbance of the pool
waters to heal him. Jesus indicates that he himself—not the pool—is the
true source of healing. Helpless and mired in his misplaced trust, the
paralytic is encountered by Jesus who instructs him to stand (John 5:8). He
stands and is cured. By contrast, Pharaoh’s officials who continued to rely
on their false gods of healing became so ill they could not even stand in
Pharaoh’s presence (Exodus 9:11). This may not be disconnected from the
fact that while the creatures created on the sixth day “move along the
ground” (Genesis 1:24), humanity sets itself apart with the ability to stand.
Whereas Moses’ sign temporarily deprived the officials of an aspect of their
humanity, Jesus’ sign restores the same aspect of humanity to the paralytic.

4. Feeding of the Five Thousand

If any one plague corresponds to the Feeding of the Five Thousand
(John 6:1–15), it is the plague of the locusts (Exodus 10:1–20). In any
situation, a locust invasion results in a thorough stripping of the crops,
which in turn makes for a disastrous wheat harvest. (The agricultural effects
of this eighth plague are made explicit in Psalm 105:34–35.) Without
wheat, there is of course no bread. To send in the locusts, therefore, would
be essentially to deprive the people of food. In feeding the masses, Jesus
provides food in a situation where food has been lacking. The Feeding of
the Five Thousand is a sign that the curse of the locusts is now being
eclipsed through Jesus with eschatological blessing.

5. Healing of the Blind Man

In a commentary on his fifth sign, Jesus says, “For judgment I have
come into the world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those
who can see may become blind” (John 9:39). Jesus’ judgment of blindness
against the sighted reminds us of the ninth plague, the plague of darkness.
In the Mosaic plague, the darkness was so severe that the Egyptians could
not even see each other (Exodus 10:23). Those who could see were made
blind. Whereas in the Exodus, Yahweh confers blindness on the spiritually
resistant Pharaoh and his people (literally removing the light from their
world), Jesus comes so that those who cannot see can be made to see. He is
able to do this because, as he claims for himself, he is the light of the world
(John 9:5). Light was the very first thing created by Yahweh (Genesis 1:3).
Whereas Moses’ ninth plague was a sign that reversed this basic aspect of
creation, Jesus’ fifth sign restores the same.

6. Raising of Lazarus
The death of Lazarus may not immediately impress us as a fitting
analogue to the final plague, which dealt the death blow to the unredeemed
firstborn within Goshen. However, the basic issue of power over life lies at
the center of both narratives. On a basic level, if in Exodus the destroying
angel (or the Word of the Lord in some Jewish interpretations) had gone out
from Yahweh to take the life of the firstborn, in John, the Word of the Lord
Jesus has the same power over life; in this case, however, it reverses the
death process by reviving a human from the grave.
We may make a comparison from other angles. There may, for
example, be some significance to the fact that Lazarus is a shortened form
of Eleazar, who functionally became the single surviving son of Aaron and
eventually succeeded him in the high priesthood. (The priestly function of
the firstborn receives some emphasis in Exodus.) To infer that Lazarus is
the sole surviving male within his own family should be enough (had he
other siblings outside Martha and Mary, we would expect to know). As
such, whether or not Lazarus is the firstborn son, he fulfills the same role as
any firstborn son in antiquity: to carry on the family line. While in the
Exodus, Moses brought down a curse on the Egyptian firstborn, by bringing
Lazarus back from the dead, Jesus redeems the firstborn of his people from
the clutches of death.

7. Jesus’ Death and Resurrection

From a very early date, primitive Christianity saw a clear correlation
between Jesus’ death and resurrection and the Exodus through the Red Sea.
This is apparent, for example, through Paul’s identification of baptism
waters with, on the one side, the death of Christ (Romans 6:3) and, on the
other, the sea of crossing (1 Corinthians 10:2). Likewise, when Luke
describes Jesus’ death as his “exodus” (Luke 9:31), this entails not just the
sense of exit afforded by his death but also the redemptive-historical reality
of a new Exodus.
The early Christian identification of Christ with the Passover lamb is
also relevant, inasmuch as the Passover meal—with its inclusion of
unleavened bread prepared in haste—anticipated both the deliverance from
the destroying angel and the impending reality of the Exodus. Given John’s
dating of Jesus’ crucifixion on the Passover (John 13:1; 18:28; 19:14), we
suspect that for him above all the gospel writers, Jesus stands as the
Passover Lamb who prepares for a new Exodus. Through his death and
resurrection, Jesus broke the Pharaoh-like bondage of sin and provided a
new righteousness, life, and calling appropriate for a holy nation.

Implications for the Church Ancient and Modern

In John’s world, a tussle seems to have been going on between
synagogue and church over the hearts and minds of those contemplating the
claims of Jesus even as they sometimes straddled both worlds. In such a
setting, the Jews fully convinced that Jesus was not the messiah would
likely point to the life of Jesus and pose some difficult questions. “How is
it,” they might ask, “that the messiah was supposed to have inaugurated a
fresh series of plagues on a much more intensive scale than the first go-
around, yet this Jesus has done nothing of the sort?” A messiah who was
crucified without having performed the signs leading to Exodus is no
messiah at all. Such a man and those who followed him ought to be
unmasked and revealed for the deceivers they are. “As for us,” they said to
themselves, “we’re going to stick with Moses.”
Writing partially in response to this set of concerns, John is eager to
demonstrate through his carefully crafted gospel that Jesus had in fact
already performed the requisite signs of Exodus during his earthly ministry,
even if their outward expression has been dramatically reworked. In the
first Exodus, the signs of the plagues predominantly functioned as
mechanisms of judgment (Exodus 10:1–2; Deuteronomy 4:34; 6:22; 7:19;
11:3; etc.). In the new Exodus, the signs are acts of re-creation, reversing
the de-creation of judgment that had occurred in the first Exodus. (For those
who resisted these signs, judgment was of course inevitable [John 9:39].) If
the first Exodus brought deliverance for Israel and judgment for the world,
as represented by Pharaoh’s Egypt; the second Exodus brings deliverance
for the world. Why deliverance and not judgment? Because “God did not
send his Son into the world in order to condemn the world, but rather to
save the world through him” (John 3:17). The world had already been
condemned by Moses through his plagues. Now Jesus, as part of a much
bigger rescue operation than Moses could ever dream of, is going back for
the world. By rolling back the Mosaic plagues through his seven symbolic
signs, Jesus is intimating that a new, worldwide Exodus is underway in and
through himself.
So John responds to the objections of his Jewish dialogue partners. “If
any impostors are here,” the evangelist might say, “they are those who
claim to respect Moses’ authority but reject Jesus’ message” (John 5:45–
47). We remember that in the first Exodus story, the signs had issued in one
of two results. On the one hand, the Pharaoh and his officials simply
continued to harden their hearts despite Moses’ rather convincing evidence
that Yahweh, Israel’s God, was in fact Lord of the universe. On the other
hand, those who experienced Yahweh’s redemption could look back and see
Jesus and, having seen, then believe. In the same way, the evangelist
recognizes the same mixed reaction to Jesus. Some were favorable in their
response (“many even amidst the leaders believed in him” [John 12:42]);
others hardened their hearts like Pharaoh (“Although Jesus had done all
these miraculous signs in their presence, they still would not believe in
him.… They could not believe because… he has blinded their eyes and
hardened their hearts” [John 12:37, 39–40]). Of course, the same jury is still
in session to this very day.
For John, the new criterion for belonging to the people of God is faith,
and this faith was the same for the people of that time as it is for us today. It
is not merely cognition or bare mental assent to a theological truism.
Instead, faith means responding properly to the signs of Exodus as revealed
uniquely in Jesus or in the God-driven events that are occurring around us
now in the present. When we see God at work through his Spirit in
overthrowing the malevolent spiritual forces that bear down on us, we each
have our own choice as to whether to harden our hearts or to believe. Once
we believe, a proper response would be to give public credit where credit is
due. This is difficult in a world that values autonomy and self-reliance. But
people only talk about what is real to them, and those things we don’t talk
about cease to become real. When we testify before others to the divine
deliverance taking shape within our lives and own communities, we are not
only encouraging the church but reaffirming the Exodus-orientation of our
calling. Keeping it real is a discipline.
Finally, through his gospel John is giving his hearers the opportunity to
see and believe that new creation is already taking place through the Spirit
within the community of disciples. As history moves forward, its true future
extends directly through this same community, though the world knows it
not. In the beginning, light and life came to us in the person of Jesus. Now
the Risen Lord—whose messianic Social Security card, birth certificate,
and driver’s license have been validated seven times over—meets his
church through the Spirit; light and life, the very glory of God, finds new
expression among his gathered people in their relationships to one another.
When Exodus happens, it happens en masse. You can’t do Exodus by
yourself. It doesn’t take a village, but it does take a holy nation. So long as
radical individualism and consumerist Christianity continue to plague the
modern church, the Exodus may be the one paradigm, the one story of
ecclesial self-understanding, that can deliver us from the bondage of our
self-imposed isolation, loneliness, and emptiness. Jesus has come to roll
back this plague—and all plagues past, present, and future.
PASSOVER—GOSPEL OF LUKE
  

The household of Quartus is busily taking care of last-minute

preparations before their friends from church arrive for the weekly eranos,
that is, their church potluck followed by the Lord’s Supper. At about 3 P.M.
the first guests knock on the door. Fashionably dressed and well perfumed,
most of them had the day free and so also the opportunity to bathe just
before coming over. Glad to see Quartus and his wife, Julia, they put down
the baskets they had been carrying and embrace their hosts. Inside the
baskets are fresh foods recently packed for the evening’s festivities: fruit,
fish, meat, nuts, and much more. As additional guests appear, the people
(now about fifteen or so) begin to recline at their assigned places around the
short, stubby-legged table in the triclinium (the dining area). The most
honored guests sit near the host at the head of the table, while the less
important are farther away. Stretched out, all the guests know their positions
within the social pecking order as they take their places. And if, by chance,
anyone has forgotten, the seating arrangement will surely remind them.
After a prayer, including a prayer of protection for the emperor, the
dinner party gets underway. As the 3 P.M. arrivals start in on their baskets, a
few more guests trickle in. Meanwhile, a slave enters the room looking
around for empty goblets to fill. Drinks are on the host, but in this eranos
dinner (as was standard for most) it was a policy of BYOF (Bring Your
Own Food). On arriving, the guests exchange niceties and the latest news;
the gathering seems to be convivial.
 Eventually, the eating slows, and the people continue to chat while the
servants clear away the plates and brush crumbs from the table. More
alcohol is brought in. At seven o’clock comes a knock at the door.
Fortunatus and his wife, Rufina, stand there. She, too, has a basket in hand,
but it is a fairly small basket by comparison to the others. Just as well—they
never could have afforded to fill a large basket on the wages of a day-to-day
manual laborer. For Fortunatus and Rufina to join the weekly church eranos
is quite a splurge. But Fortunatus insisted that if everyone else was going to
have fine meats for their dinners, they also would go all out and bring
something similar, though in a much smaller amount.
Entering the triclinium, Fortunatus and Rufina greet the familiar faces
and discover pretty quickly that all the spots around the table have been
taken. Accordingly, they are forced to position themselves, as usual, along
the outer perimeter of the room against the wall. As the other (working
class) guests arrive, they all begin to form an outside ring around the
triclinium, again, as usual. The new guests, aware that the party has been
going on for nearly four hours by this point, dutifully greet their hosts.
Those who came earlier in the day by now look pretty settled. Some seem
perhaps too settled. Rufina opens up her basket and carefully withdraws
two small bundles of food, a few pieces of bread and chunks of meat
wrapped in a cloth. It’s not much, but it will have to do. Meanwhile, she
listens to the other guests at the center table energetically comparing notes
on the lavish dishes they have just consumed.
In time, the servants reappear and clear the tables a second time. They
mix water and wine and begin pouring it freely. The noise level in the room
begins to rise. The 3 P.M. crowd is now on its second course: some spiced
meat, fish, and bread. The 7 P.M. crowd is not so well supplied, but they
make do. By ten o’clock, the servants remove the dishes for the last time,
and Quartus leads the gathering in celebrating the Lord’s Supper together.
By that time, a few have already had too much to drink. By the wee hours,
the time has come for everyone to go home.

The Lord’s Supper and Luke

Even if this imaginative account of the Corinthians’ practice of the
Lord’s Supper is inaccurate in some of its details, I think it is nevertheless a
fair portrayal of what was going on at Corinth in the early A.D. 50s, the
kinds of things that led Paul to accuse the Christians of conducting the
supper in “an unworthy manner” (1 Corinthians 11:27). Some were eating
before others arrived; some over-indulged, while others went completely
hungry. And some got drunk. All this was taking place around the
Christians’ most sacred meal. It was a mess.
Although Paul had to pick his battles carefully with this messy
Corinthian church (just as all pastors have to pick their battles wisely), he
was determined to right the ship on this matter. For Paul and for the early
Christian churches across the board, the Lord’s Supper was a big deal. This
matter had no room for compromise. Of course, when the Corinthians are
told that some of their own members had passed away on account of
abusing the Supper (1 Corinthians 11:30), this probably was motivation
enough for the Christians there to clean up their act. As the text of 1
Corinthians was copied, re-copied and circulated throughout the
Mediterranean world, I’m sure other churches also started watching their Ps
and Qs with the sacrament (and if Ps and Qs refers to “pints and quarts” of
alcohol, then they would do so metaphorically and literally).
We know from the rest of the New Testament that Paul was both a
friend and a traveling companion to Luke (Acts 20–28; Colossians 4:14; 2
Timothy 4:11; Philemon 24), the author of the third gospel. I have to
imagine that as Paul and Luke journeyed and ministered together, they
would have had more than a few reflective downtimes in which the apostle
would have shared from his own pastoral experience, perhaps including the
debacles at Corinth. If so, perhaps we can also imagine the apostle recalling
the issue of the Lord’s Supper, leaving Paul to shake his head in disbelief,
as if to say, “How could the believers at Corinth do that? How could they
treat the Lord’s Supper with such contempt? They just don’t get it, do
they?” And as Paul reflected aloud, Luke would take it all to heart.
Paul is not the only New Testament writer to become exercised about
the sacrament. While we do not know the author, the date, or even the
audience of the Epistle to the Hebrews, clearly the composer of this letter
has at least a passing interest in the Lord’s Supper. Closing an exhortation
designed to discourage readers from returning to the synagogue, the author
remarks, “We have an altar from which those who serve in the tabernacle
have no right to eat” (Hebrews 13:10). As a number of scholars reconstruct
the meaning and setting of this difficult verse, the issue at hand appears to
do with the Jewish Sabbath feasts (syndeipna), attended by non-Christian
and Christian Jews alike. From what we can tell, this ritual meal, broadly
practiced in Jewish homes throughout the Diaspora (Jewish population
outside of Palestine), attached an atoning function to one of the meal’s
central components, a ritual reenactment of the temple peace offering. The
writer of Hebrews seems to argue that participation in this ritual meal is
incompatible with participation in the Christian Lord’s Supper, which points
to the one atonement provided by Christ. If this was an issue for the writer
of Hebrews, then chances are that churches under Luke’s watch-care
struggled with the same.
Breaking untrodden ground on all kinds of fronts, theological and
practical, the first-century church had a number of issues to work on. But
somewhere near the top of the agenda certainly must have been sharpening
its theory and practice of the Eucharist. On our best historical
reconstruction, the Eucharist became a plank of church life at a very early
date. Perhaps this is altogether understandable. Given Jesus’ farewell
words, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19), who among the
apostles would have failed to encourage the ongoing rehearsal of these very
words in the scattered Christian communities? Still, even by the time that
Luke writes his two-volume work, Luke–Acts (no earlier than A.D. 63 or
so), the church is still cutting its theological teeth on the Lord’s Supper.
Perhaps that is exactly why Luke spends so much time in his writings
talking about meals. It’s almost a preoccupation. Consider Acts. According
to its author Luke, the early church wastes no time after Pentecost devoting
itself to the breaking of bread (a technical term for Eucharistic practice—
Acts 2:42). Later we learn from Acts 20:7–12 that the church (in the mid-
50s) came together regularly on the first day of the week to celebrate the
Supper. Later still in the narrative, as a passenger in a storm-tossed cargo
ship, Paul breaks bread much in the manner of Jesus (Acts 27:35; cf. Luke
22:19) in order to bring comfort to his terrified sailing companions (Acts
27:27–38). On the one hand, we might say that Luke was simply reporting
history as he knew it. But on the other hand, we would be naïve to think
that his selection of talking points was void of theological interest. If Paul
had a few things to say about the Lord’s Supper, Luke arguably has more.
Luke’s first book, the Gospel of Luke, demonstrates this same interest.
Like the other evangelists, he recounts the very first Lord’s Supper, Jesus’
Last Supper, as a modified Passover meal (Luke 22:14–23). Passover was
the celebratory event, enjoined by Yahweh as a mandatory midnight meal
right before the Exodus. On that night, families were told to slaughter a goat
or lamb, apply its blood to the doorposts as protection against the
destroying angel of Yahweh, and then consume the meat, together with
bitters and unleavened bread. From that point on, down through history,
when Jewish families gathered for the annual Passover, they would look
back to the redemption of the Exodus and look ahead to the Exodus still to
come: the arrival of the messiah. At the Passover meal, the father of the
family or the host would not only recite what God had done to redeem the
nation in the past but also speak to what everyone expected God to do in the
future: enact a new Exodus.
By all historical accounts, including Luke’s, none other than Jesus
himself serves as the host for what will prove to be his last Passover. The
text reads as follows:

And when the hour approached, he reclined and the apostles along
with him. And he said to them, “I have very eagerly desired to eat this
Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you that I will not eat it
again until it is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.” And taking a cup and
having given thanks, he said, “All of you, take this and divide it
amongst yourselves. For I tell you that I will not drink from the fruit of
the vine until the Kingdom of God comes.” And then taking the bread
and having given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples,
saying, “This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of
me.” And he did likewise with the cup after they had eaten, saying,
“This cup is the new covenant in my blood poured out on your behalf.”
(Luke 22:14–20)

Laying hold of the age-old Passover symbols and assigning them a

fresh and new meaning, Jesus identifies himself as the new sacrificial
Passover lamb. Just as the Jews had to eat the Passover lamb if they
intended to remain members in good standing within Israel, now Jesus
invites his disciples to join this new Israel undertaking a new Exodus—
through symbolically eating the messiah! Here we begin to see just why, out
of all the festive meals that could have been appropriated, Jesus settled on
the Passover as the prototype for one of the two rituals (the other being
baptism) that would define the church. Whatever the Exodus was about,
Jesus was now about the same thing.
While the synoptic gospels in their respective presentations of the Last
Supper (all of which puts the historicity of the Passover account in good
stead) overlap considerably, each of the evangelists has his own distinctive
angle. This includes Luke. In summarizing the unique contribution of the
third evangelist, we can settle on two ways of characterizing the Last
Supper. Whatever else we would want to say about Jesus’ last repast, this
was a Kingdom meal and a meal of remembrance.

Kingdom Meal
Having already noted Luke’s attention to meals in Acts, we begin to
understand reasons for this interest when we see the evangelist’s tendency
to associate meals with the Kingdom of God. This is most immediately
apparent in Jesus’ repetition of the phrase “Kingdom of God” in the Last
Supper scene (Luke 22:16, 18). (Matthew and Mark only mention the
Kingdom once in their words of institution.) Luke’s readers are not
completely unprepared for this. In earlier teaching within the narrative,
Jesus explains that the patriarchs and prophets will be present in the
Kingdom of God, just as Gentiles from all four corners of the earth “will
recline at the table of the Kingdom of God” (Luke 13:29). The very next
chapter finds Jesus at lunch, where someone calls out, “Blessed is the one
who will eat bread in the Kingdom of God!” (Luke 14:15). The spontaneous
remark provides occasion for Jesus to tell a parable that both assumes and
draws attention to the culinary quality of the Kingdom (Luke 14:16–24). If
we had nothing but Luke 13–14 in our New Testaments, we would have to
infer that the Kingdom of God is actually a very big dinner table. And if we
did think that, we just might be right. (Good news for foodies, I suppose!)
When Luke depicts Jesus taking regular meals with both the great and
the good and the not-so-great and the not-so-good, he does so mindful of
what he saw as the historical Jesus’ self-understanding. According to Luke,
Jesus understood himself as the messiah and understood these meals as mini
prequels to the great messianic banquet to be given at the Resurrection. A
stepping stone between these daily meals and the great eschatological
banquet is the Last Supper itself (making it together with the meal off the
road to Emmaus [Luke 24:13–32] midquels, I suppose.) At any rate, if
Luke’s Eucharistic participants get the idea, they learn that they are still
looking forward (as they used to do with the Passover supper), but now they
are looking forward to a different endpoint. For them as for us today, the
Lord’s Supper is a sneak peek of the Kingdom to come. To put it in Narnian
terms, the Lord’s Supper is the wardrobe through which we temporarily
enter another world—in this case, a future world on its way.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

If Jesus’ everyday meals as recorded by Luke impact our
understanding of the Last Supper, then we would also do well to consider
the kind of people Jesus met for those meals. First, we find him eating with
tax collectors like Levi (Luke 5:30–32) and Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10), or
more generally, tax collectors and sinners (Luke 7:34; 15:1–2). Jesus does
not take these meals as though he is holding a gospel tract in one hand and
holding his nose with the other. No, on the contrary, judging by his famous
Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32), Jesus seems to be imitating
the father within his own story, the father who joyfully slaughters the
fattened calf because he is receiving his sin-torn son back home safely. By
all accounts, Jesus loved to eat; and he loved to eat with “sinners” even
more.
A second category of people frequenting Jesus’ dinner table is “the
poor.” We tend to identify the poor as those without financial resources.
While in Jesus’ day the term certainly had this connotation, it conveyed
more of a sense of social marginalization. Speaking to people who saw
strategic advantages to inviting wealthy friends over for dinner (in the
hopes that they would return the good favor and then some), Jesus rejects
this kind of calculus and instead commends inviting the poor—including
the crippled, the lame, and the blind—who could never play the host in the
same way (Luke 14:12–14). Luke’s readers are forced to surmise that the
poor (the last people Jesus’ contemporaries would even think about inviting
over) were the very ones who topped Jesus’ guest list.

A Mixed-Up Kingdom
I never thought that thick-framed Warby Parker glasses and vest
pocket protectors would be in style, but this is exactly what has happened.
Nerd is the new cool. How nerds got from their one-time place at the
bottom of the “cool ladder” to the top is anyone’s guess, but get there they
did. The modern-day social revenge of the nerds has called into question all
our old assumptions as to what was cool and what was not. Perhaps the best
way to be cool (if that’s your goal in life) is to make up your mind to be
uncool. I don’t know. It’s all mixed up now.
In habitually hanging out with the “sinners” and social outcasts, Jesus
is very intentionally instigating something quite similar: a great mix-up. If
the Greco-Roman world was extremely hierarchical in how it thought about
social class and sought to reinforce those social hierarchies wherever it
could (not least at occasions like the eranos or another Greco-Roman feast
called the symposion), Jesus appears equally intent on disrupting those
pecking orders. In Jesus’ world, individuals like Zacchaeus and Levi are the
heroes; in Jesus’ stories, characters like the Prodigal Son almost become
role models (almost!). Why? Because of the very nature of the Kingdom of
God. And Jesus’ public meals were the best available pre-enactment of that
Kingdom. Since this same Kingdom was also confrontational, Jesus’ dining
habits also constitute his first line of attack within a larger master plan to
dismantle the world’s rigid and dehumanizing distinctions. At this table,
Jesus insists, the human constructs of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender,
socio-economic class, political partisanship, and so on—all such
differentiation of humanity fades away, just as will happen when the
Kingdom comes. In a world where like attracts like, and where our general
preference is to have meals with those who share our social profile, the
Lord’s Supper throws up a powerful challenge.

PASSOVER LAMB
In 1 Corinthians 5:7, Paul writes that “Christ our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed for us.” Just as
Israel had to sacrifice a member of the herd and spread the victim’s blood on the doorposts, so too
would Christians “apply” the blood of Christ for their own salvation. This imagery is reinforced with
Jesus being executed on or near the day of Jewish Passover. Of course, on the very first Passover
night it wasn’t animal blood that saved the Israelites; this animal blood only represented the shed
blood of Christ.

The Last Supper is where we meet the climactic moment of that master
plan. It is almost as if Luke had set the whole thing up. In the Magnificat,
which occurs near the very beginning of Luke’s gospel, Mary sings that
through the little messiah in her belly, Yahweh himself will “fill the hungry
with good things” (Luke 1:53). Later, in the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus tells
his disciples, “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be
satisfied” (Luke 6:21). Then, in the Feeding of the Five Thousand, perhaps
the very first soup kitchen (without the soup), Jesus (1) takes bread, (2) give
thanks, (3) breaks it, and (4) gives it to the disciples (Luke 9:16). All eat
until they are satisfied (Luke 9:17). Finally, when we come to the Lord’s
Supper in Luke 22:19, we likewise read of Jesus taking bread, giving
thanks, breaking the bread, and then giving it to his disciples—the very
same actions of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, in the very same order.
Luke’s point is that the disciples are no different from anyone in that crowd
of five thousand plus; they, too, will be satisfied at the Lord’s Table, even if
fuller satisfaction must wait until the Resurrection itself.
When we take the Lord’s Supper today, we are essentially taking a
nibble of a reality to come, an appetizer of the coming Kingdom of God.
When we partake, we do so in anticipation of the eschatological feast in
which our deepest longings—for permanence, for satisfying relationship,
for a sense of belonging and significance—will finally be met. In this
respect, the Eucharistic meal looks forward, much as the Israelites’
Passover meal looked forward to the next steps. In the Mosaic age, the
people of God looked forward to the Passover night in which the messiah
would come again. Now that Jesus the messiah has come, he commands all
his followers to look ahead through this symbolic meal to the final
Passover: when God will take his people through the Red Sea of death and
onto the other side. If our secular world has fooled us into thinking that our
fullness is on this side of the sea, the Supper reminds us otherwise.

A Meal of Remembrance
Having met a number of very wealthy as well as very poor individuals
over the years, I think I can safely say that while being wealthy is not a
virtue, certainly neither is being poor. The poor and the wealthy may have
different kinds of temptations, but both are tempted. And both fall. In short,
poor people are sinners, too. But if nothing is intrinsically righteous about
the poor, then why does Jesus go out of his way for them? Why does he
announce that his gospel is specifically for the poor (Luke 4:18)? In short,
why the poor?

An Underrated Poverty
The answer to this question has to do with Jesus himself. In other
words, I believe that Jesus gravitated toward the poor and asked his
disciples to do the same precisely because he and his disciples had made
themselves poor. By this I do not mean that Jesus and the Twelve made it
their personal goal to become literally the poorest thirteen men in Galilee.
Rather, Jesus and the Twelve consciously decided to forego certain
resources that they might otherwise have had and, in so doing, threw
themselves on the mercies of God. For Jesus, to be poor is to reverse the
gravitational pull of self-protection and self-aggrandizement, and to move
instead toward others while holding loosely to one’s own life.
My reading of Luke’s version of the Last Supper leads me to this
conclusion. In the first place, it is striking that when Jesus refers to the
bread saying “This is my body,” he uses a neuter pronoun touto (Luke
22:19), exactly when we would expect a masculine pronoun in keeping with
the gender of the antecedent noun (artos, “bread”). In fact, given the
grammatical disconnect between touto and artos, we cannot be sure just
what Luke’s Jesus means by the word “this.” My own suggestion (hardly
original) is that when Jesus says, “This is my body,” he is not so much
focusing on the bread as physical substance (causing no end of
metaphysical speculation among Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and
Zwinglians) but on the chain of actions leading up to his declaration. The
“this” in “This is my body” is not so much his body but what happens to his
body. It is as if Jesus were to say, “I have been taken. I have been made a
reason for thanksgiving. I have been broken. And I have been given away to
my disciples. This is my life. This is my story. This is my body.” In inviting
his disciples to partake in the bread and cup, he is inviting them to join in
his story; he is asking them to sign on to his life of self-giving.
The Lukan addition to the words of institution, “Do this in
remembrance of me” (unique among the gospels), drives home the same
point. When Luke’s Jesus commands his disciples to perform and re-
perform the Lord’s Supper unto the end of the ages, he is requesting that
they do so self-consciously in remembrance of him. Here Jesus intends far
more than mental recollection. Instead, the imperative to “do this in
remembrance of me” means, first, taking the Supper in conscious awareness
of Jesus as the one who gave away his life on behalf of others and, second,
honoring that memory by committing oneself to do the same.
By casting the Last Supper as a meal of remembrance, Jesus is taking
the original intent of the Passover meal and extending it. We recall from
Exodus 12 that Yahweh had Moses implement the Passover so as to ensure
ongoing, regular remembrance of the Exodus. This gave rise to a tradition
that endured from the time of Moses (though some scholars dispute this) all
the way down to the first century—and beyond. The Passover celebration
was an important piece in Israel’s national life because it ensured that at
least once a year the people could reflect back on their one-time status of
slavery. Now by redirecting his disciples’ thoughts from Moses’ generation
to himself, Jesus is inviting them to see him as suffering Israel in bondage
and, moreover and paradoxically, as the redeemer figure who would save
Israel—and indeed the whole world—from their bondage. Likewise, by
taking the bread and eating it, the disciples are essentially identifying with
the same broken Jesus, the Jesus of the poor, downtrodden, and socially
disempowered. By putting the bread morsels in their mouths, the disciples
are saying, “We’re with you. We are willing to join you in this mission of
pain.” I believe that—whether we appreciate it or not—taking the Lord’s
Supper means the same thing today.

New Covenant
In breaking the bread, Luke’s Jesus—again uniquely so among the
gospels—announces that he is instituting a “new covenant” (Luke 22:20).
The phrase “new covenant” hearkens back to Jeremiah 31:31: “ ‘The days
are certainly coming,’ says the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.’ ” This covenant is marked
off as a covenant of forgiveness (Jeremiah 31:34). Thus, that Luke himself
has a particular interest in forgiveness is no accident, for in the third gospel
we have our most remarkable and most classic stories of forgiveness in all
of Scripture (including, as I have already mentioned, the Parable of the
Prodigal Son).
But we notice, too, that this New Covenant is not an absolutely brand
new covenant. We know this because the phrase, “which is poured out for
you” (Luke 22:20), ties back to the inauguration of the Mosaic covenant. At
that time, Moses “took half of the blood and put it in the basins; next he
took half of the blood and poured it against the altar.… Moses then took the
blood and poured it on the people, saying, ‘Look here, this is the blood of
the covenant that the Lord has made with you according to all these words’”
(Exodus 24:6, 8). Because the blood that Moses shed in Exodus 24 was
atoning blood, we have to expect that Jesus is also alluding to the atoning
function of his own approaching death. As the new Moses bringing the new
Exodus, Jesus provides true and lasting atonement. He is the sacrificial
lamb.
Yet he is also forging a holy nation. By offering a cup of New
Covenant blood, as it were, Jesus invites his disciples to look back to the
seminal moment of the Exodus and own the present moment as a new point
of departure. Just as the Israelites agreed to the Sinaitic covenant by
allowing Moses to sprinkle them with animals’ blood, so too by drinking of
the cup, the disciples are saying, “We’re in. We want to be part of this New
Covenant.” Without the Exodus under Moses, the Mosaic covenant would
have been inconceivable. In the same way, without the new Exodus through
Jesus, this New Covenant would not even get off the ground.
The point of the New Covenant is much the same as the goal of all
prior covenants: mission. God enters into a loving, legal partnership with
his people in order that they might engage the world in mission. Luke looks
at it much the same way. We notice that when the evangelist sets the scene,
he writes: “And when the hour approached, he reclined and the apostles
along with him” (Luke 22:14). In the four gospel accounts of the Last
Supper, only Luke uses the term “apostle” to refer to the disciples. To be
sure, when compared to the other evangelists, Luke inclines to this word in
general; nonetheless, because the term highlights the disciples’ identity as
“sent ones” (that’s what apostle means), Luke seems to be drawing a
connection between the Twelve’s partaking of the Last Supper and their call
to mission, which is, of course, a central theme in Acts. He upgrades them
from disciples to apostles because, through the Lord’s Supper, the Twelve
have together moved from being a mission field to being missionaries. That
move, too, is a work of God.
In light of this, here’s my unsolicited advice. The next time you have
the opportunity to take Communion, you might ask yourself, “Am I willing
to sign up for Jesus’ mission, whatever that might mean?”
 If the answer to that question is “Yes” or even “Maybe,” then this
Supper is for you. If, however, the answer to that question is a resounding
“No!” then perhaps the next honest step would be to let the plate and cup
pass you by. Sometimes pastors will “fence the table” on the basis of
something (call it a decision or the process of regeneration) that has
happened—or not happened—in the past. But the Lord’s Supper is less
concerned with where we’ve been and more concerned with where we’re
going.
Passover and Exodus cannot be separated. Neither can the Lord’s
Supper and the crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ. Perhaps the
Corinthians didn’t “get” that as Paul would have hoped. They had failed to
find Jesus in the Passover. Perhaps that’s because they failed to find Jesus in
the Exodus. Like the other evangelists, Luke is committed to helping his
readers find Jesus in both. Prince and pariah, prophet, power behind the
plagues, and pattern of the Passover—Jesus was all these. And remains all
these for us today.
 POSTSCRIPT

In Arthur Miller’s, Death of a Salesman, the character Biff Loman

hands down a chilling indictment on the life of his recently deceased father,
Willy. “He had the wrong dreams,” Biff says, “all, all wrong.” Life can be
funny that way. We can be so sure that we’re chasing the right dreams
when, in fact, those same dreams turn out to be illusions—and only those
who come after have the insight to figure that out. The tragic life is not a
life fraught with pain; it is a life misspent.
I have noticed that certain well-meaning friends get nervous when
Jesus is compared to Moses, or when Jesus’ work of salvation is compared
to the Exodus. Such comparisons, they seem to feel, end up giving us a low
Christology, discounting the magnificence of the person and work of Christ.
I understand their concerns. No one wants to worship a Jesus who is merely
an upgrade of an Old Testament figure, a Moses 2.0, as it were.
But if anyone should say that such comparisons are theologically
unhelpful in principle, I disagree. I hope this book has helped to explain
why. The reason the gospel writers tell their story through the lens of the
Exodus is not because they want us to see Jesus merely as an upgrade of
Moses; rather, it is because Moses, through his own life, unwittingly had
given a thumbnail sketch of a living messiah who would make his
appearance in the fullness of time. For the evangelists, no less than for early
Christianity at large, the comparison between Moses and Jesus, Exodus and
new Exodus, was important. At the end of the day, if you don’t like Jesus
being compared to Moses, your problem isn’t with me or this book—it’s
with the New Testament itself.
So perhaps the more pertinent question is not whether or not Jesus is a
second Moses (for the gospel writers he patently was), but what all this
means. Or, to put it more sharply, perhaps the pertinent question is this:
Now that we have the real person of Jesus Christ in the pages of the New
Testament, do we still need the sketch in the Old?
In a word: absolutely. We need the sketch because the sketch
emphasizes the very features of Jesus that matter most for God’s purposes.
To put it another way, when you find a sketch in isolation or a person in
isolation, you have a lot of room for extrapolation and misinterpretation.
But if you have two points, you have a line and a trajectory. A dot can be
made to point in an infinite number of directions, but a trajectory tells us
where we need to go. Today, now more than ever, we need a trajectory to
help us set the course.
Recent years have witnessed an astounding shift in cultural values. As
a result of this shift, the Western church has never looked more strange to
unchurched eyes than it does today. Despite all the alarms being raised on
this front, perhaps this is not necessarily so bad after all. Perhaps we need to
be reminded that the Exodus is not over (not completely over anyway) and
to rethink what this Exodus business is all about. Perhaps, too, we will need
to consider taking on certain Pharaohs (be they spiritual or flesh-and-blood)
within our society if we’re not doing so already. In order to do so
effectively, however, we need to be more clear about not only the problem
(Who or what is Egypt?) and the solution (How will we get out?), but also
about the vision (Where do we go next?).

WATER FROM THE ROCK

Right before Jethro visits Moses, the Israelites drink water from a rock. Interestingly, Paul does not
say that the rock was like Christ; rather, this rock “was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). As Christ was
the source of spiritual drink in the days of Paul, so too was Christ also active in the days of Moses. If
the believing Israelites found God in the Exodus, we today can find Christ in the Exodus.

Think of Moses. When Moses delivered the Israelites out of Egypt, he

brought them out of a way of life that was spiritually, socially, politically,
and economically oppressive. When he saved the children of Israel, he
didn’t just save their souls, he saved them as whole people. More than that,
he had a clear idea of where exactly he was taking them from and where he
was taking them to. This involved more than identifying the problem
(Egypt) and the solution (getting them out). He also had a coherent vision
as to what Israel would do after the escape from Egypt. Casting a vision like
this is impossible without also answering some fundamental questions such
as, “Who are we?” and “What are we about?” and “Where are we going?”
Fortunately, Moses had a vision, Yahweh’s vision, which was not only
integrative but also comprehensive. Although in the end Moses only saw
the realization of his dream from the distance of Mount Nebo, this was his
God-given dream, and he was faithful to it.
Jesus also had a vision for a new Exodus, and he invited the disciples
to be part of it. We are heirs of that new Exodus. Today, when Christ-
followers deeply disagree as to the identity of Egypt and the proper route
across the Red Sea, it only means that our collective theological vision has
become blurred. As for questions like, “Who are we?” and “What are we
about?” and “Where are we going?”—these, too, will need to be answered
if we hope to have an impact. If society today has stopped listening to
Christians (and if we’re not there already this may be where we’re heading),
perhaps it’s because we’ve lost a unified voice that speaks with clarity and
conviction.
I suggest that the answer is not to speak more loudly but to return to
our basic Sunday school stories—like Exodus. As we do, and as we begin
to think about the Exodus as reflective adults, we may be able to begin
mapping the biblical narrative onto our present-day realities. Then—and
perhaps only then—some of the pieces will start falling into place. Then, to
switch metaphors, we can begin writing our own Exodus story,
screenwriting our own Exodus film. I’m not here to make any suggestions
as to who or what should be cast into what roles. I am here to say that if the
early Christians saw themselves as realizing a new Exodus with Jesus
Christ at the head, perhaps we would be wise to consider taking their cue.
Who knows? If we reflect on the Scriptures in the belief that they have
something to say to us today, God might give us new dreams—the right
ones. A fresh, crisp, and compelling Exodus vision might be exactly what
the church needs. If this book is even a small step in that direction, I will be
extraordinarily grateful.
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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
 

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Welcome

4. Chapter One: Promise—The Four Gospels

5. Chapter Two: Prince and Pariah—Gospel of Matthew
6. Chapter Three: Prophet—Gospel of Mark
7. Chapter Four: Plagues—Gospel of John
8. Chapter Five: Passover—Gospel of Luke

9. Postscript
10. Newsletters
11. Copyright
 Copyright

Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Perrin

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