Jesus Within the Context of Israel
Since the entire last chapter was dedicated to God’s interaction with Israel being critical for our understanding of Christ, it can come as no surprise that this chapter, dealing with the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, would start with placing Jesus within His Jewish context.
Jesus as a Jew
Again it must be said that, even though it may be an offensive idea, Jesus was a Jew. This has both a positive and a negative meaning. Positively, it means that Jesus lived and taught within the Jewish context in Israel. This means that He was speaking to people who took the law for granted, who participated in Temple worship, who believed in the One God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and who believed that history was headed in a definite direction. It means that Jesus needs to be thought out according to the categories of thought and life that God hammered out through the hundreds of years of history that Israel had endured since Abraham was called.
In a negative sense, the fact that Jesus was a Jew marks off some ways of thinking as utterly incompatible with the gospel. For example, Greco-Roman thought and its heirs throughout Western history has operated with a body-soul dualism where the body and soul are seen as being completely different and having absolutely nothing in common. Often, this manifested itself as a belief that the soul is intrinsically good while the body is intrinsically evil and that the world and body are a kind of prison for the soul. This idea is utterly foreign to the Old Testament and, though the New Testament sometimes uses language that can be interpreted in a dualistic way, we must resist that temptation by remembering that Jesus was a Jew, the apostles were Jews, and they wrote from a Jewish worldview (perspective).
The fact that Jesus was a Jew is significant because God did not simply enter into humanity as some kind of abstract concept but became a particular human person. Though Jesus presented a gospel that was intended for all of humanity, it is dangerous to imagine that Jesus somehow transcended all human culture and ethnicity and can be thrust into any context without reckoning with the “Jewishness” of Christ. Jesus was not European, nor was he American, nor was he Asian or African. The gospel is open to everyone who is from those areas of the world, but we must, in a sense, become Jewish and get inside the Jewish way of thinking if we want to really understand Christ. The gospel can be translated into any culture, but it also challenges and transforms any culture it enters into, just as it did the Jewish culture.
One other thought we must bear in mind is that the Jewish man Jesus lived at a particular time in a particular place, who traveled to different places which we can visit ourselves. When the time came, Jesus died in the city of Jerusalem and we can visit the sites that are mentioned in the Gospels. This same Jewish man, after being in the tomb for three days, was raised from the dead, still as a Jew, and forty days later, ascended to heaven to be seated at the right hand of God, as a Jew. Not only is one of the Persons in the Holy Trinity bound up with humanity, not only does the Trinity include a human, but a Jewish human, a particular human. The gospel, from beginning to end, is built on concrete events which cannot be jettisoned, even once we have understood their meaning.
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