Jesus Redefines Judaism
Though we must always remember to place Jesus into his appropriate context as a Jew, we cannot simply conclude that he has no impact on Judaism. Perhaps the most significant impact that Jesus has on traditional Judaism is that he forces us to rethink the oneness of God. Jesus takes the Shema onto his own lips (Mark 12:29), affirming that he believed that there was only one God, a God that he called Father. And yet, at the same time, he continually spoke of his unique relationship with this Father saying things like, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), “Do not let your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me” (John 14:1), and “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him” (Matthew 11:27, Luke 10:22). Each of these (and many others could be added to them) points to a kind of exclusive relationship between the Father and the Son; in fact, we read several times that people tried to execute him because he made himself God.
So, somehow the Jewish understanding of God needs to be reinterpreted to understand how both the Father and the Son can be God and yet have there still be only one God. Indeed, nearly every Christological heresy could be described as attempts to answer the question, “How are the Father and Son related to one another” within the context of monotheism. This has resulted in many different views: That Jesus is simply a man (Ebionite Christology), that Jesus is only God and only seemed to be human (Docetic Christology), that Jesus is a half-man, half-God mediator (Arianism), that Jesus is another God altogether (Tritheism) which throws out the Jewish conviction of the oneness of God, or that Jesus is simply a particular manifestation of the one God but there is no personal distinction between him and the Father (Modalism).
Trying to wrestle with this kind of tension is difficult enough, but when a dualistic framework which presupposes that God and the world can have no real interaction (like in Greco-Roman philosophy and their intellectual heirs), the problems multiply. In the end, we have only two options, conclude that Jesus was just a man whose claims to be equal to God were simply delusions of grandeur or to take him seriously and rethink our concept of God. Seeing that the New Testament and the entire apostolic community absolutely refused to consider the first of these options, we are left with rethinking our doctrine of God, which will be explored at various points below.
Another way that Jesus redefines Judaism is in its scope. Traditionally, it was viewed that God had a special relationship with Israel and, though there was only one God, this one God was only Israel’s God. The continual reaching out of Christ to the Samaritans and Gentiles show that the scope of salvation has been extended to the rest of the world. God has entered into humanity, so all of humanity is implicated in this act of God. The scandal of particularity still stands because Jesus must still be interpreted within a Jewish framework and the Christian gospel, though open to all people is still rooted and grounded in the person of Christ. Though the gospel is universal in one sense, it can only be accessed in Christ. There is no other way to the heart of God other than Jesus (John 14:6).
We also see, after looking at Christ’s life, that the sacrificial system, so important for understanding the sacrifice of Christ, is marginalized and set aside, no longer serving as the center of the faith. There is good reason to hope that Israel will be able to resume their rituals of sacrifice because it will help both Jews and Gentiles rediscover the significance of sacrifice within the framework that God has crafted, but, because of Christ and how his death is interpreted in the New Testament, we see that the sacrificial system was pointing forward to Christ’s death and, now that the one sacrifice has been made, we need not continue the practice of regular animal sacrifice. However, be that as it may, the sacrificial system is not to be considered unimportant, nor can we simply ignore it now that we understand Christ’s death as a sacrifice. This is because, since Jesus died in the context of Israel and the Israelite understanding of sacrifice is necessary to correctly appropriate it, we must always remain rooted in the historical context God shaped so that a correct understanding can continue to arise.
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