COMMENT Jesus of Nazareth

COMMENT - LATER there follows the passage from the book, 'Jesus of Nazareth'

by Pope Benedict XVI.

Matthew 12:43-45

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From: William J …
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Sent: Tue, 20 July, 2010 21:24:43
Subject: Mtt 12: 47 omission / Joseph Ratzinger

Dear Father Donald,

… (Pope Benedict -referring directly to verse 47).

While reading (Joseph Ratzinger's) Pope Benedict's book, "Jesus of Nazareth", and relating to this passage, he has a very interesting comment (on which he expands, page 112ff, having written on the Sermon on the Mount). He writes of Israel's view of the Fourth Commandment anchoring the heart of the social order, the rationale for Israel's social existence, saying that this is exactly the connection that Jesus calls into question (when Jesus is "told that his mother and brothers are outside"... referring directly to verse 47). Pope Benedict writes that while the Torah presents a very definite social order, discipleship of Jesus offers no politically concrete program for structuring society, saying that Jesus' new interpretation of the fourth commandment affects not only the parent-child relation, but the entire scope of the social structure of the people of Israel. His analysis is very penetrating... but it is his inclusion of verse 47 that weights in favour of the inclusion for me of the missing verse!

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Jesus of Nazareth
by Pope Benedict xvi 2007

The Fourth Commandment: The Family, the People, and the Community of Jesus’ Disciples (pp.112-123)

"Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you" (Ex 20:12 )-this is the version of the fourth commandment that is given in the Book of Exodus. The commandment is addressed to sons and it speaks of parents. It thus strengthens the relationship between generations and the community of the family as an order both willed and protected by God. It speaks of the land and of the stable continuance of life in the land. In other words, it connects the land, as the place for the people to live, with the basic order of the family. It binds the continued existence of people and land to the coexistence of the generations that is built up within the family structure.

Now, Rabbi Neusner rightly sees this commandment as anchoring the heart of the social order, the cohesion of the "eternal Israel"- this real, living, ever-present family of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Leah, and Rachel (pp. 58, 70). According to Neusner, it is this family of Israel that is threatened by Jesus' message, and the foundations of Israel's social order are thrust aside by the primacy of his person. "We pray to the God we know, to begin with, through the testimony of our family, to the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah and Rachel. So to explain who we are, eternal Israel, sages appeal to the metaphor of genealogy .... to the fleshly connection, the family, as the rationale for Israel's social existence" (p. 58).

But this is exactly the connection that Jesus calls into question. He is told that his mother and brothers are outside waiting to speak to him. His answer: "Who is my mother and who are my brothers?" And he stretches out his hand over his disciples and says: "Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Mt 12:46-50).

Faced with this text, Neusner asks: "Does Jesus not teach me to violate one of the two great commandments .... that concern the social order?" (p. 59). The accusation here is a twofold one. The first problem is the seeming individualism of Jesus' message. While the Torah presents a very definite social order, giving the people a juridical and social framework for war and peace, for just politics and for daily life, there is nothing like that to be found in Jesus' teaching. Discipleship of Jesus offers no politically concrete program for structuring society. The Sermon on the Mount cannot serve as a foundation for a state and a social order, as is frequently and correctly observed. Its message seems to be located on another level. Israel's ordinances have guaranteed its contin­ued existence through the millennia and through all the vicissitudes of history, yet here they are set aside. Jesus' new interpretation of the fourth commandment affects not only the parent-child relation, but the entire scope of the social structure of the people of Israel.

This restructuring of the social order finds its basis and its justification in Jesus' claim that he, with his community of dis­ciples, forms the origin and center of a new Israel Once again we stand before the "I" of Jesus, who speaks on the same level as the Torah itself on the same level as God. The two spheres—on one hand the modification of the social structure, the opening up of the "eternal Israel" into a new community, and on the other hand Jesus' divine claim—are directly connected.

It should be pointed out that Neusner does not try to score any easy victories by critiquing a straw man. He reminds his reader that students of the Torah were also called by their teachers to leave home and family and had to turn their backs on wife and children for long periods in order to devote themselves totally to the study of the Torah (p. 60). "The Torah then takes the place of genealogy, and the master of Torah gains a new lineage" (p. 63). In this sense, it seems that Jesus' claim to be founding a new family does remain after all in the framework of what the school of the Torah—the "eternal Israel"—allows.

And yet there is a fundamental difference. In Jesus' case it is not the universally binding adherence to the Torah that forms the new family. Rather, it is adherence to Jesus himself to his Torah. For the rabbis, everyone is tied by the same relationships to a permanent social order; everyone is subject to the Torah and so everyone is equal within the larger body of all Israel. Neusner thus concludes: "I now realize, only God can demand of me what Jesus is asking" (p. 68).

We come to the same conclusion as in our earlier analy­sis of the commandment to keep the Sabbath. The Christo-logical (theological) argument and the social argument are inextricably entwined. If Jesus is God, then he is entitled and able to handle the Torah as he does. On that condition alone does he have the right to interpret the Mosaic order of divine commands in such a radically new way as only the Lawgiver-God himself-can claim to do.

But here the question arises: Was it right and proper to create a new community of disciples founded entirely on him? Was it good to set aside the social order of the "eternal Israel," founded on and subsisting through Abraham and Jacob according to the flesh? To declare it to be an "Israel according to the flesh," as Paul will put it? Is there any point that we can discover to all of this?

Now, when we read the Torah together with the entire Old Testament canon, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Wis­dom Literature, we realize very clearly a point that is already substantially present in the Torah itself That is, Israel does not exist simply for itself in order to live according to the "eternal" dispositions of the Law—it exists to be a light to the nations. In the Psalms and the prophetic books we hear more and more clearly the promise that God's salvation will come to all the nations. We hear more and more clearly that the God of Israel-being, as he is, the only God, the true God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the God of all peoples and all men, who holds their fate in his hands—does not wish to abandon the nations to themselves. We hear that all will come to know him, that Egypt and Babylon—the two secular powers opposed to Israel—will give Israel their hand and join together in worshiping the one God. We hear that the bound­aries will fall and that the God of Israel will be acknowledged and revered by all the nations as their God, as the one God.

It is our Jewish interlocutors who, quite rightly, ask again and again: So what has your "Messiah" Jesus actually brought? He has not brought world peace, and he has not conquered the world's misery. So he can hardly be the true Messiah, who, after all, is supposed to do just that. Yes, what has Jesus brought? We have already encountered this question and we know the answer. He has brought the God of Israel to the nations, so that all the nations now pray to him and recognize Israel's Scriptures as his word, the word of the living God. He has brought the gift of universality, which was the one great definitive promise to Israel and the world. This universality, this faith in the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—extended now in Jesus' new family to all nations over and above the bonds of descent according to the flesh—is the fruit of Jesus' work. It is what proves him to be the Messiah. It signals a new interpretation of the messianic promise that is based on Moses and the Prophets, but also opens them up in a completely new way.

The vehicle of this universalization is the new family, whose only admission requirement is communion with Jesus, communion in God's will. For Jesus' "I" is by no means a self-willed ego revolving around itself alone. "Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother" (Mk 3:34f): Jesus' ''I'' incarnates the Son's communion of will with the Father. It is an "I" that hears and obeys. Communion with him is filial communion with the Father— it is a yes to the fourth commandment on a new level, the highest level. It is entry into the family of those who call God Father and who can do so because they belong to a "we"—formed of those who are united with Jesus and, by listening to him, united with the will of the Father, thereby attaining to the heart of the obedience intended by the Torah.

This unity with the will of God the Father through communion with Jesus, whose "food" is to do the Father's will (cf. Jn. 4:34), now gives us a new perspective on the individual regulations of the Torah as well. The Torah did indeed have the task of giving a concrete juridical and social order to this particular people, Israel. But while Israel is on one hand a definite nation, whose members are bound together by birth and the succession of generations, on the other hand it has been from the beginning and is by its very nature the bearer of a universal promise. In Jesus' new family, which will later be called "the Church," these individual juridical and social regulations no longer apply universally in their literal historical form. This was precisely the issue at the beginning of the "Church of the Gentiles," and it was the bone of contention between Paul and the so-called Judaizers. A literal application of Israel's social order to the people of all nations would have been tantamount to a denial of the universality of the grow­ing community of God. Paul saw this with perfect clarity. The Torah of the Messiah could not be like that. Nor is it, as the Sermon on the Mount shows—and likewise the whole dialogue with Rabbi Neusner, a believing Jew and a truly attentive listener.

That said, what is happening here is an extremely impor­tant process whose full scope was not grasped until modern times, even though the moderns at first understood it in a one sided and false way. Concrete juridical and social forms and political arrangements are no longer treated as a sacred law that is fixed ad litteram for all times and so for all peoples. The decisive thing is the underlying communion of will with God given by Jesus. It frees men and nations to discover what aspects of political and social order accord with this communion of will and so to work out their own juridical arrangements. The absence of the whole social dimension in Jesus' preaching, which Neusner discerningly critiques from a Jewish perspective, includes, but also conceals, an epoch-making event in world history that has not occurred as such in any other culture: The concrete political and social order is released from the directly sacred realm, from theocratic legislation, and is transferred to the freedom of man, whom Jesus has established in God's will and taught thereby to see the right and the good.

This brings us back to the Torah of the Messiah, to the Letter to the Galatians. "You were called to freedom" (Gal 5: 13)—not to a blind and arbitrary freedom, to a freedom "understood according to the flesh," as Paul would say, but to a "seeing" freedom, anchored in communion of will with Jesus and so with God himself. It is a freedom that, as a result of this new way of seeing, is able to build the very thing that is at the heart of the Torah-with Jesus, universalizing the essential content of the Torah and thus truly "fulfilling" it.

In our day, of course, this freedom has been totally wrenched away from any godly perspective or from communion with Jesus. Freedom for universality and so for the legitimate secularity of the state has been transformed into an absolute secularism, for which forgetfulness of God and exclusive concern with success seem to have become guiding principles. For the believing Christian, the commandments of the Torah remain a decisive point of reference, that he constantly keeps in view; for him the search for God's will in communion with Jesus is above all a signpost for his reason, without which it is always in danger of being dazzled and blinded.

There is another essential observation. This universalization of Israel's faith and hope, and the concomitant liberation from the letter of the Law for the new communion with Jesus, is tied to Jesus' authority and his claim to Sonship. It loses its historical weight and its whole foundation if Jesus is interpreted merely as a liberal reform rabbi. A liberal interpretation of the Torah would be nothing but the personal opinion of one teacher—it would have no power to shape history. It would also relativize both the Torah itself and its origin in God's will. For each statement there would be only human authority: the authority of one scholar. There can be no new faith community built upon that. The leap into universality, the new freedom that such a leap requires, is possible only on the basis of a greater obedience. Its power to shape history can come into play only if the authority of the new interpretation is no less than the authority of the original: It must be a divine authority. The new universal family is the purpose of Jesus' mission, but his divine authority-his Sonship in communion with the Father—is the prior condition that makes possible the irruption of a new and broader reality without betrayal or high-handedness.

We have heard that Neusner asks Jesus whether he is trying to tempt him into violating two or three of God's commandments. If Jesus does not speak with the full authority of the Son, if his interpretation is not the beginning of a new communion in a new, free obedience, then there is only one alternative: Jesus is enticing us to disobedience against God's commandment.

It is fundamentally important for the Christian world in every age to pay careful attention to the connection between transcendence and fulfillment. We have seen that Neusner, despite his reverence for Jesus, strongly criticizes the dissolution of the family that for him is implied by Jesus' invitation to "transgress" the fourth commandment. He mounts a sim­ilar critique against Jesus' threat to the Sabbath, which is a cardinal point of Israel's social order. Now, Jesus' intention is not to abolish either the family or the Sabbath-as-celebration-of-creation, but he has to create a new and broader context for both. It is true that his invitation to join him as a member of a new and universal family through sharing his obedience to the Father does at first break up the social order of Israel. But from her very inception, the Church that emerged, and continues to emerge, has attached fundamental importance to defending the family as the core of all social order, and to standing up for the fourth commandment in the whole breadth of its meaning. We see how hard the Church fights to protect these things today. Likewise it soon became clear that the essential content of the Sabbath had to be re­interpreted in terms of the Lord's Day. The fight for Sunday is another of the Church's major concerns in the present day, when there is so much to upset the rhythm of time that sus­tains community.

The proper interplay of Old and New Testaments was and is constitutive for the Church. In his discourses after the Resurrection, Jesus insists that he can be understood only in the context of "the Law and the Prophets" and that his community can live only in this properly understood context. From the beginning, the Church has been, and always will be, exposed to two opposite dangers on this score: on one hand a false legalism of the sort Paul fought against, which throughout history has unfortunately been given the unhappy name of "Judaizing," and on the other hand a repudiation of Moses and the Prophets—of the Old Testament. This was first proposed by Marcion in the second century, and it is one of the great temptations of modernity. It is no accident that Harnack, leading exponent of liberal theology that he was, insisted that it was high time to fulfill the inheritance of Marcion and free Christianity from the burden of the Old Testament once and for all. Today's widespread temptation to give the New Testament a purely spiritual interpretation, in isolation from any social and political relevance, tends in the same direction.

Conversely, political theologies, of whatever sort, theol­ogize one particular political formula in a way that contra­dicts the novelty and breadth of Jesus' message. It would, however, be false to characterize such tendencies as a "Judaizing" of Christianity, because Israel offers obedience to the concrete social ordinances of the Torah for the sake of the "eternal Israel's" ethnic community and does not hold up this obedience as a universal political recipe. All in all, it would be good for the Christian world to look respectfully at this obedience of Israel, and thus to appreciate better the great commandments of the Decalogue, which Christians have to transfer into the context of God's universal family and which Jesus, as the "new Moses," has given to us. In him we see the fulfillment of the promise made to Moses: "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren" (Deut 18:15).

Compromise and Prophetic Radicalism

In following the dialogue of the Jewish rabbi with Jesus, adding our own thoughts and observations, we have already moved some distance beyond the Sermon on the Mount and have accompanied Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem. We must now go back once more to the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus takes up questions associated with the second tablet of the Decalogue and brings a new radicalism to bear on the old commandments of the Torah in their understanding of justice before God. Not only are we not to kill, but we must offer reconciliation to our unreconciled brother. No more divorce. Not only are we to be even-handed in justice (eye for eye, tooth for tooth), but we must let ourrselves be struck without striking back. We are to love not sim­ply our neighbor, but also our enemy.

The lofty ethics that is expressed here will continue to astonish people of all backgrounds and to impress them as the height of moral greatness. We need only recall Mahatma Gandhi's interest in Jesus, which was based on these very texts. But is what Jesus says here actually realistic? Is it incum­bent upon us-is it even legitimate-to act like this? Doesn't some of it, as Neusner objects, destroy all concrete social order? Is it possible to build up a community, a people, on such a basis?

Recent scholarly exegesis has gained important insights about this question through a precise investigation of the internal structure of the Torah and its legislation. Particularly important for our question is the analysis of the so-called Book of the Covenant (Ex 20:22-2P9 ). Two kinds of law [Recht] can be distinguished in this code: so-called casuistic law and apodictic law.

What is called casuistic law stipulates legal arrangements for very specific juridical issues: those pertaining to the own­ership and emancipation of slaves, bodily injury by people or animals, recompense for theft, and so forth. No theologi­cal explanations are offered here, just specific sanctions that are proportionate to the wrong done. These juridical norms emerged from practice and they form a practically oriented legal corpus that serves to build up a realistic social order, corresponding to the concrete possibilities of a society in a particular historical and cultural situation.