Thinking about the Messiah

“For there is no good tree which produces bad fruit, nor, on the other hand, a bad tree which produces good fruit” (Luke 6:43 NASB).

One of the chief differences between Hebrew and Greek paradigms is the idea of certainty. In the Greek world, truth assumes commitment to some specific correct answer. We might not know what this final answer is at the moment, but the paradigm tells us that such an answer exists and eventually can be made clear to the rational mind.   This view is exemplified in Plato’s theory of forms, a theory that postulated a timeless, perfect world where the true essence of the corrupt, observable and changing experience actually resides. Plato’s timeless “forms” were independent of the manifested variety of human experience. They acted as universals, capturing the “real” existence of the object. For example, the concept “tree” is not about any particular tree but rather an eternal, timeless idea that informs us about what is the essence of all trees.

Hebrew takes a decidedly different view. Because Hebrew deals with life as it is observed, it is far less concerned with theories of universal, timeless truths. It does not posit a world where the “essence” of things resides. Rather, Hebrew views life in its diversity as the fundamental component of reality. All of the “blooming, buzzing confusion” is the real, not merely a shadow of some other “real” world. Therefore, it embraces paradox, even contradiction, as completely compatible with human experience. Hebrew is not committed to some supra-rational eternal single-answer solution. It thinks in terms of what appears to be the case now, not in terms of Plato’s ideals in some ex-temporal heavenly permanent unchanging existence. The implications are significant. Hebrew is eminently practical. “This is how we do things,” replaces the statement, “This is the way things really are.” So Hebrew is about cultural absorption rather than philosophical elucidation. When Gentiles encounter the God of Israel, they are asked to embrace a certain way of life, a way of life that leaves lots of things fairly loose because that’s the way life seems to be. Conversion is a process of adopting a “way of seeing things,” not a system of absolute truths. It is paradigm shift, not argument from evidence.

Greek thinking is primarily responsible for the development of systematic theology, an approach to the biblical text that attempts to derive “essence” from the accidents of historical, humanly conditioned events. Thus, systematic theology talks about the “essential” attributes of God, the principles of soteriology, the truths of eschatology, the foundations of morality. Jewish thought does not embrace this approach easily. Instead it seems concerned with “What do we do now?” kinds of questions, an approach that finds the divine in the ordinary ways of living and concerns itself with ethical questions in the present circumstances.

Think about your own real life experience. When did you make a plan that came to pass exactly as you planned it? When did you derive an answer to one of the big questions that has never changed over the course of your life? When did your life stop changing? Greek philosophy suggests that once we have determined the “real” answer to a big question, we can set that one aside as a fixed point and move on to the next nebulous concept. Hebrew sees life as constant flux where what we knew yesterday is more than likely to change today. That, by the way, does not mean we are floating on the sea of uncertainty. What it means is that we choose where to put anchors. We choose to place our confidence in the God of Israel and what He revealed through the prophets. We don’t withhold commitment because there are unanswered questions. There will always be unanswered questions. We go forward with what we have and we are not afraid to change things if we must. Our “certainty” is the choice to trust the working of YHVH, not a set of true, timeless propositions. God did things in real human history. We trust that what He did vouches for His willingness to do things again. Hebraic faith does not rest on creeds or doctrines. It rests on the God who acted in history.

All of this seems threatening to Western paradigms. We have absorbed the theory that truth must be fixed. When we encounter confusion and doubt in the world, we automatically believe that the problem is our understanding, not the actual complexity of the world itself. Most of the time, we actually ignore the complexity and contradictions of life in order to maintain our grip on this need for fixed answers. Certainty removes the panic of not-knowing in a world where not-knowing is viewed as rationally and morally inadequate. But if we step back from this presupposition, we might discover that the world is really far more complex and much more malleable than we imagined. We might discover that we are required to make choices without absolute evidence, that making a choice is really the task of being human. Most of us in the West know that we must choose, but rather than recognize the inherent ambiguity of choice, we strain to find absolute justification for our choices. Plato offered us a definition of truth that has become virtually a part of Western DNA. Truth is justified, rational belief. Unfortunately, this definition rules out most of the ways that we actually live in the world. Hebrew recognizes the logical and spiritual limitations of “justified, rational” in this view of truth. It moves toward “what works now,” and “how we have been instructed to do things,” rather than expecting our actions to conform to Plato’s definition. Hebrew is about deciding despite lack of evidence. For the West, this spiritual tension is uncomfortable. For the Semitic mind, it is simply what is.

If you adopt a Hebraic view of life, what this requires more than anything else is a godly guide. Since direction signals are some of the most confusing signs on life’s highway, we need more than a few street signs. We need a guide, someone who has gone before us and knows the way. If we are to be delivered from the hundreds of possible choices before us each day, we need someone to follow. And that person must also be one who knows just how difficult it is to sort out the confusion, to stay focused and to experience the distractions common to all of us. In other words, in Hebrew, we need a Messiah. A Messiah is someone whom God appoints for the task of representing fully and completely what God is like in this world and what we have to be like to stay in alignment with Him. A Messiah is literally a rescuer of those who have lost their way among the choices. A Messiah not only points us in the right direction, he has already taken that road and knows where it goes. In the past, God appointed various men as messiahs, anointed to perform specific roles within the community of the faithful. They all pointed, in some not-clearly-defined way toward a final version of this chosen rescuer, one who would provide answers to some of the truly biggest questions like, “What happens to me when I die?” Someone who has gone before us through that inevitability is someone to listen to. The conqueror of death settles one of the big questions. He provides an anchor point, not because he explains it but because he has experienced it. Such a guide is the trusted interpreter of human experience. He is authorized by God and worthy to follow. But we must nevertheless choose to do so.

This brings us to reconsider the role of the unique Messiah, the one chosen by YHVH to act as His final representative and authorized executor of His will for humanity. Previous messiahs played limited roles, but this one is the end of the line, the last word of God in the realm of men. His life, unique from beginning to end, is the sure sign that God has empowered him to act as our guide, our final guide, to kingdom living. In fact, YHVH endorses this Messiah by resurrection from the dead as the King who will never die again, and therefore the Kingdom he establishes is without end. All of this is about the history of God’s involvement with men and the Messiah is an historical person, not just an idea of ecclesiastical construction. He has an ancestry, a culture, and ethnicity, a point-of-view, a defined language and a way of living in the world. In other words, he is like us—human in a human world.

Messiah Yeshua fulfills multiple roles. He is the final word of interpretative commentary on the revelation given to Moses. In that capacity, he is the last rabbinic sage. He is the fully authorized regent of the Kingdom of YHVH. In other words, he is Lord of life. He is the ultimate expression of YHVH’s will in human form. In other words, he is the Word of YHVH manifest in our world. And he is the guarantor of God’s plan of total restoration. His resurrection from the dead is the first-fruit sign that God has not abandoned His intention that all creation will be reconciled and will glorify its Creator. There is no more important person who ever lived, or lives, in all humanity.

This Messiah fulfills a crucial role that is easily overlooked by Westerners. In our world, rationality is the hallmark of truth. Being human means being rational, logical and cognitive. This emphasis on mental affirmation and propositional logic can leave us empty of the emotional experience of God. We have all the right facts but we are left with a black hole in the heart. We don’t know God because we don’t feel Him. As Arnold Bennett observed, “There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.” Yeshua the Messiah introduces us to the feelings of the Father, and these feelings are not judgment, rejection and stern demands. They are graciousness, compassion, care and concern. Yeshua shows us the Father in his healing, forgiveness and sacrifice. Yeshua writes a theology of emotion with his life, something we have longed for since the poet David. Perhaps this is the most important of all his roles for us, Westerners who have been taught that there is something terribly wrong with who we are, Westerners who have succumbed to Plato’s view of the material world, Augustine’s view of sinful nature and Luther’s view of penal atonement. Yeshua comes to demonstrate that YHVH grieves over His lost children and seeks us with a broken heart of emotional longing and undying love.

All of these roles are true of both the Jewish Messiah and the Christian “Son of God.” They are, unfortunately, not equally true of the Christian “God the Son.” Considerable, admitted equivocation on the meaning of the word “person” is required for Trinitarian explanations. The Trinity is simply not a biblical concept derived directly from the text. It is a paradigmatic theological concept. It can be asserted as true only within this theological paradigm. For those who adopt the paradigm, a choice made prior to examination of the “evidence,” “Jesus is God” is a conclusion of the system. For those who do not share the presuppositions of this paradigm, Yeshua does not have to be God in order to be the one and only final Messiah. The history of the Church since the 4^th century is testimony to the divisive nature of this theological assertion, an assertion that does not seem to find representation even among the earliest followers of Yeshua. They apparently understood Yeshua as The Messiah without claiming his ontological equality as YHVH. They certainly accepted him as their Lord and Master, as YHVH’s fully authorized representative, as the final interpreter of Moses and as the once and future King. One must wonder what else is necessary in order to fulfill the role.

Daniel Boyarin (The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ) points out that a divine Messiah is not a foreign concept to Jews, but this is not the same as saying that the Messiah is deity. We must be careful (extremely careful) to recognize that the language of the apostolic authors is not our language. The words they chose to use mean what they meant in the first century, not what they mean to us today. Since Jewish thought includes the idea that every person has a “divine spark” because of the animating action of the Ruach Hakodesh, it is perfectly acceptable to claim that Yeshua as Messiah exhibits in the fullest sense this divine connection. But that is not the same as the claim that he is deity. Perhaps it is helpful to note that the word “deity” is never found in Scripture and did not come into the language until Augustine coined the word in Latin. Our contemporary equivalence of “divine” and “deity” simply did not exist in the first century. History demonstrates that many human beings were considered divine during the time Yeshua walked in Israel, but that did not make them equivalent to the one true God, YHVH.

What does this mean for us, followers two millennia removed from the Jewish culture and context of the Messiah’s earliest proponents? Don’t we have the same connection with Yeshua that they had, removed only by intervening years? Yeshua is still the final interpreter of Moses, not the replacement of Moses. He is still the only one who deserves unrestrained loyalty and deference. He is, after all, my King here on earth. He is still the conqueror of death. How that happened is not nearly as important as the fact that it did happen, and because it happened you and I are released from the specter of meaningless existence. Death is not the end. He has proven that. He is still my daily guide. Yes, his words require decoding for my world, a world far removed from the political-social-technology of the first century. But human problems are fairly constant across the ages and his instruction is valid for us just as it was valid for his disciples. In the end, I choose to live according to his life and words. He is still the one who helps me experience the reality of the Father’s love. He is my friend who talks with me about a God who cares.

How does any of this diminish his importance? Frankly, it doesn’t. The only stumbling block here is that we have been accustomed to think of this unique, authorized manifestation of God’s word as divine, not in the sense of the first century use of the term but in our theologically Christian sense of the term where “divine” for us means “God.” We are frightened that we might have a Messiah who is not “God.” That doesn’t seem to have bothered any of his original followers, but it certainly bothers us. The real question is, “Why does it bother us?” Perhaps our concept of divinity is really a reflection of the Church and not the Bible. Perhaps we are Augustine’s children rather than Abraham’s.

How does this affect exegesis? What do we do with all those stories and lessons and instructions we find in the biblical text? May I suggest that in order to understand what our faithful guide Yeshua the Messiah is teaching us, we must first understand what he is teaching about. Since he is teaching about Torah in the context of first century Jewish thought, it seems reasonable (a Greek idea) to know something about these two topics before we attempt to extract ideas from a commentator on these topics. In other words, it’s not possible to understand the apostolic writings unless we understand the Tanakh. That doesn’t mean we put aside the words of the Messiah until we have fully comprehended the Tanakh. Such a task is impossible for us. We must begin somewhere and grow as we learn. Where we begin will be a choice. Where it leads us will probably not be. We will be driven to see the larger reality and we will struggle to incorporate that larger reality into our lives. Tension, progress, confusion, deliberation, decision, revelation—all seem to be part of this journey.

But it isn’t a journey for everyone. You will have to decide.