Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

This is the insight that true peace can only come from the victims, never from the victors. But this peace cannot be accomplished by human beings; it comes from God’s initiative. This new insight on the part of Israel, which was, like Micah 4:1-5, gained from the exile, was compressed by Isaiah into the so-called fourth Servant Song. The servant is Israel itself. “Against this servant of God, according to the servant songs, the nations have conspired together. They beat and torture, even kill him. But like those who cry out in Lamentations, he takes refuge in his God. He accepts the violence that falls upon him, does not strike back, and does not avoid it. And God receives him. Suddenly, in the fourth song, we hear a confession from the other kings and nations of the world.²¹ They acknowledge what God has done with this outcast.”²² And ultimately, as a result of this knowledge that overturns everything, they confess: “we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities” (Isa 53:4-5). To these prominent texts from the books of the prophets we could add others, for example Psalm 22 or Zechariah 9:9-10. All these texts show that the theme of nonviolence appears already in the Old Testament. Jesus did not invent it. He found it in his Bible; he could find it all in his Sacred Scriptures.

But things are somewhat more complicated than that. Could he find all of it? Yes. But he could also find many other things, for the Old Testament continually struggles with the theme of “violence and nonviolence.” This is evident from the later history of its influence, when these key texts of nonviolence often play no part at all. There was fighting in the time of the Maccabeans and the Hasmoneans. The statements about the servant of God seemed not to exist at all. That was certainly true of the Zealots in the time of Jesus. They saw themselves as God’s warriors, permitted in the name of God to use violence—brutal force, by which to establish the reign of God.

And that is not only bad intention; it is connected with the Old Testament itself, which approaches the theme of “nonviolence” like an orchestral piece with many voices. It is not easy always to hear the principal voice in the polyphony it plays, among the accompanying voices, counter-melodies, and dissonances. It is deeply moving to see the unbelievable sensitivity with which Jesus listened to the fourth Servant Song among all the many voices and used it to interpret the true rule of God and his own life. He used no violence at all. He took the sword from Peter’s hand (Matt 26:52). He preferred being a victim to using violence. And by that very fact he initiated in the world an unexpected and ongoing influence. It still goes on, and no one can say where it may yet lead.

Jesus’ Ability to Distinguish

What we see here in the case of nonviolence can be expanded to cover our overall theme: Jesus did not simply reproduce and repeat the Old Testament. He certainly did not insert completely new content into it. Instead, from the immense material in his Bible, from this experience of centuries, from this heaped-up mass of wisdom and history he discerned and drew out the scarlet thread of God’s will—with a sensitivity and ability to distinguish that we can only marvel at.

Jesus’ genius—and Jesus was a genius, if we can use such banal language of him—consisted precisely in that he brought together at its center everything Israel had already discovered, and he did so both critically and creatively. In fact, everything had long since been said in Israel, but often without the necessary weight. Or it was submerged in mountains of things said, so that it could scarcely be recognized. Sometimes it even happened that the opposite was said, leaving matters unclear. Jesus, by weighing the many voices with a critical ability to differentiate, allowed the new thing to arise out of what had already been known and hoped for.

The Our Father is itself an eloquent example of this. With each of its petitions it is bound up in Israel’s great theology made up of Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, and the Torah—and yet it is his very own, something that, on the basis of the proclamation of the reign of God, draws Israel’s traditions together and joins them anew for today.

Or we could take the Sermon on the Mount and its rules for interpreting the Torah as another example. There is not a single statement there that does not have an Old Testament background. Nothing of the Torah is “abolished” or eliminated, “not one letter, not one stroke of a letter” (Matt 5:17-19), and yet Jesus brings everything into a new light once again: the light of his freedom and reason, his radicality and reverence for God.

First Testament or Old Testament?