Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

It is understandable that the Sermon on the Mount was understood to be the “new Torah” of Christians. After all, the mountain itself recalls Sinai. But in reality the Sermon on the Mount is not a new Torah. How could it be, when it does not even touch so many areas of human life? Jesus does not proclaim a new law; he brings to its fulfillment the one social project of the Torah given once for all by offering examples, in the Sermon on the Mount, that show how that social project is to be understood and lived radically, that is, in terms of its roots—and that means in terms of the true will of God.

It is understandable that people saw the love commandment, with its expansion to cover enemies, as a “new commandment.” It had to seem something completely new in the world of antiquity. But it was already in the Torah.

It is understandable that people said that Jesus not only interpreted the Torah but transcended it. No, he did not transcend it; he found its center and so brought the whole Torah to its fulfillment.

And it is understandable that people have said that Jesus understood “himself” as the Torah. He did, in fact, live the Torah with his whole existence; he established it irrevocably and in unsurpassable fashion in his own person. Jesus lives in union with the will of God in the ultimate sense. And yet to say that he himself is the Torah has something dangerous about it: the Torah is a social order, and a social order cannot be exhausted in a single person. It requires a people.

The Whole Torah

Jesus showed himself to us as the eschatological interpreter of the Torah. He comprehended the intent of the Torah as well as its dynamic. He interpreted it with an admirable sensitivity to its center. When Mark 1:22 says that he taught like one who has sovereign authority and not like the scribes, that is exactly the point. But does that mean that for Jesus, and accordingly for Christians, whole sections of the Torah have been sidelined by Jesus’ centralizing interpretation, indeed, that they have basically been done away with because they have been absorbed by the twofold commandment of love of God and neighbor? Here we need to exercise extreme caution.

Obviously Jesus established a new basis for the Torah; he interpreted it definitively and thus gave it its eschatological form. But that does not mean that whole parts of the Torah were discarded like burned-out rocket stages. They were not cast off but transformed. No part of the Torah may be regarded as over and done with, certainly not as abrogated, but the whole Torah must be interpreted anew, over and over again, in light of Jesus Christ, and directed toward the will of God. Then it may certainly appear that certain parts of the Torah that at first seem strange and even comical in our eyes acquire a new meaning—or to put it in better words, they reveal the meaning intended for them from the beginning.

To give one example: the Torah contains extensive laws for what is clean and unclean (cf., e.g., Lev 11–15). These apply primarily to the house, clothing, the body, and food. There are orders for how people who are healed of skin diseases are to be declared clean. Distinctions are made between animals that confer uncleanness and those that are clean. It is established what kinds of meat may be eaten and what kinds are not to be eaten. Is all that out of date? It seems so. After all, we have learned Jesus’ clear principle: “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile” (Mark 7:15). But does that saying mean that Israel’s laws for cleanness and holiness are abrogated or reduced to purely ethical norms? Christian theologians have repeatedly said, in this connection, that Jesus’ distinction between “inside” and “outside” refers all external, ritual holiness from a material-prepersonal sphere to its real meaning, that is, internal, personal holiness. But we ought to be careful about such formulations, because in the New Testament even holiness separated from the external-material means decisively more than merely an inner quality of the soul or the moral person.

The whole people of God is meant to be a holy people. Thus holiness always encompasses also the community-social dimension with which the individual person is inseparably connected. Not only must the human heart be holy: so must life’s conditions and relationships, the social structures and the forms of the environment in which human beings live and into which they constantly project themselves. But that is precisely what the material-ritual prescriptions of the Torah regarding cleanness and uncleanness always intended.