Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Hear the word of the LORD, O people of Israel! for the LORD has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. No: swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing. (Hos 4:1-3)

There could be no harsher judgment on the true situation of the people of God. These three verses are “a true summary of divine wrath.”⁹ It affects not only the people in Israel but even the animals. The fish are perishing with all the rest.

But in Hosea the wrath of God does not have the last word. At the beginning of chapter 11 that wrath has been transformed into lament. God cannot forget his first love. And in Hosea 11:8-9 everything is reversed in God; his burning wrath collapses and is transformed into love. God puts an end to the judgment that is already in progress. The cosmic catastrophe threatened in Hosea 4:3 does not come to pass:

How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?… My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath. (Hos 11:8-9)

This transformation of wrath into compassion, of judgment into salvation, is not something we find only in Hosea. There are similar texts in other prophetic books and throughout the whole of the Old Testament. God responds to his people with faithfulness despite their own unfaithfulness and rejection. God’s heart beats for Israel, and he must have mercy on it. So we read in Isaiah 54:6-8:

For the LORD has called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, like the wife of a man’s youth when she is cast off, says your God. For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the LORD, your Redeemer.

Certainly, in citing such texts one should not fall into the error of separating them from their contexts. We cannot deny that in the Bible such love is spoken of mainly in the context of judgment and catastrophe. The Old Testament texts portray not a God of cheap love who accepts everything but rather the “nevertheless” of divine fidelity in view of the infidelity of the people of God.

The love of God appears in the book of Hosea in the collapse of God’s wrath. The prophet can only speak of it in view of Israel’s unfaithfulness and in the context of the fearful losses brought about by that unfaithfulness. God’s fidelity averts the ultimate destruction of the people, which is nothing other than self-destruction. But it does not give salvation apart from judgment. The consequences of sin cannot be left aside.

Jesus knew all these texts. His preaching of judgment presumed them. In the parable of the lost son he himself spoke of the fathomless compassion of God (Luke 15:11-32). But he also spoke of judgment. He could not do otherwise. It is precisely in the tension between salvation and judgment that runs through his whole proclamation that his deep rootedness in the Torah and the prophets is evident. That will be our next topic.

Chapter 11

Jesus and the Old Testament

The title of this chapter conceals some problems. First of all, at the time of Jesus the Bible was not defined in the same way as it was later, through the definitive Jewish and Christian delimitations of the canon. The Pharisaic canon of sacred writings did play a decisive role already, but there was also the Sadducees’ canon of Scripture and that of the Samaritans, both of which recognized only the Torah, and there was the much more open idea of Scripture in the Qumran community.¹

And, of course, Jesus never called his Bible “the Old Testament.” The title of this chapter already presupposes the much later perspective of the church. We would have to speak differently if we take Jesus’ point of view. In his time what Christians today call the “Old Testament” was simply called “Scripture,” or “the Torah,” or “the Torah and the prophets,” or more precisely “the Torah, the prophets, and the other books.”

That, at any rate, is how the foreword to the book of Jesus Sirach formulates it. That book, originally written in Hebrew, was composed around 190 BCE. The prologue is later and is by the Greek translator of the book, a grandson of the author. It begins: “Many great teachings have been given to us through the Law and the Prophets and the other [books of the ancestors] that followed them, and for these we should praise Israel for instruction and wisdom.”

“Written on Your Heart”