Promises and Prophecies – taken from Jesus Christ – The Truth
Matthew’s Gospel begins with a long genealogy that daunts modern readers. It’s tempting to pass rapidly over this listing of fathers and sons, yet it is there for several reasons. Matthew, writing to people who were familiar with the Old Testament, is pointing out that what he is about to tell us is connected to the story they already know. Actually, Matthew is making a bigger claim than mere continuity: it is one of fulfilment. He is announcing that, in Jesus, the long-promised Messiah from the line of David has finally come. After centuries of silence, the frustratingly incomplete story of the Old Testament is, at long last, moving to its fulfilment.
Here, as elsewhere in the Gospels, there are revealing little details. There is a curious twist in the genealogy because interspersed with a typically patriarchal list of men are four women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba. Intriguingly, these are not just women but are all individuals on whom some sort of shadow falls: either of being a Gentile, of being sexually immoral or both. What seems on the surface to be the most exclusive of lists actually contains a message of inclusiveness. Matthew is here quietly announcing a theme that will be present throughout his Gospel and indeed throughout the New Testament: Jesus may be Jewish to the core but he has come for everybody from everywhere.
Luke’s Gospel begins not with the birth of Jesus but that of someone else, John the Baptist. The Angel Gabriel promises an elderly and childless couple a son who will be a great figure and bring Israel back to God. Given that there had been no prophets for over four centuries, the news that God was to speak again to Israel must have been astonishing.
Luke then tells how the same angel later appeared in Nazareth, a village in Galilee, to Mary, a virgin engaged to a man called Joseph. Mary is told she will become pregnant with a son who is to be named Jesus and promised that ‘he will be very great and will be called the Son of the most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. And he will reign over Israel for ever: his Kingdom will never end!’ These are momentous words: the child will rule with authority and for eternity. Mary, however, is concerned about something more basic: how is this going to happen given that she is a virgin? Gabriel’s response is, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.’
Interlocking with this is Matthew’s account of how an ‘angel of the Lord’ appeared to Joseph and told him that Mary’s child would be‘ conceived by the Holy Spirit’. Significantly, the angelic message goes on to say that the child will be called Jesus, for ‘he will save his people from their sins’. Jesus or Yeshua (‘Joshua’) is highly significant because it means ‘the Lord (Yahweh) saves’. Matthew records another angelic comment: this Jesus is to be ‘Immanuel’, which means ‘God with us’ and alludes back – as so many of these prophecies do – to the book of Isaiah.
These prophetic statements rooted deep in the past are reminders that the New Testament is the continuation of the Old Testament. How Jesus’ followers are to view the Old Testament is something that has challenged believers for two thousand years. There is a long-standing temptation to reject the Old Testament on the grounds that the coming of Christ has cancelled it, but this cuts away at the foundations of the Christian message. It is far better and wiser to see the New Testament as the culmination and fulfilment of the Old. A helpful illustration is to imagine that you are shown into a vast but poorly lit hall in a great art gallery; you can glimpse shadowy outlines of paintings that, even in the poor light, are clearly magnificent. Suddenly, the lights are switched on and now everything can be seen clearly in its full splendour. This is very much the case with the Bible. The New Testament does not change the Old Testament, but it does cast a new and brilliant light on it so that what was once hidden in shadow can now be seen with a new clarity.
