Canter Bridge

Bible readers who care enough for curiosity about the book’s two large ‘testaments’ sometimes sprain hermeneutical ankles on differences between the Old and the New. Indeed, the alignment between them is not always easily discerned, an observation that will seem vastly understated to Jewish readers.

Yet alignment there is, an organic relationship that made the anthology of Christian memoirs, sermons, letters and apocalypse that emerged as a ‘new’ testament compelling to readers since the first and second centuries of the present era.

The pungent aroma of skandalon wafts over those who observe Jesus himself defining the change of times that he believed to have been coming upon humanity in his historical moment. I do not mean ‘scandal’ in its modern sense, but rather an ‘occasion for stumbling’ that is placed before those who walk in a certain direction and proves itself an obstacle to those who will not or cannot in good conscience step over it and continue the journey.

Jesus frequently defined this change of the times as the intervention of ‘God’s kingdom’ or—in Matthew—’the kingdom of heaven’. He can be expected to have agreed with the fundamental assertion of the book of Daniel that ‘the Most High has sovereignty over the kingdom of mortals and gives it to whom he will.’

This was a common enough Jewish affirmation, with a sufficient surplus of meaning to nest itself in a thousand traumas, challenges, and windows of opportunity.

But now we come upon Jesus’ take on this received wisdom:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Thus does Matthew conclude his testament and so is the wedge between synagogue and church driven deep.

Jesus seems effortlessly to assume a range of authority heretofore reserved for the Lord himself and to dispense it to his human agents at will. C.S. Lewis once poignantly observed the limited range of options this leaves to the curious with regard to the actual identity of Jesus. Lewis saw three. He is a lunatic. He is a fraud. Or he is who he claims to be.

The audacity of the implicit claim cradles the skandalon.

Jesus’ words as Matthew’s community preserved them can seem also to displace the words of Moses the great legislator, though perhaps not until one has soaked long in the Pentateuch’s language and expression (The Pentateuch, also called the five Books of Moses, are the Bible’s first: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy).

Finally, Jesus alludes to a preoccupation that in literary order hearkens back to earliest Genesis and in historical order was often on the lips of the eighth-century prophets and their successors. What is to become of these nations? As in the case of ‘these Yankees’ in modern-day America, one does not risk much in assuming a colorful adjective between article and noun.

Jesus’ answer is at once alarming and consonant with the most exalted wordsmithery to be found in the book of Isaiah: ‘Teach them.’

There is also the small matter of baptism and the awkward anachronism—if that is what it is—of a full-blown Trinitarian rubric on Jesus’ lips. Yet the implicit expectation is that the nations are capable of redemption or at least of education, which probably says the same.

People of a certain nature live with one eye trained on the horizon, a habit of mind that is difficult for those who do not practice it to fathom, like reading right to left or driving on the wrong side of the road. Such people often wonder whether human history will end in glory or in ashes.

Jesus’ appears to have an opinion.