JESUS IS THE ANSWER?

The Bible is not a book. It is a library. It contains 66 books if you’re Protestant, 73 if you’re Roman Catholic, 79 if you’re Greek Orthodox, 81 if you’re Ethiopian Orthodox, and 24 if you’re Jewish. Those 24 books, or scrolls, make up the Tanakh, Jesus’s Bible. Christians appropriated this library, rearranged its contents into 39 books, and called it the Old Testament. The New Testament, meanwhile, is a collection of 27 diverse interpretations of Jesus and what it means to follow him.

Sunday’s lection, Matthew 23:1–12, illustrates this diversity. Whose voice are we hearing? The historical Jesus of the 30s? Mark’s Jesus of the 70s? Or Matthew’s Jesus of the 90s? Mark and Luke criticize the scribes. Matthew adds “and Pharisees.”

That addition matters. After the Roman-Jewish War of 66–70 CE and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, Jewish communities took different, though overlapping, paths. Rabbinic Judaism developed around the Torah, its interpretation, and synagogue life. The Jesus movement, initially Jewish, increasingly included uncircumcised Gentiles. Matthew’s repeated references to “the scribes and Pharisees” reflect the tensions of his own time.

In effect, Matthew puts his own community’s conflict into Jesus’s mouth. 

We do this all the time. We make Jesus speak to our contemporary concerns. If Jesus were here, would he support Trump and MAGA? Would he not be in Gaza, among his fellow Palestinians? More unsettlingly, if Jesus were here, would he be on your side?

Perhaps we have appropriated Jesus so thoroughly that we have turned him into an answer machine. We proclaim, “JESUS IS THE ANSWER!” without asking whether we are asking the right questions—or whether we can bear his answers.

My friends, if Jesus of Nazareth were here today, he might not be the answer we want. He might challenge our loyalties, expose our hypocrisy, and unsettle our certainties. And, like so many who threaten the powerful, he might not survive the year.

*Art: “Christ Teaches Humility,” Robert Scott Lauder (1803–1869), Vanderbilt Divinity Library Digital Archives.*

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