He will save his people from their sins

Doesn’t such a reading imply that Jesus failed to do what the angel said he would? Namely the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans demonstrates that Jesus did not succeed in saving Israel from their sins.

In this commentary, Andrew is again separating a local, historically contextualised significance (of Matthew 1:21) from a broader, universal significance. The salvation he suggests which should be understood here is from the destruction of the nation, which was to come if the nation did not turn from its sins. I suggest that this setting of one view (local, historically contextualised) against another (broader, universal) is not justified - using the exegetical tools and methods which he applies - and that both are to be assumed, not one or the other.

Micah’s prophecy came before the exile to Babylon, and refers to that as the judgement which came on Israel as a consequence of her disloyalty to the covenant. The judgement on Israel in the 1st century was of a different order - there was to be no national restoration, but a reconstitution of the people of God around Jesus - a ‘new covenant’ (which was really a fulfilment of all the covenants), also foretold by the prophets.

In other words, even in Andrew’s reading, a broader, universal significance was being given to the people of God than had been the case in the existence of Israel as a nation. Now the people were to be worldwide. What was their significance to be to the world? The bringing of a message of God’s plans, now being brought into action, for redeeming creation - fulfilling all his designs and purposes for the cosmos, starting in individuals, who were to be brought into community as the people of God. The starting point of that fulfilment was to be a dealing with the inheritance of Adam, the old creation, in the lives of God’s people, who were now not just Jews living in the specific, historically contextualised circumstances of Israel in relation to the Mosaic covenant in the 1st century, but a worldwide community of peoples who had never had that specific background and set of obligations.

In the light of this context, is Matthew 1:21 to be seen exclusively in the light of 1st century Jews needing a temporal and physical salvation from a physical judgement which was to come in their lifetime? I don’t think so, since ‘saving people from their sins’ was given an entirely different significance through the actions of Jesus than had been implied in Micah’s prophecy. Salvation from destruction at the hands of the Romans in the Jewish wars was part of that salvation. A much more important part was that described by Paul in Romans, which took in a wider context - with Adam as a key reference point, and Jesus as the ‘last Adam’ and ‘new man’ - through whom we might also share in the attributes of a redeemed humanity.

As with my comment on Andrew’s previous meditation, I contend that with Matthew 1:21, it is not one interpretation set against another, but both included and implied in the same statement. It is possible that we have forgotten to hear the interpretation which Andrew highlights, and need to hear it more clearly. But we should not do so at the expense of the interpretation which brings significance for us today, and is also validly implied in the verse. In the light of where the history of God’s people was moving, OT and NT, Matthew 1:21 bears out such a broader, universal interpretation and significance.

I see two issues in interpreting the quoted verse correctly.

Firstly, who are “his people”? Andrew writes “The reference to Israel’s ‘sins’ …” and in doing so chooses what I imagine is the only real candidate interpretation.

In some circumstances “YHWH’s people” could be interpreted as those who fear Him regardless of heritage. People like David, but unlike Ahab, people even like Ruth. However, based on the dream, Joseph would surely have had no reason to believe that his finance’s child’s people would be any other than either all Israel, or perhaps a sub-group, like Benjamin. “His people” being the blood group he was from, as was the common usage of this phrase.

The second issue is the type of saving from his people’s sins, that the unborn child would bring. Andrew suggests it was salvation (via forgiveness) from the consequences of Israel’s nation sins, which (though unknown at that time) was to be total destruction of the nation. I contend that this Jonah like job of turning the nation to repentance, that it might be forgiven and “saved”, was not what Jesus came to do at all. Instead of attempting this, Jesus said that the nation had actually been blinded, so that this generation wouldn’t turn, be forgiven, and escape the national devastation what was coming. (John 12:37-41)

With great respect, so far I have missed any compelling reason to interpret the angel’s revelation of Jesus’ mission as one of national political salvation, or even selective (ie around a re-constituted “His people”) political salvation.

From the New American Commentary on Luke: “The term “Savior” found in Luke 1:47; 2:11; Acts 5:31; 13:23 appears only once in the other Gospels (John 4:42); “salvation” is found ten times in Luke-Acts* but only once in the other Gospels (John 4:22); and the verb “to save” is found seventeen times in Luke (more than any other Gospel) and thirteen times in Acts.”

It seems Jesus as Savior was a particular theme for Luke and was a bold counter claim to the imperially backed and blossoming Caesar cult. Beyond: Jesus is our savior and Caesar isn’t, precisely what Luke was meaning is not clear to me.

Perhaps the way Jesus was to save his people, was the same way that he saved us gentiles also, through his death? In this reading, the unborn child was coming to save his people retrospectively and futuristically, in addition to the several hundred who followed him 30 years later, or even the many thousands of Jewish Christians who fled the city before it fell to the Romans. The rest of us (gentiles) become an unmentioned bonus.

* Luke 1:69, 71, 77; 19:9; Acts 4:12; 7:25; 13:26, 47; 16:17; 27:34 (cf. also Luke 2:30; 3:6; Acts 28:28).

Andrew

In a response to Peter Wilkinson on 20 December you said

“we need to allow for greater separation, differentiation, contingency, the setting of boundaries, before we reconstruct the overarching synthesis. I don’t think we lose the universal significance of Jesus’ birth by insisting on its historically contextualized meaning”

In this observation and many others, you were commenting on the assumption that biblical stories can be understood as timeless truths eg the the assumption that Christ came to effect individual salvation for the whole of mankind.

Does this open up a wedge in the Biblical understanding of morality? If our understanding of Christ’s activity (and indeed of anything else in the Bible) is to be understood historically, should we also not understand the moral stands of the Bible as historically conditioned? Thus, the New Testament has no moral objection to slavery whereas it is morally repellent to us today. And the New Testament (may have) opposed homosexuality whereas a majority of people in good conscience now have no such objection.

Looking at the rest of the references in the begining of Matthew that you noted, it does make a lot of sense to read it your way.

However, I don’t want you to think that I am acutually trying to downplay the relationship between sin and punishment and death and destruction.  As you said, sin and death are existentially linked.  I wasn’t saying that they wern’t.  I was just saying that more immediate, reflexive spiritual consequences are often overlooked, when God’s direct fire and brimstone kind of punishment gets involved.

If I wish to downplay this at all, it’s to avoid to opposite extreme of the “prosperity gospel.”  Isreal has a direct covenant with God wherein they obey the commandments, things go well, if not disaster.  I see that as a specific condition for Isreal, but often passages which endorse this concept are interpreted universally.  So that anybody who is good is expected to be rewarded with prosperity and everything going well in general, while anyone who is bad will have bad things happen to them.  The consequences of that paradigm are disastrous.  When people go through bad times, they think they are being punished.  And others can assume that things would be better for them if they were better people.  While people who build up earthly treasures through evil acts can point to their prosperity as their justification.  Would God let me get so rich if I was so bad?  People daze through life thinking that this universal justice will take care if them, and when it doesn’t, their faith is injured if not destroyed.

It seems to me that one of the meanings to be gleaned from Jesus’ sacrifice is that being good will not result in good things happening to you.  He was better than anyone else, and look what happened to him.  In fact, he tells us that the better we are, the more likely we are to be persecuted.  Jesus directs us to look for spiritual rewards “treasure in heaven” rather than physical rewards “earthly treasure.”  Specifically, in Matthew he refers to those who are pious to garner the respect of others as having “recieved their reward.”  This makes God’s rewards and punishments more subtle, taking place on a spiritual, rather than a physical plane.  They are just as real, more real, since spiritual reality is the foundation of physical reality.  The reward Jesus recieves from God for his obedience dwarfs any earthly reward.  It is this reward that Christ calls us to focus on.

I just think this shift in emphasis from looking for rewards and punishments in the external physical world, to looking for them within our hearts (and after death) is pretty central to the NT, so I tend to interpret stuff (like the angel’s speech above) that way whenever I can.  But then again, the angel’s speech is just the beginning of the story.  The shift is only beginning to take place, so it would go back and forth that way, throughout the gospels.