Probably the solution is to be sought in the same direction as in the case of the prohibition of divorce. Ultimately, Jesus appealed to God’s creative wilclass="underline" “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Mark 10:9). When Jesus asserts that nothing outside a person is unclean but all uncleanness comes from the human heart, the creation account could also be in the background. There we find, six times, “God saw that it was good.” And then, when God rests on the Sabbath and creation is finished, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Gen 1:31). If the world and everything in it is made good, and if the coming of the reign of God will restore God’s original good creation, then where the reign of God is accepted nothing can be unclean. Uncleanness, then, comes about always and only through the evil that emerges from human hearts.
If Jesus thought that way, he did not simply abolish the Old Testament Torah of clean and unclean, because it too is intended to create a holy people for God in the midst of the distorted and damaged creation. In that case he placed every command regarding clean and unclean under the sign of the good creation and brought the Torah of clean and unclean into the right light by articulating the creative will of God. We might say that then he would have been clarifying the Torah through the Torah.
A New Law?
Did Jesus abolish the Torah and, as a new lawgiver, establish a new law? That is the question with which this chapter began. The philosopher and martyr Justin saw it that way. Many great theologians after him saw it that way too. But we can see how questionable that idea is from the very fact that in that case the Torah is torn apart: its moral demands have not been abrogated, only its ritual laws!
But a great deal more speaks against this position, including Matthew 5:17: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” Romans 3:31 likewise speaks to the contrary: “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.” Finally, every sampling that has been made in this chapter speaks against it. Jesus does not abrogate the Torah or abolish it; he does not replace it with a new Torah; he interprets it.
But he does not interpret it as the scribes do. He does not cling to the letter. He seeks the original will of God behind the letters. He sees the Torah as a whole and therefore also reaches back to the first chapters of Torah to find there the creative will of God. He sets forth the center of the Torah: the commandment about the uniqueness and sole rule of God. And by his message of the reign of God now coming he endows that commandment with historical urgency. He places the whole Torah in the light of the reign of God and subordinates all commandments to God’s reign. He combines the principal commandment with that of love of neighbor from Leviticus 19, and in doing so he gives the Torah its center or, better, he finds its center. First and last, his concern is the will of God, and he knows how easily even religious people can use external performance of the law to avoid the true will of God. And Jesus teaches all that with ultimate authority—like someone who himself stands in God’s stead. “At Sinai it was said to the congregation of Israel… but now I say to you.”
It is understandable that Jesus has repeatedly been seen as a “new lawgiver,” but he was no such thing. He spoke about the one and only law of God, but he enunciated it as something fully new.
It is understandable that the Sermon on the Mount was understood to be the “new Torah” of Christians. After all, the mountain itself recalls Sinai. But in reality the Sermon on the Mount is not a new Torah. How could it be, when it does not even touch so many areas of human life? Jesus does not proclaim a new law; he brings to its fulfillment the one social project of the Torah given once for all by offering examples, in the Sermon on the Mount, that show how that social project is to be understood and lived radically, that is, in terms of its roots—and that means in terms of the true will of God.
It is understandable that people saw the love commandment, with its expansion to cover enemies, as a “new commandment.” It had to seem something completely new in the world of antiquity. But it was already in the Torah.
It is understandable that people said that Jesus not only interpreted the Torah but transcended it. No, he did not transcend it; he found its center and so brought the whole Torah to its fulfillment.
And it is understandable that people have said that Jesus understood “himself” as the Torah. He did, in fact, live the Torah with his whole existence; he established it irrevocably and in unsurpassable fashion in his own person. Jesus lives in union with the will of God in the ultimate sense. And yet to say that he himself is the Torah has something dangerous about it: the Torah is a social order, and a social order cannot be exhausted in a single person. It requires a people.
The Whole Torah
Jesus showed himself to us as the eschatological interpreter of the Torah. He comprehended the intent of the Torah as well as its dynamic. He interpreted it with an admirable sensitivity to its center. When Mark 1:22 says that he taught like one who has sovereign authority and not like the scribes, that is exactly the point. But does that mean that for Jesus, and accordingly for Christians, whole sections of the Torah have been sidelined by Jesus’ centralizing interpretation, indeed, that they have basically been done away with because they have been absorbed by the twofold commandment of love of God and neighbor? Here we need to exercise extreme caution.
Obviously Jesus established a new basis for the Torah; he interpreted it definitively and thus gave it its eschatological form. But that does not mean that whole parts of the Torah were discarded like burned-out rocket stages. They were not cast off but transformed. No part of the Torah may be regarded as over and done with, certainly not as abrogated, but the whole Torah must be interpreted anew, over and over again, in light of Jesus Christ, and directed toward the will of God. Then it may certainly appear that certain parts of the Torah that at first seem strange and even comical in our eyes acquire a new meaning—or to put it in better words, they reveal the meaning intended for them from the beginning.
To give one example: the Torah contains extensive laws for what is clean and unclean (cf., e.g., Lev 11–15). These apply primarily to the house, clothing, the body, and food. There are orders for how people who are healed of skin diseases are to be declared clean. Distinctions are made between animals that confer uncleanness and those that are clean. It is established what kinds of meat may be eaten and what kinds are not to be eaten. Is all that out of date? It seems so. After all, we have learned Jesus’ clear principle: “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile” (Mark 7:15). But does that saying mean that Israel’s laws for cleanness and holiness are abrogated or reduced to purely ethical norms? Christian theologians have repeatedly said, in this connection, that Jesus’ distinction between “inside” and “outside” refers all external, ritual holiness from a material-prepersonal sphere to its real meaning, that is, internal, personal holiness. But we ought to be careful about such formulations, because in the New Testament even holiness separated from the external-material means decisively more than merely an inner quality of the soul or the moral person.