The Last Word 4

The third chapter of N.T. Wright's The Last Word moves from the Old Testament to the New. The particular focus of the chapter is Jesus. Wright begins by looking to Jesus as the accomplishment or fulfillment to which the Old Testament scriptures had pointed. He writes, 'Jesus does, climactically and decisively, what scripture had in a sense been trying to do: bring God's fresh Kingdom-order to God's people and thence to the world...When he spoke of the scripture needing to be fulfilled, he was not simply envisaging himself doing a few scattered and random acts which corresponded to various distant and detached prophetic sayings; he was thinking of the entire storyline at last coming to fruition, and of an entire world of hints and shadows now coming to plain statement and full light.'

Apart from himself being the fulfillment of scripture, Wright also talks about Jesus' insistence upon scripture's authority. While he doesn't make it a major theme in his teaching, it is clear that Jesus' underlying attitude is one of attributing authority to the Old Testament scriptures.

Tying these two themes together, Wright responds to the otherwise puzzling passages where Jesus seemingly disregards traditional understanding of scripture. For instance, in the same passage where Jesus insists on the priority of scripture over man-made traditions, he declares foods to be clean that scripture had forbidden (Mark 7:1-23). Another example is that Jesus speaks very strongly in equating lust with adultery and anger with murder, yet is very loose with his interpretation of sabbath rest. A third example is the command to honor your father and mother, yet Jesus ignored his own family and told his followers that they must be prepared to hate their own families.

These, and other examples like them, do not make any sense unless we see Jesus as someone who both honors the authority of scripture as well as being the one who fulfills scripture. However, once we see Jesus in the context of the larger biblical narrative, we begin to get a glimpse of what the new covenant means and how it 'would both fulfill and transform the old one.' Jesus, as the embodiment of the word, has the authority to fulfill the authoritative written word of God in unexpected and surprising ways.