If we recap the first eight posts, we can say this: when Adam and Eve sin, they exhibit a fleshly impatience for maturity. They are cut off from Eden, and the cost of re-entry is death. Death functions in the world as a power. Fear of death and the need to set up boundaries against it leads humanity to live by flesh - creating unjust structures of clean and unclean, pure and impure. In order to destroy flesh without bringing death, God enrolls Abraham in a project in flesh warfare. They are marked in the flesh by circumcision, and their tabernacles under Moses are a parody of the fleshly sacrifices of other societies. Where their sacrifices policed distance between gods and people and between have's and have-not's, God's sacrifices followed a logic of access. It wasn't "you aren't allowed in here," but rather, "you aren't allowed in here...until you've had your bath." It's about making a way for flesh to enter into the presence of God, and re-entering Eden. Ultimately, instead of being a parody, the project of Israel became more of a way of separating themselves from God than actually drawing near. In other words, they became just like what they were intended to parody.
We saw this in the first eight posts. After our (lengthy) interlude in post nine about atonement theories (how God makes us "at-one" through Jesus), we spent nine posts asking what it would look like if God came out from his throne room in the holy of holies in the temple and walked around among his people. In looking at Matthew's gospel, we found that Jesus recapitulates the whole story of Israel, all its leaders, all its prophets, all its sacrificial structure. He gathers it all up and brings it to fulfillment.
Now we ask why that wasn't enough? If Jesus' life so thoroughly followed the logic of being a new temple, such that religious habits of how hands were washed, how the sabbath was honored, who were acceptable dining companions were now being redefined around Jesus, why did it have to end in tragedy? Why did he have to die?
Peter Leithart depicts a process of increasing direct engagement between Jesus and his opposition:
"Jesus died because his purposes and program for Israel clashed with the agenda of the Jewish leaders at every crucial point. The Jewish leaders considered Jesus a transgressor of Torah, who not only failed to keep Torah here and there but who overturned Torah altogether. To Jewish eyes, Jesus was a Sabbath-breaker. He flouted purity regulations, eating at defiled tables. He went freely among compromised Jews and prostitutes. He distributed bread in the wilderness as if he were Yahweh leading a new exodus, but the multitude who ate together was a mixed multitude packed with polluted Gentiles. He spoke with Samaritans, even Samaritan women." (Delivered, 146)
Leithart goes on to say that Jesus did not only accidentally offend Pharisees but transgressed their boundaries on purpose:
"Jesus knew just where the pressure points were, and he courageously acted and spoke to provoke repentance, with the full realization that he would in fact provoke nothing but fury." (148)
These weren't just "breaches of etiquette." Jesus wasn't just being rude. His enacting of Torah and all that the levitical laws and the tabernacle and temple were for - all this went directly against the Pharisaical program such that only one could emerge victorious. Ben Meyer writes:
"The distinctions of clean and unclean and of righteous and sinners shaped and permeated the self-understanding of Judaism. To subvert these distinctions was...a challenge to the social order." (Meyer, quoted in Leithart, 149)
Leithart writes:
"If Jesus' way became the way of Israel, then all the hopes and plans of the Pharisees and scribes were doomed, because their plans and hopes depended on maintaining and tightening the taste-not-touch-nots of their (life)...If Jesus' way became Israel's way, then Israel as the Jewish leaders and teachers knew it would cease to exist. If Jesus was right, then the teachers and leaders of Israel must themselves have been transgressors of Torah. There was a stark choice: Torah or Jesus. For the Jewish leaders, it could not be both." (149)
My putting it this way may seem like only a historical incident and that I'm only retracing what led up to the scene of the crime. But who is at fault? Whose crime is it? Who is on trial? This is where the historical lead-up is so significant. The history is precisely where the divine plan is illuminated. People put a common criminal on trial and execute him. The gospels disclose that God was at work in the trial of this one man, and put the whole world on trial. Everything becomes very dense here as Jesus recapitulates the full sacrificial sequence that Torah prescribed and dies as Israel's representative substitute, even as he has lived as Israel's representative substitute. And in dying for Israel, he also dies for the world. For Israel is the representative of the world, and God's means for delivering it, as he had promised to Abraham so long before.
The last thing we'll say here is that unless Jesus dies, there will be no way back into Eden. True, the God of Eden, the very Word that created it has stepped out into his fleshly world, but that very flesh of the world must be put to death to pass through the gates of Eden. Just as Israel had to be turned from flesh into smoke through unblemished animal sacrifices and fire to slip through the tabernacle veil, just so, there can be no actual access to Eden unless flesh is put to death. Peter Leithart writes:
"Eden could be reentered only by passing through the cherubic sword and fire, only through death and transfiguration. If Jesus had been nothing but a teacher, if he had died a peaceful death in bed, he would not have fulfilled the sacrifices of Israel. Without death and resurrection, he could not have made a way into the presence of the God who is a consuming fire. Apart from his death and resurrection there is no transfiguration of human nature from flesh to Spirit." (Delivered, 286)
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