Jesus and the prophesies

I was first taught that Jesus was a direct fulfilment of Hebrew Bible messianic prophesies, that there was a clearly defined set of messianic expectations among the people of Israel that Jesus fulfilled to the point.

In Zechariah 9,9-10, we find one of the texts that has been identified as such a prophesy. The prophet says:

"Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion!
Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation,
gentle and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the war-horses from Jerusalem,
and the battle bow will be broken.
He will proclaim peace to the nations.
His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth."

This text contains a clear expectation of a king who will bring political peace. The armies, with their chariots and horses, will go away, the nations will quiet down and an Israelite king will rule all the known world.

The first part of the text is also a word-for-word background for Jesus’ actions and experience on Palm Sunday. Jesus was very well versed in the Scriptures and shared his time’s understanding of the Scriptures as prophetic texts, rich with hidden meanings, analogies and always with a message for contemporary society – often relating to the Messiah. Jesus and his followers saw him as fulfilling the people’s hope for a God-sent king who would usher in a world-change and the Kingdom of God.

Jesus, however, seems to have had few political ambitions. When people tried to engage him in revolts against the Roman occupation or proclaim him king, he refused or fled. His kingdom, he said, was not of this world. Most of the prophesies, and judging from the Gospels, many of Jesus contemporaries, expected just what Jesus did not want to be. The exact match between prophesy and fulfilment breaks, it seems quite consciously, from Jesus’ side. On Palm Sunday he fulfils only part of the literal meaning of the prophesy, the part about riding on a donkey and creating celebration in Jerusalem. The peace he proclaims is of a different kind. All the gospels show Jesus approaching Easter with the knowledge that he will be rejected and sentenced to death in Jerusalem, in clear opposition to the prevailing images of the Messiah.

This is not a problem for a christian understanding of Jesus as our Saving King and Messiah. But the relationship between prophesy and fulfilment is, for Jesus and, as many theologians would say, for the church, a different one than a direct fulfilment. Jesus also reinterprets the prophesies and shapes his own messianic role. There is both a break and a continuity between Jesus and the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew Bible providing the background for much of what he does and says, but he also reshapes the old beliefs, partly, it seems, on his own, and partly in congruence with other patterns of thought from his time.

Based on this, I would say, Jesus’ own authority actually increases, but it costs something in terms of our not being able to say that Jesus’ life proves the accuracy and correctness of Old Testament prophets. They only have a partial understanding, at least when Jesus is proclaimed as the Messiah, of what kind of salvation God would send. Jesus himself also uses principles of scriptual interpretation which follow another logic than our basic reflexes when studying ancient texts, and quite freely departs from the texts original scope of meanings, something which gives rise to another set of interesting questions.