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SUBJECT: 14. Chapter 14: Christ Being Thrust Outside of the Sphere of Mosaic Law
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C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N
Christ Being Thrust Outside of the Sphere of Mosaic Law
And they themselves went not into the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover.
—Joh_18:28 b.
THOSE who would appreciate the suffering of Christ and the curse that accrued to Him, those who would taste of the dregs of that passion, must return again and again to the thought that Christ is being thrust outside of the sphere of law.
The concept of Christ as outlaw has appeared several times in this second volume. We noticed that in the presence of Annas Christ was placed outside of the sphere of canonical law. The servant who struck the Master on the cheek did so in violation of law. We can say that at this time Christ was put outside of the circle of civil law. Thereupon, we observed that Christ was defied on the mountain of prophecy. They beat and they buffeted Him. In other words, the leaders of the people cast Him out of the domain of ethical law. Anything was good enough for Jesus. They could do as they chose with Him. Laws had not been written with Him in mind. Therefore we say that Christ was set outside of the sphere of ethical law, that is, of the decalogue. On this occasion that which happened to Him before Annas was confirmed. He was treated as one having no civil rights. Thus they were not only, in that first preliminary session of the Sanhedrin before Annas, reaching back to the defiance heaped upon Christ after the sentence of the Sanhedrin, but they were also reaching ahead to what is to come now as they thrust Him out of the sphere of the ceremonial and symbolical law.
Not until this last thing has also been done is the work complete. Not until then is the profanation of Christ as outlaw, at least in so far as His people are concerned, entirely exhausted. Now the whole of the sacrosanct law which God gave Israel can be subsumed under these three classifications: the civil, the ethical, and the ceremonial. These three together constitute the law according to which God led His people along the messianic way; through these He realized His will and His counsel in effecting the history of redemption. Now if Christ, because of the curse resting upon Him for our sin, must be made Christ the outlaw, He must be completely thrust outside of the law. Otherwise His suffering and His curse are not yet complete. It is not enough that they take away from Him the protection of civil and ethical law. This process of removing Him from the domain of right had to reach a sharper crisis: they had to cast Him out of the sphere of the Mosaic, the ceremonial, the symbolical law also. Only then, as far as Israel was concerned, would the task be completed. Only then would Moses and the Prophets, the law and the prescriptions, in short, the whole legislative activity of the Old Testament, the whole inspiration of the Holy Spirit as it had been poured out in the Old Testament up to this time — only then would these all arise in judgment against Christ who was made sin because He was accursed for our sake. Only after Jesus had been plunged into an externally perceptible judgment also would He who was called the Nazarene be completely excommunicated by the Old Testament. Only then would they, in the name of the messianic image, have rejected Him whom the image bodied forth. Only then would Moses who gave the symbolical law, and Elias, who had again intensified the force of that law for the indolent priests, the ignorant prophets, and the indifferent kings, be officially summoned into judgment by the people of Israel to testify against the Nazarene. Then only would the Jewish nation in its ignorance, of course, but also while being fully responsible, hang up the picture which is diametrically opposed to the one of Christ on the mount of transfiguration.
At the beginning of the gospel of the passion, Moses and Elias had come to the mountain as messengers of God to tell Jesus that He must die in Jerusalem, but also that He would in that fulfill the life work of Elias and Moses. They emphatically call Jesus into the sphere of law. Christ who is the origin, the mediator, the purpose, and the sublime, evangelical mystery of their legal work —He is expressly called into the domain of that law.
But could the Christ on His way to His suffering have tasted of heaven’s luxury unmolested? That would have been too much for Him. No, He will have to compensate for all His joy: God will convert all His feasting into mourning.
Now God must convert into mourning the festival of His meeting with Moses and Elias, who drew their circle around Him, saying: Thou belongest inside it. However, Moses and Elias must now emphatically keep Him out of it, saying: Our laws reject Thee; they do not pertain to Thee; they have no bearing on Thee. Naturally, Moses and Elias will not do this themselves. The Sanhedrin will do it; but by means of the Sanhedrin, God Himself will be doing this work, the God of Moses and Elias. Just as God Himself later delivers up Christ to the cross by means of Pilate, so God Himself now makes Christ an outlaw by means of the Sanhedrin. God Himself now has become Christ’s enemy, excluding Him from the area of relevance of all of Israel’s laws. Judas has betrayed Him, has he, and Simon denied Him? Yes, and to this end: Moses will not deny Jesus; through Moses God will excommunicate Him. For is He not the Surety?
Now note this. Christ can be harassed perfectly by the sombre counter-design of the dazzling brilliance on the mount of transfiguration only when the people of Israel and the Sanhedrin summon Moses and Elias into judgment against the Nazarene. Now these two, and this time according to the inevitable logic of the flesh to which the Judge on high affixes His seal, will again have to tell Jesus that He will die in Jerusalem. They have given Him this message before; now they must repeat it.
But it is not they who fill in the details of the message. He must die in Jerusalem, yes, and outside of the city gates. They must tell Him that their sphere of law can contain Him no longer. That like a pariah He is being cast out of the communion of Israel’s ritual, that He apparently is not the comforting, mysterious secret of the law, that He has been made sin, and, accordingly, that He is reckoned with those unholy ones whose life is a continual warfare against the law. Moses and Elias must regard Him as the great stumbling-block which stands in the way of a breaking through of evangelical grace, the grace for which Moses as well as Elias was reaching.
Only when this has happened, only when the sphere of ceremonial law, too, has driven Jesus of Nazareth out, crying ‘‘unclean, unclean” against Him, will everything written in the Old Testament and in the whole law of revelation — by unbelief of course, but through these by God the Judge also — be summoned into judgment against Jesus of Nazareth.
Just that much happened to Him today. Unclean, unclean! God sends Moses in pursuit of Satan, who comes to mobilize all of Jaweh’s laws against Christ, and to excommunicate Him. We know that excommunication means to deliver the rejected one up into Satan’s hand. The Jews do not have that in mind, it is true (p. 186), but God does. It is just that which God achieves through them.
Such is the awful significance of what is told us in our narrative by the finely discriminating evangelist, John. What we have in our text is not a little particular which at best has only a chronological significance. It is just this chronological significance, however, which has occupied at least ten writers. We read that the whole Sanhedrin arose but took great pains not to go into the judgment hall lest they be defied for eating the Passover. No, this is no insignificant detail. It is a real, historical complement to everything that has gone before. It is a dogmatic amplification of the sombre fact of the curse which God by means of the unspiritual, Jewish exegesis of the Old Testament opposes to the Saviour of the New. We, accordingly, shall not delay long in considering the matter of chronology which has set so many pens in motion. The nature of this book keeps us from doing that. Suffice it to indicate the argument of some to the effect that the chronological facts which John puts into our text are in contradiction to the accounts of the other evangelists. They believe, on the basis of what the other evangelists say, that the Passover meal had been eaten on the morning of the day on which Christ was delivered up to Pilate. John, according to them, is referring to that part of the program of the feast which is still to take place. Now John says that the Jews refuse to go into the judgment hall. Why did they refuse? The answer is that for them to enter the hall of a heathen in this way would, according to the ritual, be to defile themselves for the Passover. This they would circumvent, lest they should have to eat the Passover with an uneasy conscience.
Now if it is true that the phrase “to eat the Passover” refers only to actually partaking of the Passover lamb, we would have to agree that John’s presentation of the chronology of events conflicts with that of the other evangelists. Others have, however, satisfactorily explained the apparent difficulty. These maintain that the phrase “to eat the Passover” may be used in a narrower and a broader sense. Even though the phrase originally referred to the actual partaking of the feast, the center of which, naturally, was the eating of the lamb, it is still possible to deduce from several sources that the same phrase was used for such activities of the feast as followed upon the actual Passover meal. The celebration was by no means completed after the lamb had been eaten. Moreover, the regulations governing Levitical cleanness were binding for these later activities also. Hence the person who wanted to celebrate the feast, and who wanted to take part in each of its activities and to conclude it with the others, had to preserve the ritualistic regulations of cleanliness punctiliously throughout the day in the manner designated by the law and custom regulating feast days.
There is, therefore, no conflict at all between the several accounts of the evangelists; no one need dispute the unity of the narratives. Accordingly, our thoughts take a different direction as we read of the scruples which caused the Jews to halt at the steps of the court house. This event gives us a glimpse of the tragic conflict that exists between the Jewish externalization (formalization) of the law and the revelation, and the true, messianic, spiritual fulfillment of it. How meager and yet how human the Jews prove themselves, to be here. They fear that they will not be able to partake of the Passover because of a defilement which might be theirs if they should enter a heathen house. They do conduct Jesus to Pilate, but they do not enter the praetorium themselves lest it hamper them in carrying out their share in the remaining schedule of the celebration. A superficial treatment could very easily work out various contrasts here between the extravagant sin which the Jews are willing to undertake, on the one hand, and the punctiliousness with which they keep their days “clean,” on the other. Here is reason indeed for recalling Jesus’ utterance about those who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. Yes, we will even go farther and say that at no time was the pronounced contrast between the gnat and the camel as conspicuous as it is at this moment. While being mocked and defied, Christ is delivered up to death by a most atrocious injustice, and at the same time the letter of the law, amplified by human customs, is being fastidiously observed.
However, it would not be appropriate for us to work out these pronounced contrasts in a superficial and cynical fashion: it would not do for us to shake our heads superciliously at the stupidity of those who are responsible for them. Jesus never follows that method. There is something more than mere “pettiness” at work here. In this also Pharisaism is but following the course of its own intrinsic logic.
What we have here first of all is an “externalization” of religion. Christ was the form, the purpose of all the laws that God gave to Israel. No one ever had the key that would disclose the meaning of law, save Him who saw it as a particular moment, as a unique phase, of that history of redemption in which God throughout all the preceding centuries had searched out and pointed to the Christ. But the Jews have thrown away the key which God gave them to the law. They externalized the law; they made it a purely formal thing by explaining it in terms of itself, by not allowing the evangelical light to throw upon the screen the image of the meek, the lowly, the gentle Messiah which was contained in the law. Once they had explained the law without reference to Christ Jesus who was to come by grace, they proceeded to cut the “symbols” loose from the “body,” the types from Him they typified, the ceremonies from the Spirit, the lamb of the Passover from the Christ, ritualistic cleanness from regeneration, the priests from the Chief Priest, the covenant fellowship of Israel from the covenant fellowship of the new dispensation, the flesh of Abraham (his natural fatherhood) from his faith (his spiritual fatherhood). It is this distorted logic of an erroneous apperception of the Scriptures which expresses itself in a rejection of the Christ at the same time that a painfully fastidious insistence on the letter of the law is maintained. Such conduct lets the children of sin go on cherishing the illusion that they are doing God a service by staying outside of a pagan court, a court in which leavened loaves are served on the day of unleavened bread.
In the second place, we have here the tragedy of self-assertion, a self-assertion which, once it had misunderstood God’s laws, proceeded to add to them by means of human regulations. Once a person has lost his hold on the spiritual content of the law, and has no further need of penetrating what was at first the transparent wall of external ceremony with an eye enlightened by the spirit, it must necessarily follow that a misdirected zeal will make that wall firmer, denser, and sturdier, so that it may not be broken down in all eternity.
Thus did the Jews add their stipulations to the law of God. In other words, they emasculated God’s law by means of their human regulations. After all, the stipulation that a pagan house could be entered only at the cost of ritualistic defilement was one which could be found nowhere in the laws.[1] True, the law indicated in Deu_16:4 prescribed that during seven days of the Passover season the Jews might have no leaven in their house. But that prohibition says nothing about shunning a pagan palace because of the fact that there is leaven in it. The stipulation which the Jews feared so anxiously is one which the Rabbis and Scribes have added to the regulations found in the canonical books. Similar additions were those humanly contrived ones which Christ expressly opposed in His conflict with the Pharisees and the Scribes. These all were the interpretations of the Scribes, as we know them from the mishna, for example, in which a law such as the one involved here is given. Not the Author of the law but the false interpreters, the Rabbis, were responsible for such legal interpretation. In this matter also “the great God proves to be more merciful than the churchistic Jew. The rabbis had unnecessarily accentuated the separation which God had intended to be temporary. Never had the law absolutely prohibited the Jews from making contacts with a heathen, or with a heathen house. What God had forbidden was the fellowship or the making of covenants with pagans. When the Jews refused to enter Pilate’s judgment hall ‘lest they be defiled’ (Joh_18:28) they simply proved to be the pitiable slaves of a tyrannical formalism.”[2] Who now would dare to dismiss these Jews as people who strain at gnats; who would dareto think that by dismissing them in that way he had completely characterized the whole of their sinful attitude? Throughout the centuries the tragic tale has been the same: the moment the liturgical man no longer sees through the wall of symbols and of visible things in the city of God, he inevitably falls into the habit of merrily spinning out human laws and regulations. And in this respect also the Jew who shuns the praetorium will experience precisely what everyone experiences who has not seen the Christological significance of the Scriptures.
[1] Strack-Billerbeck, Kommentaar zun N.T. aus Talmud und Midrasch, Volume 2, Excurs zum Todenstag Jesu, D. 11, p. 838.
[2] Dr. B. Wielenga, Van Jerusalem naar Rome, Volume 1, p. 456, Kampen, J. H. Kok.
A third significance may be seen in this tragic event also. Not only do the Jews assert themselves externally as a Hebrew nation over against heathendom when they shun the praetorium of the procurators, but they also assert themselves internally, that is, within the sphere of the Jewish congregation itself. There, too, the priests and the members of the Sanhedrin want to maintain their dignity as a privileged caste on this beautiful feast day. For, even if they had entered the house of the pagan, they would have had a chance for active participation in such activity of the celebration as still remained on the schedule. All that they would have lost is the dignity of their position. Now we know that throughout the Passover great caution in the matter of Levitical cleanness was emphatically enjoined upon everyone as an important requisite. Each day, for instance, the streets were swept. And when they were actually sitting at the festal meal the liturgically clean had to be kept carefully separated from the liturgically unclean. If they were walking on the carefully swept street, the ritualistically clean persons enjoyed the middle of the road; the unclean had to stay on the side. Moreover, there was a separate, high-flung arch through which those passed who in a legal sense were clean. Those who were not had to take the humbler side-route.[3]
[3] Gustaf Dalman. Orte und Wege Jesu, 3rd edition, Gutersloh, 1924, p. 299.
Naturally, the Jewish authorities remembered that as they were at present they could take that middle course, and in passing through the gate could take the high route of clean people. In this we see the delight in preeminence, that characteristic of the Jewish caste-spirit, asserting itself to the limit on the day of Christ’s death. The Jewish leaders will not forfeit at any price the privilege of that dignified procession along the middle of the thoroughfare and through the gate which must be raised for them as they pass through it. They want to appear as though they especially are crowned of God. This, then, is the bitter irony in terms of which the Bible outlines a conflict between flesh and Spirit as that struggle is carried out on the day of Christ’s death. The judges of Israel insist on their rights of passage through the middle of the street with a painful insistence. Meanwhile Jesus, as He who is unclean, is regarded as being good enough for the unclean house of the pagan procurator. The Jewish judges, those epigones of Moses, Aaron, and Solomon, and of all the prophets, took great pains not to lose the privilege of passing through the high-flung gate along the highway of the clean. But they see to it that Christ is thrown outside of the gate as one accursed. This, too, is His passion. His people deliver Him at Pilate’s door, but keep their own hands clean in their dealings with the heathen. This people— and they are His own people—now sanction a method of interpretation of the law which is a contradiction of itself. Only a caricature of that law remains. The Word is at bottom cut loose from its Speaker, the symbol from the law, the letter from the spirit.
That, therefore, which pushes Christ over the borderline is a conscious insistence upon the line of demarcation which separates the profane province of heathendom from the holy province of Israel. No one given to removing landmarks could ever grieve Him as severely as these spiritual rangers are doing here. All the symbols of the law were calling for Him, but He is cast out in the name of that very symbolical service. As a monster born of God’s fruitful people, He is brutally thrown out of the fellowship of the temple.
Nevertheless, it is not becoming for us to begin criticizing the Jews now, for all those who have shared in the threefold guilt of externalization, of a distortion of the Scriptures, and of self-assertion are essentially one with these Jews, even though in themselves they have not the power, like the Jews, to demonstrate the perverse logic of their own sins.
No, there is but one thing for us to do. We must stretch our hands out to the Surety of our souls. He allowed Himself to be accursed by all that is law in our stead. By suffering the passion of that curse, fully aware of its intensest implications, and in obedience to His heavenly, that is, to His perfectly exacting Judge, He entered into the great self-concealment which permanently keeps the messianic suffering from being mitigated or tempered. It is in concealment, that He Himself in His strong love publicly makes His debut for the faith. The visible wall of external shadows and signs, to which the Jews have added more and more stays, again becomes transparent to him who believes, for Christ’s great light shines through it from the inside. Jesus endures the suffering when they throw Him behind the gate of the heathen court, even though they themselves refuse even to pass through it. He endures being classified with barbarians. For He has great plans in mind. Presently He will show Simon Peter a vision from heaven. A great sheet will be lowered from heaven in which both clean and unclean animals will be presented as food (Acts 10). That event will prove that the Surety who endured being segregated with the “sect” of the barbarians is transferring those barbarians, together with the believing Jews, to a new communion, to the universal world-unity of the new messianic humanity, which will make all fleshly partakers of the Passover Lamb a “sect.” At the same time in which Christ is being pushed behind the curtains of a pagan house, He earns the right to rend the veil in the temple. He achieves the right to break down the middle wall of partition, and to give to the former barbarians, to the unclean pariahs, and to the abandoned heathen the fellowship of the Messiah of the Scriptures. Accordingly, the hour in which the laws of Moses cast out the Christ was an hour of world-renovating significance. The primary cry no longer is, “Separate yourselves from the palaces of pagans.” The call now is, “Separate yourselves from the essence of sin.”
This moment caused schisms, yes. The lawyers of Moses segregate themselves from Christ. They thrust Him out of their fellowship. Naturally, their fellowship failed to flourish then, and that is a comfort to no one. But there is another comfort now. It is that God has achieved this schism through the Jews. It is to their detriment, but to the good of those who are of Christ, for these all can flourish now by virtue of their genuine root. With His own hand God cast Christ outside of the sphere of law. God Himself kept the Jews back at the threshold of Pilate’s judgment hall. For the whole law must make its demands on Jesus, in order that the whole law presently may harmonize with the gospel.
Whoever has read the letter to the Galatians will appreciate why the Jews shunned the judgment hall into which they threw the Christ. In this way, room could be made in the Bible for the statement: “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.” Thus, too, room could also be made for those other statements: “When the fullness of the time was come, God sent out His son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because we are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a Son; and if a Son then an heir of God through Christ.” “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” “Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace. For we through the spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by faith. For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love.” “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creature and as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them and mercy, and upon the Israel of God.”
Let us keep the feast in the palace of a pagan then, in the praetorium of Pilate, for there we were born. The place was good enough for God to use as the place in which to regenerate us through Christ’s Spirit. Let us keep the feast in the court of the pagan, for it was there also that the Passover was slain for us, the Passover who is Christ Jesus. It was slain on this side of the threshold; it segregates us from those who are seeking Abraham’s house of bondage. O incomparable irony! The Jews seek the house of bondage, but they make pretensions to cleanness by calling that house unclean, and by shunning it. Now they can keep the feast no longer. The house without which they cannot live is barred to them: who, then, can keep the feast? As for us, we are led out of the house of bondage and into the house of the Father. Let us then keep the feast, not in the old leaven, or in the leaven of evil and of wickedness, but in the unleavened bread of integrity and truth.
For the account of Christ’s excommunication through the lawgivers of Moses also serves as the Form written by God Himself for our acceptance by Jesus Christ our Lord. God Himself wrote that Form, and our High Priest, who was called leprous and unclean, read it to us Himself. He is the clean Priest of God; He stands in the inner sanctuary—there where He brought the loot of barbarians. A very great host they were, and Moses did not reject them.