Do not think that I have
come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to
fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an
iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished… For I tell
you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you
will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:17-20
Over and above the difficulty we have understanding
just how ‘tithing’ in the Torah actually worked in practice, there is good
reason not to even try: Christians are not expected to live by the Old
Testament ‘Law’ but to be led by the Holy Spirit. That is how the ‘righteousness’
of Jesus’ followers is to exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.
In the above passage, Jesus of Nazareth explains that
he did not intend to abolish, or set aside, the Law but to fulfil it. We rarely
stop to consider how audacious a claim that was! His audience believed the Law
had been given by God, personally, to Moses to govern how they, God’s chosen
people, should live. For over 1,500 years, it had stood as the national rule of
life. So who was Jesus to say that he had not
come to set it aside? Why was it a possibility even worth mentioning? Even if a
rumour had been circulating to that effect, just to afford it any sort of
credibility was presumptuous.
Jesus, however, not only denied that was his purpose
but went on to make a still more audacious claim: that he would be the first
person to fulfil the Law! Yet many
years after Jesus’ death, a former Jewish Pharisee who we now know as St Paul thought that
Jesus had done just that and that, as a consequence, Christians do not have to
live subject to the Torah.
Jesus of Nazareth was crucified at the Jewish Passover
festival, the time when families sacrificed a Paschal Lamb; Christians believe this crucifixion of 'the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world' once and for all replaced the
Torah sacrifices. A few
weeks later, at the Pentecost feast, which celebrated the giving of the Torah, the
Holy Spirit came upon Jesus’ disciples, and so replaced for them the Torah as the rule
of life. Christians therefore do not obey the Torah but should be led by the
Holy Spirit. As it says in the introduction to John’s Gospel, ‘The law was
given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’.
It is, however, rightly said that tithing pre-dates
the Torah and this is why Christians remain obliged to give 10% of their income
to God. I will consider this next weekend.
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Copyright © All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans
2013.
Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright
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