Christian Economic Ethics: History and Implications

4 The New Testament

4 The New Testament The Old Testament, what is today called the Hebrew Scriptures, is part of the body of Christian texts. Still, the New Testament—today typically called the Christian Scriptures—constitutes the most fundamental set of documents for Christians today. It includes a wide range of literary genres, from the oldest stories about Jesus to the sophisticated theological analyses of the Pauline epistles and the Gospel of John, to the apocalyptic view of the end of the world in the Book of Revelation. Not all of these texts address economic life, but many do. Here, we will attend to just three of those sources, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Pauline epistles. The mission of Jesus The Gospel of Luke tells us that at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, immediately after his baptism by John in the Jordan and his temptation by the devil in the desert, Jesus’ first act was to travel in Galilee, where he had grown up as a child. He went to his hometown of Nazareth and entered the synagogue on the Sabbath. Luke recounts that he did this in other towns as well, but there can be little doubt that the stakes were highest in his own village, where everyone knew him as “the carpenter’s son.” The mission of Jesus The mission of Jesus He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim 51 freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked. Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.” “I tell you the truth,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.” All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way. Luke 4:16-30 Scripture scholars agree that Luke’s intention in putting this story at the start of Jesus’ ministry was to identify what Jesus himself saw as his mission in the world. And of course we can see two separate parts of that quotation from the prophet Isaiah which Jesus chose to read aloud. The first identifies the special relationship that Jesus has with God as the bearer of the Spirit of the Lord, something that Luke already identified in the baptism by John in the Jordan. The second portion of the quotation, however, might be a bit surprising, since it specifies what Jesus says he has been sent to do. Christians who tend to interpret faith as entailing only a deeply personal relationship with God might be surprised that Jesus does not say that his mission is to bring people closer to God or to get them to be more careful in their prayers or to persuade them to attend to their liturgical responsibilities more faithfully. No, instead he says that his mission is to...