Jamin Bradley

When Jesus took the stage to give the longest recorded speech that we have from him, he messed with everyone’s heads. He blessed the wrong people. He brought up six teachings based on Old Testament laws and then retaught them differently. All of his re-teachings got to the heart of what the laws had always intended to mean, which was often not how people read them. The heart of some of his re-teachings was so different that you would have thought that he was teaching the exact opposite of the original teachings.

But Jesus claimed to be the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. All of the teachings of the Old Testament had to be recontextualized in the law-giver and prophet-sender. To miss the heart of the law was to miss the law entirely. And what was the heart of the law? In Jesus’ eyes, it was quite simple: love. Love for God and love for people.

For three chapters straight, Jesus preached the greatest sermon ever preached, and his audience was left in a supernatural stupor. They had heard plenty of scribes preach before, but there was something different in the way this Jesus guy talked. He had some kind of authority in his words. They may not have understood his message or how he got there, but they could feel his words in their heart.

There is a reason the Trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and not Father, Son, and Holy Bible. The Bible is not a person. It has no personhood—no heart, no soul, no mind. Inspired though it may be, if it is not read alongside its inspirer, its words have the capacity to fall flat, to miss the point entirely, or to be bent toward evil. Everything you read before and after the gospels must be turned back to Fulfillment-Man upon whom the Bible hinges.

The Father sent the Son and the Son sent the Spirit, and as you read Scripture with the Spirit, he will send you back up the line to the Son, who will send you to the Father—for when you’ve seen the Son, you’ve seen the Father. This is a statement the Bible cannot make about itself, but only about Jesus. Jesus is the revelation of revelations, and Jesus on the cross is the chief revelation of the revelation of revelations. Life and death and re-life lie at the heart of two beams of wood. This terrifying object of loving self-sacrifice is the key to properly understanding all the other teachings in the Bible. Scripture must be crucified—the word of God subjected to the Word of God.

We call ourselves Christians because we believe Christ is the Son upon which the whole universe revolves. But if we are honest with ourselves, we often feel the temptation to take any other biblical route than Christ. We are happy to adhere to lesser revelations, lesser fulfillments, lesser interpreters, and lesser kings than the King of Kings. It’s not that we don’t want a kingdom built on love, but we want to be the ones to define what love is, what it looks like in action, and who it should be shown to, causing us to join Peter (and Satan) in trying to convince Jesus away from the revelation of the cross and toward a different revelation.

But Jesus, as we know him—not as we wish he was—is what we have. And we know that must have been who he was (and is), because any zealous biographer would have been happy to have written up a different story about their favorite hero. We also know who he is (and was) because the Spirit of Jesus lives in our hearts, reminding us to keep our eyes on him.