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Faith within the Hebrew-Jewish Context

The first expression of Christian theology was within the Jewish culture. It was in
Palestine, among Jews that Christianity was born (or a movement around Jesus). Jesus of
Nazareth was a Jew, who spoke Aramaic, and it was among the Jews that he lived and died. His
teachings were framed within the Jewish worldview and his first disciples received them as Jews.
Is there something in the cultural context of the disciples and early communities of Christ, which
made them see Jesus in a more significant manner? Were there some elements in their tradition
as Jews, which were re-interpreted and re-formulated to give meaning to their experiences of
Jesus, the Christ, Emmanuel, Messiah, Son of David, and so on?

Who is God and what is God’s will?

In order to understand the message of Jesus and how his disciples interpreted it (read:
how they “theologized”), it is important to situate them against the background of Israel’s faith in
God. The written texts, in now what we call Old Testament (or the First Testament), did not
develop its own concept of God’s self-communication but elaborated categories in which the
reality is expressed. The revealing activity of God shows itself: (a) in inner experiences of God
(inner voices, visions, oracles, dreams, such as in Nm 22-24, Isa 1:1, 6:1-13, 1 Sam 10:17-27,
Gen 20:60); (b) in historical experiences that are grasped conceptually in the categories of
promise/fulfillment, slavery/freedom, perdition/salvation (e.g., Dt. 26:5-9) and that have high
points like the calling of Abraham, of Moses in Israel’s process of becoming a people, and of the
prophets in the stabilization of Israel; (c) in the experience of the word of God that reveals God’s
self as the God of human beings, the God of people (Ex 6:7, 8:6, 9:14; Ez 7:9, 21:10); (d) in the
experience of the covenant through which Israel, the unique people from the very beginning, is
made God’s people (Gn 17:1-14).

Central to the Christian faith is the fundamental horizon of a God-with-us. Nothing is

exempted, no space is left out, and no time is constrained by God’s presence. The presence never
ceases and is never withdrawn; it keeps on pouring, as it were, or something dynamically in
movement. The Scriptures is filled with images that tell of the creative and freeing power of God
let loose in the world. God is a God who creates, sustains, and guides all things. In the reflections
of Israel, God was, is, and will forever be with them, giving hope and encouragement in a
troubled world, fulfilling divine fidelity to the promise of shalom. The plurality of human speech
for God’s free, enduring and unwavering presence, coaches us that His or Her presence is
thoroughly inclusive, existential and experiential.

The content of this manifold revelation is above all: Yhwh is the God of Israel, lord of
history, creator of the world, person, and initiator of the covenant. For the Hebrews (the name for
the Semitic people in ancient Israel), history is the scene of God’s mighty acts. The Exodus
deliverance is the exemplar or paradigmatic act of a God who saves and liberates. From this
perspective we have a story of an enigmatic encounter in the book of Exodus 3:1-15.

A bush is burning in the wilderness without being consumed. In respect for the presence
of the holy, Moses removes his sandals. From the bush, he hears words of divine compassion for
people who are enslaved, and feels challenged to partner this God of the Hebrews in winning
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their release. In this context, the exiled shepherd asks the central God for a self-identifying name.
It is graciously given: ehyeh aser ehyeh, safeguarded in the sacred tetragrammaton YHWH.

In the first place, “to be” in the Hebrew thought is phenomenal; to be is to be there
concretely and in evidence. The God of Israel is a God who acts out his word within history.
Israel has a strong sense of looking at its secular history as religious history, i.e., the world, life,
people, events are the locus of God making himself or herself present and known. One of the
beautiful symbols or metaphors used to describe the presence of God is that of a tent or dwelling
(shekinah). It conveys the idea that Yhwh has no other shekinah than the world, and it is in the
world that he or she both discloses and saves. (Jürgen Moltmann)

Secondly, taking into account the cultural mind-set of the Hebrew believer, the human
being is inescapably a social being, one who is related to others, to the world, and to God. The
“world” is seen from a communal perspective through families, the tribe, or clan. This way,
human existence is not only historical but also social. In the Hebrew context, “to be” is
relational; that is, to exist is to be with others. Ancient Israel prizes community; one’s identity is
bound to the community (family, tribe, nation) where she or he belongs. The individual is
incorporated into the tribal alliance. Israel thought and lived out its want faith in Yhwh in a very
strong tribal alliance. Yhwh is not there for the individual, but for the community as such.
Certainly, the Israelite does not ignore the redemption of individuals, but it puts strongest
emphasis on the truth that full human life is life in the community. A God who is intimately
related to humankind, therefore, is the God whom Israel puts its faith (cf. Genesis story wherein
the Israelite puts his faith in a God who does not want the human being to be alone.

Thirdly, “to be” in the Hebrew thought is affective; to be is to be in action; to exist is to

influence or affect others. As already mentioned above, God is known through his mighty deeds
in history, i.e., by what he does as God in the ordinary events of people’s lives. The question of
“who is God” is reflected upon by the believer via the question, “what has God offered or
effected to our lives?” This way of thinking will be carried out also by the disciples in their
reflection of Jesus. It is because God has effected deliverance, liberation, salvation, or
redemption, that the name of this God is solidarity (cf. Emmanuel, God-with-us). In such a
culture, to have a name in the community means that one has done good things in and for the
community. The worst thing that can happen to anyone is for his or her name to be blotted out
and forgotten, i.e., he or she failed to do good things to be remembered by people. As the men
and women of wisdom have it: “The mourning of men and women is about their bodies, but the
evil name of sinners will be blotted out. Have regard for your name, since it will remain for you
longer than a thousand great stores of gold. The days of a good life are numbered, but a good
name endures forever” (Sir 41:11-13; cf. Prov 22:1, Eccles 7:1). Everything possible must be
done to gain a good name, which Yhwh deserves this God has shown that his/her presence is
effective.

Taking into account these three aspects of “existence” in the Hebrew culture, it can be
posited that the name which Moses heard from the voice, ehyeh aser ehyeh, is the name of God
as “I am with you” or “I am solidarity with you” - a God who is experienced phenomenally,
relationally, and effectively. Herman Hendrickx puts it more clearly: “When we use the word
revelation, we usually think first of all of God or Jesus speaking. But strictly speaking, God does
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not speak. God has no mouth! What the Bible means is that at a given moment God makes
something known to people or to a particular person, like Abraham, or Moses. But God has a
hundred ways to make his will or his plan known.” The interpretation of ehyeh aser ehyeh, if it is
at least valid, can also explain another response of the Hebrews to the question, “what is God’s
will?” This will of God is expressed in the central idiom of the covenant.

The covenant is an international political treaty between a great king and a lesser prince
or the vassal. In ancient Mediterranean system of treaty, the great king gives the conditions of the
treaty and makes promises for the well-being of the vassal, including its protection. The promise
of well-being consists of economic, social, political, and so forth. To make the treaty operational,
the lesser prince or the people pledge their obedience and enjoy the protection of the great king.
For obedience means life; disobedience means death. This entails following laws and decrees of
the king.

The Old Testament term for covenant is berith. Israel uses this interpretative model of the
covenant to express and explain the relationship between God and humanity.

The story of the Sinai covenant begins as the people suffer oppression in Egypt in the 13th
century BCE. God hears their cry and moves to deliver them because “he remembers his
covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Exod 2:24). The exodus from Egypt creates for God
a special people. The experience at Sinai solemnizes the bond created through the exodus.

Experienced as a God whose name is “I am solidarity with you,” Yhwh is like a great
king who desires nothing less, and cares decisively, about the secular, social, historical and
political realities of people. The “will” of this God-king is humanity’s total well-being. Within
the Hebrew/Jewish, there is no such thing as sacred and profane, soul and body, spirit and matter
which are divided dualistically. They see reality historically; hence when we say that God cares
for the “secular, social, historical and political realities,” we are us emphasizing in words the
whole of reality which later tradition and language in the church used because of the changed
(Greco-Roman) context.

God promises this well-being and the protection for this well-being. In this covenant
perspective, Yhwh initiates the covenant relationship, forging the people into a relationship. This
covenant is sealed by a dual ceremony: a meal and a blood rite (Exod 24:1-11). Those who eat
together share the nourishment that sustains their lives, and ancient custom understands that to
share bread with someone is to become responsible for that person’s life. The sprinkling of the
blood on the altar, which signifies Yhwh, and on the people indicates that Yhwh and the people
have become blood relatives, next-of kin (again, remember the Semitic mind-set of a
communitarian personality). Blood was a symbol of life for the Hebrew people, as it was for
many other ancient peoples. Moses’ action of sprinkling the blood on the twelve pillars
(representing the twelve tribes of Israel) thus affirmed that the life of Israel was joined to the life
of Yhwh. Yhwh’s deliverance of the people in the exodus, which is an exercise of the
responsibility of the next-of-kin to ransom one who is enslaved, has already demonstrated this
relationship. The Sinaitic covenant idiom affirms a God whose primary investment has to do
with the total welfare of people.
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It is within this covenant that Israel understood its identity and mission. It provides the
Jewish people with a special identity, the twelve tribes are now one people whom God had
gathered and sent. It also provides them with a mission; Israel now had special responsibilities in
the spheres of ethics and worship, and to bring the knowledge of the one living God to all
humankind.

The covenant experience affirms how Israel’s faith understood God’s revelation as
something that happens in history. A crucial element I the belief that God is faithful to his
promise, that this God works within history and will show that he/she will conquer evil i.e.,
suffering, injustice, and oppression. This fidelity is embodied protologically in the biblical
account of the covenant of Yhwh with Israel, where God is portrayed as pledging everlasting
faithfulness (e.g., Exod 19:24). The theme of divine fidelity is the dominant theme in biblical
religion, and revelation is the story of the mighty acts of a God who remains faithful in spite of
our lack of trust. What the Hebrews appropriated from the cultural-religious milieu was this
basic framework of a binding relationship (i.o.w., walang iwanan). They, however, rejected
eventually the politico-legal aspects of protection and submission while injecting new things,
such as the elements of faithfulness (from the imageries of parent-child, husband-wife) and the
ethical response, which in the words of prophet Micah, consists of acting justly, loving tenderly,
and walking humbly with God. In short, Israel’s mission is to proclaim a God who cares
decisively for his people, and so, we too must care decisively for the total well-being of people.
We may infer thus that “faith” in the Old Testament, from the covenant perspective, is rooted in
God’s fidelity to the divine promises. Faith is not so much a matter of believing as of hearing:
hearing the word of God and accepting it with trust and obedience. The prophet Micah puts it
aptly: What Yahweh demands is this – act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with Him/Her.

Jesus of Nazareth and the Kingdom of God

Central to the words and deeds of the historical Jesus was his proclamation of the
kingdom of God. As a Galilean Jew, Jesus used the kingdom of God as a category to speak of
Yhwh’s relationship with and promise for humanity. The idea finds origin in the notion of the
Kingship of Yhwh (cf. covenant) or the reign of God (in Hebrew: malkuth Yahweh; in Greek:
baseliea tou theo). In the first century Palestine, the world where Jesus lived, the kingdom of
God is associated with the Roman empire, and the emperor called himself as Son of God. Among
the Jews, God’s kingdom was an anticipated reality in the light of Israel’s hope for the
covenantal promise of total well-being. Such expectation, in connection to the framework of our
course, belongs to the pole of “tradition.” For the Jews, God’s reign is understood in three ways.

a. The kingdom of God as an eschatological promise, a transcendent, universal rule

which God alone would establish in the end-times. The “community of the poor” in
Qumran had this kind of understanding. It was thought that God would come in the
imminent future to establish a thousand-year kingdom of peace after his judgment
over the people and the downfall of “this world,” that is, the world of injustice,
oppression, betrayal, and so forth. Only initiates who knew the signs would escape
the wrath.
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b. The kingdom of God as the restoration of the kingdom of David. Some of Jesus’
contemporaries hoped for the restoration of national political theocracy in Israel,
against all its colonizers, oppressors, and enemies, which at the time was the Roman
colonizers. The Zealots represented this view.

c. The kingdom of God is provisionally hidden in the hearts and lovers of the Torah, a
kingdom which had to take shape in social righteousness in Israel. Without
righteousness, the kingdom of God cannot come to completion. Rabbis and Pharisees
held this view. The malkuth Yhwh (Hebrew) or basiliea tou theo (Greek) comes to
fulfillment in faith-observance of God’s will. Accordingly, conversion, change-of-life
orientation and observance of the law again make it possible the rule of God in
oppressed Israel and in the long run (it was thought, if not in the near future) would
break foreign rule. Following the precepts of the Torah was doing God’s will, and this
accelerated the coming of the kingdom. Finally, the Lord would exercise universal
rule over all people who accepted belief in Yhwh, “the One.”

During the time of Jesus, there was high expectation of the coming of the kingdom of
God. This expectation rests on Israel’s own history, which was marked by oppression, injustice,
exile, and marginalization (i.e., the negative experience of contrast). In such contexts, hope
played a central role in Israel, and the hope for God’s promise took the form in the expectation of
a kingdom where God rules.

Jesus himself did not define the kingdom of God. He went around to carry out a mission. In
relation to the tradition that God’s reign is a future transcendent reality, Jesus was convinced of
the nearness of God’s kingdom (Mt 3:17; Mk 1:15). It is highly probable that he got the idea of
God’s kingdom from John the Baptist. Unlike John’s proclamation of God’s kingdom with a
threatening warning, Jesus proclaimed it as good news. God’s kingdom is not disastrous or
something to be feared but a welcome hope of new life. The nearness of God’s reign was spoken
in parables and sayings, but Jesus also demonstrated through actions what the experience of
God’s reign is. In his healings, people experienced wellness of the whole self; in his
identification and protection of the poor, people felt their human dignity is restored; in his table-
fellowship with the outcasts, people realized how important they were in God’s eyes; in his
forgiveness of others, people were released form the ideologies of their culture that had placed
them in the margins of society. Jesus thus was seen by his disciples as a prophet of the kingdom
in the tradition of the old. Yet unlike the old prophets, Jesus put into action the kingdom of God
as a here-and-now experiential reality and still a future reality.

In relation to the tradition that says God’s reign is a matter of political governance, Jesus’
words and deeds were not directly about political governance as much as they have significant
political repercussions. According to Juan Luis Segundo, for Jesus the poor are the primary
beneficiaries of God’s Rule not because of any merit of theirs or because poverty in itself is holy.
The Kingdom is for them because of their inhuman condition as poor people, a condition that
God does not want. God’s Rule implies that the poor will cease to be poor. This conviction of
Jesus was considered irregular or even scandalous by many of his contemporaries because it
suggested a close and positive relationship between God’s Rule and the situation of poor people.
In his declaration of beatitude to the poor, Jesus was not concerned with the poor’s inner
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dispositions or their moral and religious worth. His declaration pointed at the kind of God he
believed in and the will of this God. Jesus reveals a God who does not want the miserable state
of the poor even if some of the poor themselves have vices or are inclined to vices. Furthermore,
by declaring that God’s Rule, the highest kind of rule, belongs to the poor, Jesus indicates that
God takes their side in their hidden and open conflicts with their oppressors among the rich and
the elite. Thus, for Segundo, the beatitudes and God’s Rule are not only religious proclamations
but also political ones. Jesus of Nazareth was definitely a politico-religious figure and not a
solely religious one.

The political dimension of Jesus was comparable to the political dimension of the ancient
Israelite prophets who announced the coming of a messiah (in Hebrew: mashiah); in Greek:
christos; cf. 2 Sam 7:11-14). In Jewish tradition, the messiah is the anointed one who would
bring justice, peace, and righteousness. The political dimension of Israel’s prophets and that of
Jesus referred to the relevance and impact of their practices on public affairs in general. The
proclamations of Jesus were primarily concerned not with private behavior but with public
behavior. Furthermore, their political dimension did not exclude their religious dimension: the
political interacted closely and reflexively with the religious. Moreover, Jesus rejected the title
“messiah” because of its narrow meaning in terms only of political activity in relation to
administering a state, as the Zealots thought. Jesus’ kingdom of God is in its broader and in fact
more fundamental meaning: it is about the restoration of justice, peace, and righteousness.

Historically, Jesus’ concept of the rule or reign of God is closely related to that of the
Pharisees. However, for Jesus, this rule is something original and distinctive. As the stories in the
Gospels attest, Jesus rejects the Pharisee’s identification of righteousness with cultic purity. He
also rejects domination and exploitation of urban elites (Pharisees, temple priests, Sadducees).
For Jesus, human beings, not temple and Torah, are locus of God’s power and presence. Through
his parables and sayings, and evidently in his healings, caring for the poor outcasts and sinners
that Jesus indicated how he understood this kingdom. For Jesus, the kingdom of God is not a
place but an event or an experience: the kingdom of God is to be found where human life
becomes whole, where “salvation” is realized for men and women, where righteousness and love
begin to prevail, and enslaving conditions end. Jesus made this reality of the kingdom imaginable
in terms of a common participation in a festive and splendid banquet in which the cripples, the
poor and the social outcasts can share. Clearly connected with this is the fact that he ate illegally
(in religious terms) with people who were ignored, rejected and denied of their human dignity in
his society. Jesus radicalized and transcended the Pharisaic notion of table-fellowship. In the
communal eating together, Jesus implemented God’s kingdom by his concern for his fellow
humans of the coming reality, and thus anticipated the coming to fullness or completion of the
kingdom of God. The coming kingdom is a kingdom of God. It is at the disposal of men and
women, though they are demanded to participate in its realization. This kingdom takes concrete
form in human action. The kingdom is not wholly present and final, but wherever and whenever
Jesus performed his work of salvation, the kingdom of God is realized. Whereas in the Old
Testament and the Pharisees already understood it to be strongly focused on the whole of human
reality, Jesus made this visible by his action: physical and social life are also part of the sphere of
the offer of wholeness of life or salvation. The kingdom of God is a new world in which
suffering is done away with (e.g., not by master-slave relationship).
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Conclusion
In the Hebrew-Jewish culture, God reveals God’s self in and through human experiences
not only of the individual but also the Israelite community. God’s revelation happens in history.
Faith is not so much a matter of believing but as the prophet Micah puts it aptly: What Yahweh
demands is this – act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with Him/Her.

Emmanuel S. de Guzman
Agnes M. Brazal