RONALD A. KNOX

The Messianic Hope

"If you begin the Bible with St. Matthew, it makes a mutilated story," according to Msgr. Knox. In a few masterful strokes, he sketches in the all-important background of Old Testament prophecy and hope without which the full significance of Our Lord's appearance in time cannot be grasped.

The Jewish people is one of the most extraordinary facts in history. Pascal was right about that; you mustn't attempt any Christian apologetic which would by-pass or hush up the connexion of Christianity with Judaism; it's all part of the set-up. And one of the extraordinary things about the Jewish people is this-it dreams of the future, not of the past. The Jew is always looking forward to a good time coming, instead of lamenting the good old times which will never come again. Nowadays, we don't find that surprising, because for nearly two centuries we have been obsessed with the idea of human progress; and even in our own alarmingly regressive age we can't, or at any rate we older people can't, shake off the spell of it. But remember, this has only been happening for two centuries, since some priest or other, I forget his name, invented the idea of human progress. The primitive instinct of man, everywhere else, is to look back to the past and regret its disappearance. Diomede in Homer picks up a stone and hurls it at his enemy, a stone which would take three men to lift it, says the poet, the sort of men there are going about nowadays, but Diomede managed it easily alone. The golden age of Saturn--from the very beginnings of Gentile literature you find this hankering for the past; men only took to writing, it would seem, when the world already felt that it had grown old. But that is not the note of Hebrew literature, and remember what a bulk of Hebrew literature has come down to us. There are appeals to God's ancient mercies; there are tall stories about the exploits of David and his mighty men. But the note of Hebrew literature is optimism about the future. The Jew had his story of a lost Paradise, just as the heathen had theirs, but he hardly ever referred to it; the Fall just disappears from the Old Testament after the third chapter of Genesis. It wasn't Adam's fall that was remembered; it was the promises made to Abraham.

Well, what about Abraham? We can't prove, of course, the antiquity of the records which have come down to us; but he is in the very centre of a living tradition which always tells the same story. He was only a desert sheikh, perhaps a little richer in flocks and herds than his neighbours, but, to all outward appearance, very much out of the same drawer. This only would have struck you about him as distinguishing him from the rest; he seemed to live in the future. "In thy seed," he had been told, "all the nations of the earth shall be blessed"--that may only mean, "Your descendants will be so prosperous that they will be quoted, everywhere, as typical of a successful career; 'May you be as prosperous as the sons of Abraham' will be a kind of proverbial saying." But in any case he seems to have had the conviction that his family possessed a unique importance; and if it was a personal kink, it was one which he handed on to his posterity. When Jacob went into Egypt, he was far better off than he had ever been in Chanaan. But when he dies, he makes his children swear that his bones shall be taken back to the country of his birth. To him, already, Chanaan was the holy land; he must not be buried anywhere else; that parched strip of Levantine coast was to have an importance of its own, some day.

The Exodus from Egypt is not the common story of a nation which has grown too big, swarming like a hive of bees until it has found some where else to settle down. It is represented consistently as a return to the country in which Abraham and the other patriarchs had lived. Not that we should attach any importance to that very misleading word "inheritance" which our versions use, quite wrongly, as a description of Chanaan. The Israelites did not inherit Palestine from Abraham, it had never belonged to him. No, the sense in which the word is used is that of an allotted territory; Providence had arranged that this particular people and this particular country should belong to one another, and in perpetuity. The return from Egypt (always thought of as a return) became a pattern in the minds of the Jewish people, a pattern which would repeat itself at intervals; drive out the Jews from Palestine as much as you would, sooner or later they were destined to return. It is a notion which has even influenced Christian speculation; there was an ingenious clergyman the eighteenth century who considered the question why the rivers of America all flow from west to east, and concluded that it was meant to facilitate the return of the Jews to Palestine at the end of the world. How deeply that confidence has sunk into the Jewish mind, the events of our own day bear witness. Meanwhile the great hero of the Exodus, Moses, had foretold quite casually, in an unimportant context, that God would one day raise up a prophet like himself. Astonishingly, that obiter dictum was remembered twelve and a half centuries later; the first question that rose to men's 1ips when they tried to solve the mystery of John the Baptist was "Art thou the prophet?"

The institution of monarchy seems to have been a late, and, on the whole, an unpopular expedient where the Jewish people was concerned. The hereditary principle was even less securely established; Saul, the great hero of national resistance to the Philistines, left no effective dynasty behind him, and the crown went to David, as we know. And now comes the extraordinary thing, this interloper, this arriviste, the first king of his line, immediately proceeds to found a literary legend about the unalterable permanence of his own dynasty. Whichever of the psalms King David did or didn't write, you can see that they are all in a single literary tradition, and here is this legend of an immortal Davidic dynasty fairly let into the middle of it. It is exactly as if all the Scottish songs about Prince Charlie had been written about Richard Cromwell. Thenceforward, a fresh element entered into the Messianic hope. The Jewish race believed, not merely that God would bring them back home again when they went into exile; but that he would restore their country as a monarchy under a descendant of King David.

So you get on to the age of the prophets. Why do we use the word prophet, in our common speech, to designate somebody who can foresee the future? A prophet doesn't mean that; he is simply a spokesman, usually the spokesman of a God. The reason why we think of a prophet as a man who foretells the future is because the spokesman of God, in the Old Testament, foretold the future. The unconquerable Jewish instinct of looking forward has left its mark, here, on the vocabulary of the human race. The Old Testament prophets lived at a time when the captivity in Babylon was impending, and while it was happening, and just after it came to an end; their message is mixed up, from first to last, with visions of the future, calculated to bring warning or comfort to their fellow countrymen in those days of uncertainty. And although, taken one by one those visions of the future were and are tantalizingly obscure, you could make up a sort of composite picture out of them-which is what the Jews did. By the time our Lord came, you can see that they had in their minds a fairly definite programme of what the Messias was expected to do, and what his kingdom was to be like. For some reason-I think it was connected with the dates suggested in the prophecy of Daniel, but that is guesswork-the Jews of our Lord's time were expecting the Messianic kingdom to come at any moment. You see them, all through the gospels, keyed up with expectation, from old Simeon in the temple, waiting for comfort to be brought to Israel, right down to that scene just before the Ascension, when the Apostles ask our Lord whether he is going to restore the kingdom to Israel immediately or not; they are still, you see, talking the language of Old Testament prophecy....

All this can't be simply pushed on one side as being part of the Old Testament, and consequently boring. It is built right into the fabric of revelation; the Evangelists are continually conscious of our Lord's career as tracing in the lines of a blue-print which has been laid down for him by the prophets-what other book is there in the world which gives you the sense of fulfilment as the gospels do? Where else do you get the impression that the chief business of history is to make prophecy come true? . . . You see, all that old-fashioned Victorian business of reading the gospels as the story of a good man who was misunderstood by his contemporaries-it just isn't historical. Before you try to discover whether and in what sense our Lord was Divine, before you try to discover what is meant by the title "Son of God", you have to ask yourself the question, "Was Jesus of Nazareth, or was he not the Messianic king Isaias and those others referred to?" Because that was the claim which he made; that was the question which puzzled his friends, and the question which puzzled his enemies.

I was reminding you just now that the Pharisees asked St John the Baptist, "Art thou the prophet?"--in reference to the promise made by Moses that a second prophet, like Moses himself, would one day appear. The Pharisees never seem to have asked our Lord that question; I wonder why not? I think because he so obviously did claim to be the prophet in question; he was always saying "Moses told you this, but I tell you this"; when he published the programme of his new kingdom he went up on to a mountain side to do it, just like Moses, and when he fed the Five Thousand he was thinking--St John shews you that--of the manna in the wilderness. If he claimed to be the prophet, did he also claim to be the Messianic king? You can see that he did; people cried out to him as the Son of David, and he never rebuked them for it. As if to make it quite clear that he did put forward this claim, he went out of his way to ride into Jerusalem on an ass; it wasn't a coincidence, it wasn't a Providential arrangement, it was a quite deliberate gesture on his part to make the prophecy come true.

And it isn't difficult to see what must have puzzled the men of his time about all this. By his account of it, the King had come and the kingdom hadn't. Their reading of the prophets encouraged them to expect a Day of the Lord, a general show-down following on a general world-upheaval; one like the Son of Man would come on the clouds, and arraign the nations before his judgment-seat. Instead of that, one who called himself the Son of Man walked about the earth just like anybody else, and nothing happened. That was the sense of John the Baptist's question, "Is it thy coming that was told, or are we still waiting for some other?" That is why the two disciples on the road to Emmaus talk so despondingly about the Crucifixion; "For ourselves, we had hoped that it was he who was to deliver Israel; but now, to crown it all, to-day is the third day since this befell." They have heard rumours of the Resurrection, but that, evidently, was not what they were waiting for; they were waiting for "the redemption of Israel", a Day of the Lord which would put everything right. And it was the same with our Lord's enemies; when they asked for a sign they weren't simply asking for a miracle-there were plenty of them; they were wanting the sign of the Son of Man, made visible in judgment. And when, in the Council chamber, he is challenged to say whether he is really the Christ, he anticipates that objection. "I am," he says; "and moreover I tell you this; you will see the Son of Man again, when he . . . comes on the clouds of heaven"-you will see him like that at some future time, not now; you mustn't expect to see it now. It was as a king without a kingdom that our Lord was condemned.

We all know what account he himself gave of it. The kingdom of heaven, he explained, is something that comes unwatched by men's eyes; it grows like the seed in the field, radiates its influence like leaven in the bread; it is a secret, not a sudden process, the coming of the Son of Man. The kingdom of heaven is not a millennium on earth, with all wrongs put right; there will be tares left to grow among the wheat; it will not be till the harvest that the weeds are pulled up, not till the end of the day that the fishermen will sort out their catch. A kingdom, but not ruled over visibly by him who is king of it, he will have gone away into a far country, leaving his servants to get on as best they can without him. And so on; he makes it clear, at the same time, that it will not be a kingdom for the Jews only; a remnant of them will take their places in it, but only a remnant, as Isaias foretold; many will be called, but few chosen. The Gentiles, instead of being left out in the cold, will enjoy the privileges of this kingdom to the full. We, with the long history that lies behind us, have no difficulty at all in recognizing this as a portrait of the universal Church, and identifying the Church with the kingdom he came to found. The only difficulty we sometimes feel is how we are going to make it square with the Old Testament. Was it really this sort of thing the prophets meant, when they sketched their picture of a triumphant Israel, vindicated at last from its enemies and recognized as God's people?

I believe the answer to that difficulty is that we don't know what God would have done for his ancient people if they had accepted, instead of refusing, the Christ. You've only to read St Paul's epistle to the Romans to realize how puzzled the early Christians were to find the Jews persisting in their unbelief. That went on, I think, right up to the time when Jerusalem was destroyed in A.D. 70; that tragic moment in history which looked as if it were going to be the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies, and wasn't. Prophecies can be conditional; and we have no means of knowing what mercies God had for his ancient people, or what part he meant them to play in the religious history of the world, if Jerusalem had known the time of her visitation.

Meanwhile, in rejecting our Lord, they fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies to the letter. I think it is Pascal who makes such a strong point of that; all that passage at the end of Isaias, about the suffering servant of God, bruised for his people's sins while they turned away their faces from him and thought he was smitten by God, all that was meant, surely, to prepare us for what actually happened. And our Lord knew that it would happen, and modelled his Messianic career on these other, these less-known prophecies, which had fallen into neglect. That is what makes the argument from prophecy so splendid, if you know your Old Testament a little; that our Lord is carefully and consciously tracing out the blue-print of prophecy just when it looks as if he were getting it all wrong. Just when we want to pull him up, as St Peter did, and tell him he is going about the thing in the wrong way, he knows his business better than we do, and sees the whole picture of the Messias when we only see a part of it. We mustn't think of the Old Testament as an awkward fact which we've got to get over somehow, hush it up if possible because it is so difficult to make propaganda out of it. It's the lock into which the key of the Incarnation fits, and if you begin the Bible with St Matthew, it makes a mutilated story.

From A Treasury of Catholic Reading, ed. John Chapin.