Meeting Jesus in the Middle of the Story

Most people meet Jesus the same way: a manger, a star, some shepherds, a cross, an empty tomb. Good stories, usually told every year, and most people are entirely satisfied to know only that much of it.

​

But try picking up a long novel two-thirds of the way through, reading a hundred pages, and then closing the book. You could describe what you had read well enough — the characters, the scenes, how it ended. What you could not say is what the story was really about. You wouldn’t know what set the plot in motion, what the people in it were trying to resolve, or why the ending is an ending at all rather than simply the last thing that happens.

​

That is exactly the position most readers are in when they open one of the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John don’t begin the story of Jesus. Their books arrive in the middle of a story already four thousand years old by the time the events they describe take place — a story with its own plot, its own promises, its own unresolved tension, all of it laid down centuries earlier in the Old Testament. Understanding Jesus’ Ministry: the Keys to the Gospels project looks closely at one thing Jesus said or did, and each paper dives into the meaning of each one by setting proper context, and none of that will mean what it's supposed to mean if the reader doesn't first know the story that's being continued.

 

Four Openings, All Reaching Backward

​

This is not an external assumption imposed on the Gospels without merit. It is what the four writers do on their own opening pages. Not one of them begins at the beginning of what he has to say; every one of them begins by pointing backward, and each does it in his own way.

​

Matthew opens with a list of names:

 

Matthew 1:1

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham.

 

Two Old Testament names mentioned, before a single event is narrated, and neither is chosen just for sentiment. Abraham and David are the two men in Israel’s history to whom God swore promises about land, inheritance, seed, and a throne (Gen. 12:1-3; Gen. 15:7-8; Gen. 22:17-18; 2 Sam. 7:12-16), and Matthew is claiming at the outset that the promises attached to those two men now have an heir with a name and a location. A reader who does not know those earlier promises reads Matthew’s first verse as a formality. It is not; it is actually his thesis.