The Christ of the Prophets

To Zion, surely, he brings good news, and to Jerusalem peace and every blessing. He goes up a mountain, and there he spends a night in prayer, and the Father does hear him. So turn over the prophets and learn from them his whole course. “Get up onto the high mountain,” says Isaiah, “you who bring good news to Zion; lift up your voice with strength, you who bring good news to Jerusalem.” “They were mightily astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching as one who had power.” And again: “Therefore my people will know my name in that day.” What name does the prophet mean, if not Christ’s? “That I am the one who speaks — I myself.” For it was he who used to speak in the prophets — the Word, the Creator’s Son. “I am here, while the hour lasts, upon the mountains, like one who brings the glad news of peace, like one who announces good news of good things.” And so says Nahum, one of the twelve: “Look — on the mountain, the swift feet of him who brings the glad news of peace.” [a]

As for the sound of his prayer to the Father in the night, the psalm says it plainly: “My God, I will cry out by day, and you will hear; and in the night, and it will not be for nothing.” And of the same voice and the same place another psalm says: “I cried to the Lord with my voice, and he heard me from his holy mountain.” You have the name set out for you; you have the work of the one who brings the good news; you have a mountain for the place, and night for the time, and the sound of a voice, and the Father listening. In short, you have the Christ of the prophets.

But why did he choose twelve apostles, and not some other number? In truth, from this very point I could make my case about my Christ — that he was foretold not only in the words of prophets but in the shape of events. For I find figurative hints of this number in the Creator’s own record: in the twelve springs at Elim; in the twelve gems on Aaron’s priestly robe; and in the twelve stones that Joshua was told to take out of the Jordan and set up for the ark of the covenant. The same number of apostles was signalled in advance by all of it: as though they were to be springs and rivers to water the world of the nations, which until then was dry and had no knowledge — as he says through Isaiah, “I will put streams in ground that has no water” — as though they were to be gems giving their shine to the church’s sacred robe, which Christ, the Father’s high priest, puts on; as though, too, they were to be stones, solid in their faith, which the true Joshua took out of the washing of the Jordan and set in the sanctuary of his covenant.

What equally good account of such a number can Marcion’s Christ show? Nothing can be shown to have been done by him on its own, unattached, that cannot be shown to have been done by my Christ in connection with what went before. The thing done belongs to the one in whom the preparation for it is found.

Again, he changes Simon’s name to Peter, just as the Creator also altered the names of Abram and Sarai and Hoshea — calling Hoshea Joshua, and adding a syllable to each of the other two. But why Peter? If it was for the toughness of his faith, there were plenty of hard materials that could have lent him a name for strength. Was it rather because Christ himself was both a rock and a stone? For we read that he was set “for a stone to trip over and a rock to stumble against.” I leave the rest of the passage aside. So he wanted to give the dearest of his disciples a name suggested by one of the figures that stand for himself — that being more fitting, I suppose, than a name drawn from something that was no figure of himself at all.

A crowd comes to him from Tyre, and from other districts as well, from across the sea. The psalm had this in view: “And look — tribes of foreigners, and Tyre, and the people of the Ethiopians; they were there. Zion is my mother, a man will say; and in her a man was born” — since the one born was God as man — and he built her by the Father’s will. This is so that you may see how the nations flocked to him then, because the one born was God as man, who was to build the church by the Father’s will, and to build it out of other races too.

Isaiah says the same: “Look, these come from far off, and these from the north and from the sea, and these from the land of the Persians.” And of the same people he says again: “Lift up your eyes and look around: all these have gathered themselves together.” And yet again: “You see these unknown strangers, and you will say in your heart, Who fathered these for me? Who brought these up for me? And these — where have they been?” Will a Christ like this not be the Christ of the prophets? And what will the Marcionites’ Christ be? Since twisting the truth is what pleases them, theirs could not be the Christ of the prophets.

I come now to those everyday rules of his, by which he fits the particular character of his teaching into what I might call Christ’s edict on taking office. “Blessed are the needy” — nothing weaker than that will do for the word the Greek uses — “because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” Now this very thing, that he begins with blessings, is the Creator’s own way. The Creator used no other voice than blessing, either at the first command that made the universe or at its final dedication. “My heart,” he says, “has uttered a very good word.” That will be the “very good word” of blessing which everyone grants stands at the head of the New Testament, following the pattern of the Old. [n]

So what is there to wonder at, if he entered on his work with the Creator’s own dispositions — the Creator who has always, in just this kind of language, loved and comforted and protected and avenged the beggar, the poor man, the humble, the widow and the orphan? You may take what looks like Christ’s private generosity to be a small stream running out of the springs of salvation. In fact I hardly know which way to turn in so vast a wealth of good words like these — as though I were in a wood, or a meadow, or an orchard of apple trees. So I will take up whatever comes to hand.

In the psalm he cries out: “Defend the orphan and the needy; do justice to the humble and the poor; deliver the poor, and get the needy out of the hand of the wicked.” Similarly in the seventy-first psalm: “In righteousness he will judge the needy among the people, and will save the children of the poor.” And in the words that follow he says of Christ, “All nations will serve him.” Now David reigned over the Jewish nation only, so nobody can suppose this was said of David — whereas Christ had taken on himself the condition of the poor and of those crushed by want. “Because he will deliver the needy out of the hand of the powerful man; he will spare the needy and the poor, and will save the lives of the poor. From usury and injustice he will redeem their lives, and in his sight their name will be honored.”

Again: “The wicked will be turned back into the world below, and all the nations that forget God; because the needy will not be forgotten forever, and the endurance of the poor will not perish for good.” Again: “Who is like the Lord our God, who lives on high and yet looks on the lowly things in heaven and on earth — who lifts the needy up off the ground and raises the poor man out of the dung heap, to seat him with the princes of his people,” that is, in his own kingdom. And earlier still, in the book of Kings, Hannah the mother of Samuel gives God glory in these words: “He raises the poor man from the ground, and the beggar, to seat him among the princes of his people” — that is, in his own kingdom — “and on thrones of glory,” royal thrones at that.

And how he lays into those who grind down the needy, through Isaiah! “What do you mean by setting fire to my vineyard, and by keeping the spoil of the poor in your houses? Why do you beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the needy?” And again: “Woe to those who decree unjust decrees; for in their decrees they decree wickedness, turning the needy away from justice and taking away the rights of the poor of my people.” He requires these just judgments for orphans too, and for widows, and comfort for the very neediest themselves. “Do justice to the orphan, and deal justly with the widow; and come, let us be reconciled, says the Lord.”

The man for whom, at every stage of lowliness, so much of the Creator’s compassion is provided — he is the one to whom that kingdom promised by Christ will also be given; and to that mercy the people the promise is made to belong, and have belonged for a long time already. For even if you suppose that the Creator’s promises were earthly and Christ’s heavenly, this much is quite clear: heaven has so far been the property of no god but the one who owns the earth as well. And this much is clear too: the Creator gave even the lesser promises so that I would more readily believe him about his greater ones — more readily than a god who has never given proof of his generosity by handing out anything smaller first.

“Blessed are those who hunger, for they will be filled.” I might tie this line to the one before it, since nobody goes hungry but the poor and the needy — except that the Creator deliberately meant a promise of the same blessing to lay the groundwork for the good news, so that people would know it was his. For this is what he says through Isaiah about those he was going to call from the ends of the earth, that is, the nations: “Look, they will come quickly, at speed.” Quickly, because they are hurrying toward the fullness of the times; at speed, because they are not clogged with the weights of the old law. “They will neither hunger nor thirst.” Therefore they will be filled — and that promise is made to nobody but those who hunger and thirst. And again he says: “Look, my servants will be filled, but you will be hungry; look, my servants will drink, but you will be thirsty.” As for these opposites, we shall see whether they are not laid on in advance to serve Christ. Meanwhile the promise that the hungry will be filled is a provision of God the Creator.

“Blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh.” Turn again to the passage in Isaiah: “Look, my servants will shout for joy, but you will be put to shame; look, my servants will be glad, but you will cry out from a broken heart.” Recognize these opposites in Christ’s arrangement as well. Surely gladness and joyful shouting are promised to people in the opposite condition — to the sorrowful, the downcast, the anxious. Just as it is said in the 125th psalm: “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy.” And laughter belongs to the exultant and the glad as much as weeping belongs to the sorrowful and the grieving. So the Creator, in foretelling matters for laughter and for tears, was the first to say that those who mourned would laugh.

Accordingly, the one who began with comfort for the poor, and the humble, and the hungry, and the weeping, was eager from the first to present himself as the one he had pointed out through the mouth of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” “Blessed are the needy, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.” “He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted.” “Blessed are those who hunger, for they will be filled.” “To comfort all who mourn.” “Blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh.” “To give those who mourn in Zion beauty in place of ashes, and the oil of joy in place of mourning, and a garment of praise in place of a spirit of heaviness.”

Now since Christ, the moment he took up his course, carried out a service of exactly this kind, either he is himself the one who foretold that he would come and do all this; or else, if the one who foretold it has not yet come, then the charge given to Marcion’s Christ is a ridiculous one — though a necessary one, I should perhaps add — which told him to say, “Blessed will you be when men hate you, and insult you, and throw out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake.” There is no doubt a call to patience in that saying. Well then, what did the Creator say through Isaiah that was any different? “Do not fear the insults of men, and do not be broken down by their contempt.”

What insults? What contempt? The ones that were to be incurred for the sake of the Son of Man. Which Son of Man? The one who comes according to the Creator’s will. Where shall we get our proof? From the very cutting off that was foretold against him — as when he says through Isaiah to the Jews, who set the hatred against him going, “Because of you my name is reviled among the nations”; and in another passage, “Pass sentence on him who gives up his own life, who is held in contempt by the nations, by servants and magistrates alike.”

Now hatred was foretold against that Son of Man who has his mission from the Creator, while the Gospel testifies that the name of Christians, taken from Christ, was going to be hated for the Son of Man’s sake, because he is the Christ. That settles the point: the Son of Man in the matter of the hatred is the one who came according to the Creator’s purpose, and against whom the hatred was foretold. And even if he had not yet come, the hatred of his name that exists today could not possibly have come before the person whose name it is. But in fact he has had the sentence carried out on him in front of us, and has given up his life, laying it down for our sakes, and is held in contempt by the nations. And the one who was born will be that very Son of Man on whose account our own name is thrown out.