A faithful Jew

George Weigel, reminding us that we are not Marcionites:

Marcion and his followers claimed that the Creator God of Genesis and the God of the Jewish people’s Exodus was not the “Father” God to whom Jesus prayed; in fact, the Marcionites claimed that Jesus’s mission, as he understood it, was to overthrow and displace this “God of the Law” with the “God of Love.” Marcion rejected three of the four canonical Gospels, accepting only an edited version of the Gospel of Luke. And therein lay this heretic’s one positive contribution to Christianity: He forced the Church to clarify its own canon of Scripture, which of course includes the Gospels Marcion rejected.

Over the past 1,800 years, other deviant Christian thinkers have tried to “take the Jewish out of Jesus,” so to speak. ....

Lent is a good time to reflect on the indisputable fact that Jesus of Nazareth, whom we believe to be the incarnate Son of God, was a son of the Jewish people. He was circumcised on the eighth day (Luke 2:21) and presented to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses in the Temple (Luke 2:22). He was raised within the temporal rhythms and rituals of Judaism and learned its sacred writings (Luke 2:41–52). He lived as a faithful Jew and taught as a faithful Jew (“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” [Matt. 5:17]). He was mocked by the Romans who crucified him as “the King of the Jews” (Matt. 27:37 and parallels). And he died as a faithful Jew, invoking Psalm 22 and its confession of the ultimate reign of the God of Israel (“All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion belongs to the Lord...”). .... (more)

George Weigel, "Following the Jewish Jesus," First Things, March 20, 2024.