It’s always exciting to watch a championship game, even if you are new to the sport, board/card game, or whatever type of competition is taking place. The best players and teams in the world facing off, the celebration of triumphs and silence after mistakes, the palpable tension at key moments–these are all aspects that even the most casual fan can appreciate.

Often, there’s much more significance for supporters who have been following an individual player or team for the whole season. Maybe there’s a player who got off to a rough start but was somehow able to fight back and make it there. Maybe there’s a team who was dominant all season but lost a star player and is trying to hold on to the top spot. Maybe there’s a coach whose job is on the line if their team doesn’t deliver. For long-time fans, there are likely to be additional layers to the story that add even more meaning. Maybe a player is looking to cement their status as the greatest of all time. Maybe a team who lost in the past after making a crucial mistake is trying to redeem themselves and prove that they finally have what it takes to win.

In any case, if you know the backstory that leads up to a particular moment, it helps you to see the full meaning and significance of an event. This is true for competitions, and it’s true for any kind of history. It’s why parents and grandparents tell family stories to children. It’s why every country with public education makes national history a key part of the curriculum. And it’s why we took the time to go through the story of the Old Testament: Creation, Corruption (pt. 1, pt. 2) and Clinic (pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3). Knowing the past helps you to interpret the present in all of its context. The reverse can be true as well. Sometimes, we can’t know the full significance of an event right away. For example, if a team loses a championship game, what does it mean for them? If they go on to win the championship the next year, a fan might look back and see the loss as simply a temporary setback on an inevitable path to victory. If, on the other hand, the team has many failed seasons and never comes close to a championship again, a fan might look back at the initial loss with a deeper sadness, knowing the team had missed its best chance at victory.

Recapitulation: The Retelling of Stories

This is where the idea of “recapitulation” comes into play. This word has different meanings outside of theology, but in Healing Atonement, recapitulation is about retelling stories in a way that leads to new endings. We see this all of the time in sports, but there are many other ways that we may experience recapitulation in our lives. It happens when a person who makes a big mistake at work is able to successfully complete the task the next time. It happens when people who grew up in a broken home provide a loving and caring family environment for their children. It happens when a nation who has treated a certain group of people poorly in the past works towards undoing the harm that came from that unequal treatment.

With these examples, we see that recapitulation can happen at the level of individuals, families, nations, and everything in between. Recapitulation is the hope that though things went wrong in the past, there is always hope at redemption in the future. Cycles of abuse can be broken. Addictions can be overcome. The oppressed can be liberated. The past does not always predict the future.

Every day is a new chance for us to add to our stories. Sometimes, we fall back into the same negative patterns that we have before. Sometimes, we create new, better patterns to follow going forward. In these choices, Jesus is alongside us, always partnering with us to work toward the better outcome. How do we know this? Because he was always working towards recapitulation in his own life, on behalf of Ancient Israel and all humans everywhere. We have seen the negative patterns of behavior that the Israelites, and humans more broadly, fell into in the Old Testament. Jesus, in his life, worked to retell stories from Israel’s past to give the Israelites, and all of humanity, a new ending.

Questions and Answers, Longings and Hopes

After the Babylonian Exile, the Jewish people were left wondering about the future. They were under constant rule from foreign empires. Would they ever have a Jewish king again? Despite the support systems that God had given them to be a Clinic for human nature, they had not been able to circumcise the corruption from their hearts. What would it take to accomplish this goal? Instead of undoing humanity’s exile from the Garden of Eden, the Israelites felt farther than ever from God. Would God ever return to the temple and dwell with them again? How would his plan for the renewal of all Creation be accomplished now? In short, the Jewish people had many questions about how their story would end. The gospel accounts from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the Bible’s New Testament sought to answer those questions. Over the next several posts, we will examine how the gospel writers use stories from Israel’s past to point to a new way forward for all humans through Jesus.

While the Gospels might not be “plain history” texts of the same kind that you might encounter in a high school history class, they still give us important and reliable information about Jesus. We might wish that we had “neutral” perspectives on Jesus, but as we will see, it may not be possible to be “neutral” about Jesus. We can appreciate them as ancient biographies. Just like with modern biographies, the authors chose which events from Jesus’ life to include, who to highlight, and how to order everything to best communicate the aspects of Jesus that they wanted their readers to know.

There are multiple reasons for why there are four Gospels. It was very expensive to write and copy text in the ancient world. Also, Jesus engaged with so many themes and stories from the Old Testament that, for clarity, each gospel writer had to focus on a few. Thus, each of the four authors adds to the whole picture and relevance of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

The Five C’s: Cure Overview

In our series of posts on the Five C’s: Cure (pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3), we will focus on how Matthew, Luke, and John showed Jesus retelling the stories of David, Israel, and God, respectively. Of course, in their own way, each author includes all of these retellings (and more) in their Gospel, but this arrangement helps us to focus on one instance of recapitulation at a time. Each post will help us to see a different layer of the Gospel, the story that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John’s Gospels collectively point towards: how God, through Jesus, became human in order to restore human nature and begin a new kingdom of love, justice, joy, and peace, which we are all invited to join.