The New Testament is only coherent in the context of the Old Testament. And I’m not saying that merely as a Biblical critic or a philosopher. It’s clearly built into the structure of the New Testament, and if you believe it, into history itself. There is a process unfolding, and you can’t ignore the foundation that the older scriptures provide. The Bible is a kind of meta-story, playing out across lived experience, national history, oral tradition, poetry, and philosophical speculation. For the Christian, it culminates with the gospel, reaching a kind of climax that the further books take their time exploring the ramifications of and carrying them forward into ethical practice and present history.

The gospel may be the climax of the story, but the gospel alone isn’t a complete story. You can’t even understand it properly, if all you do is skip to the climax. The good news is a revelation, but it is a revelation that comes as a surprise at the conclusion of a very well-developed historical narrative that lays the groundwork for the leap to transcendence. Taken in isolation, taken for granted as the limit and the default state of things, the good news loses its goodness, because we have no context of comparison against which to set it. God’s mercy only makes sense as a surprise set against a faithful description of the reality of our world, not as a default assumption.

Jonah is a kind of gospel story. What was the merciful message in Jonah? It was that God was going to destroy the city in forty days. How do you integrate that into a modern understanding of the gospel? And why wouldn’t Jonah want to carry that message? Apparently because he truly didn’t want to tell the Ninevites about it. Perhaps the reason he was so reluctant is because a warning about real danger is not, for all its disagreeability, an act of cruelty or merciless criticism, but was in fact a message directed at the wellbeing of the people. And Jonah, not truly wishing them to know that or to change, would rather see them suffer the outcomes of their sins than engage with them in preventing or avoiding them.

If you cannot push back on or challenge someone else on what they say, you cannot have a conversation or a relationship. You merely act on one another, or avoid one anothet, if you cannot genuinely reach one another. It is not merely a matter of applying force, of striking. It is a matter of grappling with one another. In such an embrace, you are both dangerous and in danger, inside their defenses and exposed in your own. The arms that reach around them and grasp them also carry the force of their grip back upon you. Relationships and real conversations aren’t a matter of firing broadsides at someone else from a position of security, they are a wrestling match where both draw close and engage in a way that precludes personal safety except through endurance, skill, and the fitness and goodwill of your opponent. It is what makes love and a careful balance of love and truth, grace and judgment, necessary.

We pervert mercy when we hand out forgiveness as if it is something we can grant. We pervert justice when we hand out judgment as if it is something we can grant. God is the source of both.