Russian Composer Dimitri Shostakovich wrote his seventh Symphony in 1941, as an act of defiance during the Nazi invasion of Russia. On December 27, 1941, he formally dedicated it to the city of Leningrad, which was then under siege by the Germans.
The Leningrad Radio Orchestra performed the piece for the first time on August 9th, 1942, at the height of the siege. For 334 days, the city had refused to surrender, enduring fire-bombings, starvation and death.
So, when the Leningrad orchestra began rehearsing, they could barely find enough musicians left alive to fill the score. Their first rehearsal only lasted 15 minutes, because everyone was too exhausted from starvation to play longer.
But here’s how one historian describes the night of the concert: “When the last chord trailed off there was a momentary silence. Then the whole place exploded with thunderous applause. People went to their feet, tears rolling down their faces. The musicians were hugging each other like soldiers after a battle.”
In some mysterious way, this unlikely performance had a saving effect on the city.
At least, Germany never captured Leningrad. One German soldier, who picked up the broadcast of the concert that night, wrote this: “When I heard Shostakovich’s Seventh being broadcast from the famine-stricken city, I realized that we would never take it.”
To the extent that you might think about this defiant performance as the “fulfillment” of Shastakovich’s Symphony—and to the extent that this “fulfillment” was, in fact a “saving event” for the city—it provides us a helpful image for an important aspect of the Atonement that is sometimes overlooked: the way Jesus’ death on the cross saves us by fulfilling for us the Old Testament story of Israel.
To get this, we need first to consider the history of ancient Israel as an over-arcing narrative.
God promises Abraham that he will make his descendants into a great nation, and that through them, he’ll bless the whole Earth. But Israel falls into slavery in Egypt. Through Moses, God delivers them from Egypt, establishing them as his chosen people, and giving them the Law—an elaborate system of sacrificial worship that’s will mediate their life with him.
The people wander the desert 40 years before God finally brings them to the Promised Land.
But through the generations, the people continually fall into idol worship and immorality, only to be called back to God by his prophets. Eventually their sin reaches its lowest point, and the people go into exile. The Babylonian Empire invades the nation, razes their capital, and hauls them off into captivity.
The prophets at the time interpret this exile as an expression of God’s “wrath”—his righteous judgement, that is, on their idolatry and immorality. But they also promise that God will fulfill his promise to Abraham, bringing them home from exile, and back into relationship with himself.
This is a pretty condensed summary of the Old Testament, but when it’s laid out like that, we see how Jesus “fulfills” this story in his own story.
As an infant, he flees to Egypt, later he is tested for 40 days in the desert. He calls the people into right relationship with God, and when his message ruffles too many of the wrong feathers—at the lowest point of human history—we crucify him.
And here’s where the story of God’s dealings with his people come to its fulfillment: because if Jesus represents Israel, the cross is the ultimate exile, as he cut off and condemned for the sins of the people. Through the Cross, he brings all the failure and judgment of the “exile” to an end, by becoming the perfect lamb of God who fulfills all the sacrificial requirements of the Old Testament Law that Israel failed to keep.
Like a beleaguered orchestra, you might say, saving a war-torn city by fulfilling a beautiful Symphony, Christ’s death on the cross saves us, by fulfilling the story of exile and redemption that is our collective history, and leading us into a “return from exile” with the Resurrection on the other side.
Jesus himself put it more even more simply, when he cried out from the cross with his final breath, “it is finished!”
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