Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This is, of course, to run too far ahead of ourselves. If we are to approach that density of understanding, we must first grasp just how powerful, within the ancient scriptures, this theme of God’s sovereign, independent action really was. Sometimes, indeed, Israel’s God was envisaged, as in our present running metaphor, in terms of the violent forces of nature, rampaging through the heavens and coming to the rescue of his people: The earth reeled and rocked; the foundations also of the mountains trembled and quaked, because he was angry. Smoke went up from his nostrils, and devouring fire from his mouth; glowing coals flamed forth from him. He bowed the heavens, and came down; thick darkness was under his feet. He rode on a cherub, and flew; he came swiftly upon the wings of the wind. He made darkness his covering around him, his canopy thick clouds dark with water. Out of the brightness before him there broke through his clouds hailstones and coals of fire. YHWH also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered his voice. And he sent out his arrows, and scattered them; he flashed forth lightnings, and routed them. Then the channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare at your rebuke, O YHWH, at the blast of the breath of your nostrils. (Ps. 18:7–15) That sounds pretty much like a hurricane to me. And perhaps something more. Whatever else the ancient Israelites believed about their God, he was not a tame God. He was not the cool, detached God of ancient Epicureanism or modern Deism. But nor was he simply the personification of those forces of nature. He uses them, riding on the wind. At other times he tells the winds to be quiet. He remains sovereign over the elements. He is, after all, their creator. This is a different sort of wind altogether. In a sense, it’s strange even to put it alongside the other two. But the reason for doing so is that the first- century Jews told stories not only about their national history, but about their God. They celebrated his power, singing psalms like the one I’ve just quoted. They held together, with fierce devotion, their robust beliefs that their God was the one and only God, their anguish was the pain of the world, and the agony of their own people was at the heart of that world. Jerusalem, as ever, stood at the point where the tectonic plates of the world crashed together. It was, it seemed, the appropriate place of prayer for a world in pain.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  So Jesus is executed as the “king of the Jews.” All four gospels report that this phrase was written out and nailed above his head on the cross. Just as condemned criminals in early modern Britain used to carry a placard telling the onlookers of their crime, so the Romans would put such a notice on the cross, as a warning to others. The gospel writers, of course, see the sign over Jesus’s head as heavily ironic, charged with meaning of which the Roman governor and his soldiers were ignorant—just as John sees Caiaphas’s statement about Jesus dying for the people (11:50). Pilate’s words point, despite his cynical intention, to the reality: the “king of the Jews” must complete his scripturally rooted vocation by giving his life for his people, for the world, expressing and embodying the saving, healing, sovereign love of Israel’s God, the world’s creator. He should die, say the Jewish leaders, because “he made himself the Son of God” (19:7), just as in Mark and elsewhere the bystanders at the cross mock Jesus and challenge him to come down from the cross if he is the Son of God. But John’s readers and Mark’s readers know by now that it is because he is Son of God that Jesus must go to the cross, that he must stay there, that he must drink the cup to the dregs. And he must do so not in order to rescue people from this world for a faraway heaven, but in order that God’s kingdom may be established on earth as in heaven. That is why, in John’s account, the last words of Jesus are reported as being, “It’s all done” (19:30), in other words, “It’s accomplished” or “It’s completed.” The echo is of Genesis: at the end of the sixth day, God completed all the work that he had done. The point was not to rescue people from creation, but to rescue creation itself. With the death of Jesus, that work is complete. Now, and only now, and only in this way can new creation come about. How then can we interpret Jesus’s death? What models, what metaphors, what constructions can we find to do justice to it? It is, of course, easy to belittle it, to treat it as yet another example of a good man crushed by “the system,” another eager revolutionary who gave his life for the cause. Of course, there is a sense in which that is true, but if we are to understand Jesus’s own intentions, it is far from the whole truth.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Jesus himself wrote nothing, so far as we know. The sources we have for his public career— the four gospels in the New Testament—are dense, complex, and multilayered. They are works of art (of a sort) in their own right. But it is quite impossible to explain their very existence, let alone their detailed content, unless Jesus was himself not only a figure of real, solid history, but also pretty much the sort of person they make him out to be. If he wasn’t that—if cunning people made him up out of thin air to validate their own new movement, as some have ridiculously suggested—he’s not worth bothering with. But if he was a figure of history, we can try to discover what he did and what it meant in his own day. We can try to get, not “behind” the gospels, as some sneeringly suggest is the purpose of historical research, but inside them, to discover the Jesus they’ve been telling us about all along, but whom we had managed to screen out. That will occupy the bulk of the book. But Christians have always believed, as well, that Jesus is alive in the present and that he will play a crucial role in the eventual future toward which we are heading. He is the same, declared another wise early Christian writer, “yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). This book is mostly about the “yesterday,” not least because that’s the part many today simply don’t know. But toward the end of the book I shall deal a little with the “tomorrow” part (what will Jesus be in God’s ultimate future?) and suggest ways in which this combination of “yesterday” and “tomorrow” might condition us to think and behave differently in relation to Jesus “today.” J Chapter 2 The Three Puzzles ESUS OF NAZARETH, then, stands out in the middle of history. Tens of millions call him “Lord” and do their best to follow him. Countless others, including some who try to ignore him, find that he pops up all over the place—a line in a song, an image in a movie, a cross on a distant skyline. Most of the world has adopted a dating system based, supposedly, on his birth (it’s a few years off, but near enough). Jesus is unavoidable. But Jesus is also deeply mysterious. This isn’t just because, like any figure of ancient history, we don’t know as much about him as we might like.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, but, as we have seen, his deeds and words indicated that he was going to upstage the Temple, to do something that would make it redundant and leave it to its fate. Prophet? Yes, indeed, he spoke and acted as a prophet, but, however cryptically, he described his cousin as “more than a prophet” and clearly believed that he was bringing something greater again. Prophets characteristically pointed away from themselves to God and what God was doing and would do, but Jesus, as we have seen, spoke about God in order to explain what he himself was doing and was about to do. It was as though he filled the existing categories, flexible as they were, so full that they all overflowed, and in that overflow he overwhelmed his followers, his hearers, the enthusiastic and the suspicious alike, and ultimately those who were attempting to put him on trial, both Jews and pagans. The story, as we have it in the different gospels, is punctuated with moments of clarity, moments that steer the narrative away from the banal attempt that readers have made from time to time to squash Jesus into this or that box. Instead, these moments open the story up to the possibility that maybe, after all, heaven and earth would come together, God’s time and human time would coincide, and the physical reality of this world might indeed become the bearer of the fresh reality of God’s new creation. There are certain moments in the life of Jesus and indeed certain geographical locations that were already heavy with symbolic meaning. Think of the great Jewish festivals, particularly Passover, or the great Jewish landmarks, particularly the river Jordan and Jerusalem itself. At these moments and in these places, repeated throughout our sources, we find three strands meeting up, not now like the elements of a perfect storm, but more like three great rivers that had been traveling in separate valleys and now come together, as though through an earthquake or a landslip, merging with a swirl and a rush, a gigantic and powerful confluence. The great river of messiahship, of Israel’s long and checkered history of monarchy, comes crashing together with the dark flow of the servant, and both together are swept up in the longer, darker, and still more powerful current of the belief that Israel’s God would return at last to his people. The best historical analysis we can offer of what we can only call Jesus’s “vocation” is that he believed, through his prayerful study of the scriptures and his reading of what he himself called the “signs of the times,” that the full force of this great combined river would accomplish the purposes for which Israel itself had been called in the first place; and that it would do so in him, in his willing obedience to this vast and terrifying purpose.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The point of “apocalyptic” is that the seer, the visionary—Daniel, Jesus—is able to glimpse what is actually going on in heaven and, by means of this storytelling technique, the strange-story-plus-interpretation, is able to unveil, and therefore actually to set forward, the purposes of heaven on earth. The very form of the parable thus embodies the content it is trying to communicate: heaven appearing on earth. The content too does not then disappoint. Here is a sower sowing seed. The wise first-century Jew, hearing this, may suspect that this is about God sowing Israel again after the time of tragedy, the sorrow of the exile. Yes, says Jesus, but see what heaven’s perspective on this is going to be. Israel is indeed to be sown again. But there will be many who look and look, but never see, who hear and hear, but never understand. Many seeds will fall on the path, on rocky ground, and among thorns. Israel is not to be reaffirmed as it stands. John the Baptist got it right: you can’t just say “Abraham is our father,” because the axe is laid to the roots of the tree (another scriptural metaphor for the judgment of Israel), and God can now raise up children for Abraham from these stones (Matt. 3:9–10). Jesus echoes that elsewhere: many will come from east and west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the children of the kingdom—those who are presuming on ancestral heritage rather than grasping the chance of the kingdom itself now that it’s here—will be cast out (Matt. 8:11–12). Jesus is telling his contemporaries what heaven’s verdict is right now, what heaven’s action on earth looks like now, and he is using the best possible medium for doing so, the apocalyptic tradition of story-plus-interpretation, which allows the bifocal vision of heaven and earth, the simultaneous translation from the one language into the other, to take effect. Not all the stories, of course, work in this way. Jesus is anything but a wooden, stilted teacher, a one-string fiddle or a one-tune wonder. Some of the stories amount to pithy sayings or extended metaphors heavy with the hidden excitement of a new world waiting to be born. Think of the wedding guests being unable to fast, because the bridegroom is there with them, or the new wine needing new wineskins: Then John’s disciples came to him with a question. “How come,” they asked, “we and the Pharisees fast a good deal, but your disciples don’t fast at all?” “Wedding guests can’t fast, can they,” replied Jesus, “as long as the bridegroom is with them? But sooner or later the bridegroom will be taken away from them.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The sacrifice, likewise, would be Jesus himself; that, we must assume, is why he chose to make his decisive move at Passover-time, knowing that it would lead to the death of the firstborn, the beloved son, a hint he dropped in one of his last parables (Mark 12:6–8). The vocation would be the vocation he had marked out for Israel in the Sermon on the Mount: going the second mile, turning the other cheek, loving enemies, and praying for them even as they nailed him to the cross. The inheritance would not, now, be a restored holy land, but the whole world, the uttermost parts of the earth, which had been promised to the Messiah as his inheritance and then promised again to the servant as the realm to which he, through his suffering, would bring God’s justice. And the presence of Israel’s God would be the presence of Jesus himself, coming to Jerusalem as the embodiment of Israel’s returning God, the fulfillment of Isaiah 40 and 52. This, Jesus believed, is what it would look like when Israel’s God came back to Zion. It would not be the three men visiting Abraham, not the burning bush, not the pillar of cloud and fire, not Isaiah’s smoky, seraphim-surrounded vision, not Ezekiel’s whirling wheels, but a young man on a donkey, in tears, announcing God’s judgment on the city and Temple that stood on the cosmic fault lines, establishing his own still incomprehending followers as its surprising replacement, and then going off to take upon himself the full weight of evil, the concentrated calamity of the cosmos, so that its force would be annulled and the new world would be born. This way of looking at the climax of Jesus’s story is not, to be sure, the standard, traditional, “orthodox,” “conservative” reading, though it highlights from a new angle the “traditional” dogmas of “incarnation” and “atonement.” My contention is that it enables us to understand the original, historical reality for which those dogmas are later, often dehistoricized, abstract summaries.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Jesus, as we have seen, chose the Passover season as the moment to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, deliberately awakening in the onlookers’ minds the powerful prophecy of Zechariah 9:9–11: Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit. So many themes come rushing together at this point, both in Zechariah itself (which draws on images from many earlier texts) and in Jesus’s own dramatic acting out of the prophecy. Imagine an experienced naval commander seeing a ship approaching. If it were me, I would have to think about several things which would present themselves, to my inexperienced eye, as completely separate issues: the ship’s speed and size, its type and make, its nationality and fire power, and the likely threat it might pose. Only then might I be able to think through what was going on and take appropriate action. The experienced commander, however, takes all this in at a single glance and makes decisions instantly. In the same way, as we read the stories of Jesus, especially the stories of his final days, it takes us quite an effort to assemble in our minds the various themes that came together at that moment and to think of them as a single, coherent whole. But those who saw Jesus ride into Jerusalem that day, as the city prepared for Passover, were in the position of the experienced commander. Jesus’s action, the prophecy it evoked, the multiple themes of Passover (victory over the tyrant, freeing of slaves, sacrifice, the presence of God) would without difficulty form a single, coherent, though deeply challenging whole. What we, unschooled in their worldview, their controlling narrative, are bound (at least to begin with) to see as separate elements would have appeared to people in Jerusalem at the time as a single rich, dense event. They would have taken it in at a glance, meanings and all. So what was its “meaning”?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  And suppose he were to claim, at long last, his sovereign rights over that world, not to destroy it (another philosophical mistake) or merely to “intervene” in it from time to time (a kind of soggy compromise position), but to fill it with his glory, to allow it to enter a new mode in which it would reflect his love, his generosity, his desire to make it over anew. Perhaps these stories are not, after all, the sort of bizarre things that people invent in retrospect to boost the image of the dead hero. Perhaps they are not even evidence of the kind of “interventionist,” miracle-working, “supernatural” divinity of some “conservative” speculation. Perhaps they are, instead, the sort of things that might just be characteristic of the new creation, of the fulfilled time, of what happens when heaven and earth come together. Perhaps, after all, the attempts to cut them down to size are themselves part of a different agenda-driven process of invention that yields a world where such things don’t happen because they shouldn’t, they couldn’t. Because if they did, it might mean that a living God really had established his sovereign rule on earth as in heaven and was intending to let this rule grow into a large shrub from a small seed, putting an end to the fantasy of human sovereignty, of being the master of one’s own fate and the captain of one’s own soul, of humans organizing the world as though they were responsible to nobody but themselves. Perhaps the real challenge of Jesus’s transformations within the material world is what they would imply both personally and politically. If they are about God becoming king on earth as in heaven, the chances are he’s not going to stop with storms on lakes. There will be bigger fish to catch. And to fry. At the heart of the story told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke—and suffused through the whole narrative of John—we have the most striking example of all: After six days Jesus took Peter, James, and James’s brother John, and led them off up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transformed in front of them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as light. Then, astonishingly, Moses and Elijah appeared to them. They were talking with Jesus. Peter just had to say something. “Master,” he said to Jesus, “it’s wonderful for us to be here! If you want, I’ll make three shelters here— one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah!” While he was still speaking, a bright cloud overshadowed them. Then there came a voice out of the cloud. “This is my dear son,” said the voice, “and I’m delighted with him. Pay attention to him.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  If the Christian faith is true—if, in other words, Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead three days later to launch God’s new creation and, by his Spirit, to reenergize his followers to be its active agents—then the moment of Jesus’s death is, like Jerusalem on those ancient maps, the central point of the world. Even if the Christian faith were not true, we would still have to say that the death of this man, possessed of a vocation like this in which a thousand years of history and hope came rushing together in a great act of generous, compassionate love, was one of the most noble, if not the most noble, in history. Even the death of Socrates, so powerful in itself as a witness to the beliefs that had sustained his public career, cannot compete. But of course, as I shall now suggest, Jesus’s death is in fact given its full meaning and its fully central place in the history of the world by what happened next. 9 G. B. Caird, Jesus and the Jewish Nation (London: Athlone, 1965), p. 22. Chapter 15 Jesus: The Ruler of the World W HAT ON EARTH does it mean, today, to say that Jesus is king, that he is Lord of the world? How can we say such a thing in our confused world? If we do want to say it, what are we saying that Jesus is up to, in our swirling mix of modern, postmodern, and other cultural movements? What is he doing, in the midst of the dangerous clash of the new secularisms and the new fundamentalisms? What does the lordship of Jesus look like in practice in the world where we bail out the big banks when they suddenly run out of cash, but don’t lift a finger to help the poorest of the poor who are paying the banks interest so the banks can get rich again? All this is, of course, the subject for another book, or perhaps several. There are a thousand issues crying out for serious engagement. But part of the problem, I think, is farther back. Most Christians in today’s world have not even begun to think how calling Jesus “Lord” might affect the real world. When I said “what on earth” at the start of this chapter, I meant, of course, what Jesus meant in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come on earth as in heaven.” How do we even get to first base in thinking about this today? There are, broadly, four positions people can take as they face this question. There are plenty of local variations, but these four will do for a start. To help keep track of them, I’m going to invent four conversation partners: Andy, Billy, Chris, and Davie. You can decide which of them are male and which are female (though that’s not the point). For Andy, it is straightforwardly meaningless to talk of Jesus being king or Lord.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Think back to those messianic themes. Jesus would indeed fight the battle, but it would be against the forces of evil, corruption, and death itself. And, like the Maccabean martyrs, who went to their deaths confident that God would raise them from the dead to new bodily life, Jesus came to believe that the only way one could defeat death itself, and thereby launch the new creation for which Israel and the world had longed, was to take on death itself, like David taking on Goliath in mortal combat, trusting that Israel’s God, the creator of life itself, would enable victory to be won. And, since death was seen in the scriptures as the ultimate result of human rebellion against God and the failure to obey him, if death were to be defeated, then idolatry, rebellion, disobedience, and sin would be defeated along with it. Death, like a great ugly giant, would do its worst, and pour out its full weight upon him. And the creator God would overcome it, showing it up as a defeated enemy. In human terms, as we have already seen, this was the craziest vocation one could imagine. The disciples knew that, and Jesus must have known it too. Nothing could have brought him to conceive of his vocation in these terms except his unshakeable faith in Israel’s God as the creator and his deep awareness of Israel’s scriptures as marking out the course he had to tread. Jesus really does seem to have believed not only that this was indeed the way to fight the battle, but that this was also the way to rebuild, to reconstitute, the Temple. This was the way in which Israel’s God would come back to his people as the rescuer, the deliverer, overthrowing the powers of the world, overcoming the folly and frailty of Israel itself. This was how, when the perfect storm had done its worst, Israel’s God would establish a new community, a people in whom the promises would be fulfilled, in whom the living God would come to dwell as in the Temple, revealing his glory to the world. This would, in other words, be the new Exodus. Work through the seven themes once more. The tyrant would be not the Jerusalem leaders (though they, in love with their own wealth and prestige, were in league with the dark powers), not even Rome (though Rome would nail him to the cross), but all the powers of the Accuser, up to and including death itself. The leader would be, of course, Jesus himself.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Of course, I have said “when,” not “if.” I have argued in detail elsewhere that the only possible explanation for the rise of Christianity and for its taking the shape it did was that Jesus of Nazareth, three days after being very thoroughly dead (Roman executioners were professional killers and didn’t let would-be rebel leaders slip out of their clutches), was found by his followers to be very thoroughly and very bodily alive again. His tomb was empty; had it not been, his followers would have believed they were seeing some kind of an apparition. Such things were well known in the ancient world, as in fact they are today. Equally, they really did see, touch, and share food with Jesus as a real, bodily presence; had they not, they would have concluded that an empty tomb meant that the grave had been robbed. Such things were better known in the ancient world than they are today. The combination of empty tomb and definite, solid appearances is far and away the best explanation for everything that happened subsequently. “Solid?” I hear someone ask. Didn’t they tell stories about this risen Jesus going through locked doors, not always being recognized right away, and eventually vanishing upward into thin air? Yes, they did, and we have to take those stories seriously too. They don’t correspond to what first-century Jews, the majority of whom believed in eventual resurrection, would have thought “the resurrection” would be like. (For another thing, they never imagined that “resurrection” would happen to one person in the middle of time; they believed it would happen to all people at the end of time. The Easter stories are very strange, but they are not projections of what people “always hoped would happen.”) The stories don’t fit, in fact, into either of our regular categories. We tend to divide things up into solid, physical objects, on the one hand, and evanescent, insubstantial “objects” or appearances, on the other, such as (so we imagine) ghosts. But the stories of the risen Jesus have a different quality altogether. They seem to be about a person who is equally at home “on earth” and “in heaven.” And that is, in fact, exactly what they are. Remember—before this gets too confusing!—that “heaven” in biblical thought is not a long way away from “earth.” In the Bible, “heaven” and “earth” overlap and interlock, as the ancient Jews believed they did above all in the Temple. Remember too that “heaven” and “earth” are not like oil and water, resisting one another and separating themselves out. Most people in today’s Western world imagine that “heaven,” by definition, could not contain what we think of as a solid, physical body. That’s because we are Platonists at heart, supposing that if there is a “heaven,” it must be nonphysical, beyond the reach of space, time, and matter. But suppose Plato was wrong?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But Jesus brought these vocations together. When he submitted to John’s baptism, expressing the repentance necessary before the great coming restoration and symbolically reenacting the crossing of the Jordan and the entry into the promised land, he identified with his people in their humiliation and penitence, in their longing for God’s kingdom. This double strand of meaning (sorrow for sin, on the one hand, launching the kingdom, on the other) points directly to the double meaning of the voice from heaven. The servant vocation and the royal vocation became fused together in his mind and heart. This was what he had to do, and this was the time at which he had to do it. He became, in a new and deeper way, what he already was, much as a king’s firstborn son, born to rule after his father, would still be anointed for the task when the time came. “You are my son! You are the one I love!”: the lifelong sense of intimate closeness to the one he called “Abba, father” took shape with a new clarity, a new sense of direction, a new God-given energy. It was this newly shaped vision that was tested in the desert. What sort of a messiah should he be? He knew the stories as well as anyone, but he wouldn’t follow the line of David or Solomon or indeed of Judah the Hammer or Herod the Great. His secret wilderness victory, however, played the same role in his career that David’s killing of Goliath played in his. It indicated that the anointing at his baptism, like David’s anointing by Samuel, had been real, had not been a fantasy or an empty gesture. The initial victory pointed ahead to the tasks that now had to be accomplished. Sure enough, we see the same battle quickly joined as Jesus’s public career generated opposition and even plots against his life. People sometimes try to read the early days of Jesus’s public career as successful, popular, carrying all before him, but then posit a change, a decline in popularity, and the embracing of a Plan B that included suffering. The texts know nothing of such a mid-course change. Danger, threat, and challenge are there from the beginning. Jesus behaves from the start both with the sovereign authority of one who knows himself charged with the responsibility to inaugurate God’s kingdom and with the recognition that this task will only be completed through his suffering and death.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  We have felt the force of the western gale: the relentless power of Rome, its emperor, its armies, its steely-eyed ambition to rule the world. We have sensed the buildup of hope and national aspiration within the high-pressure system that emerged from the age-old stories of Israel, producing a complex but coherent narrative in which many of Jesus’s contemporaries believed themselves still to be living, in which indeed they were eager for the denouement, the fulfillment, the great final day. These two by themselves would have been enough, and were enough in many other instances, to produce a terrible storm with devastating results. But, from the moment Jesus of Nazareth launched his public career, he seems to have been determined to invoke the third part of the great storm as well. He spoke continually about the hurricane of which the psalmists had sung and the prophets had preached. He spoke about God himself becoming king. And he went about doing things that, he said, demonstrated what that meant and would mean. He took upon himself (this is one of the most secure starting points for historical investigation of Jesus) the role of a prophet, in other words, of a man sent from God to reaffirm God’s intention of overthrowing the might of pagan empire, but also to warn Israel that its present way of going about things was dangerously ill-conceived and leading to disaster. And with that, the sea is lashed into a frenzy; the wind makes the waves dance like wild things; and Jesus himself strides out into the middle of it all, into the very eye of the storm, announcing that the time is fulfilled, that God’s kingdom is now at hand. He commands his hearers to give up their other dreams and to trust his instead. This, at its simplest, is what Jesus was all about. 5 For others, see Pss. 22:27–28; 44:4–5; 74:12–13, 22; 93:1–2; 99:1–5. 6 See also Isa. 33:22; Obad. 17, 21; Zech. 14:9. 7 Yes, today many people are shocked at the idea of animal sacrifice. It was part of most ancient religions, Judaism included. That’s a subject for another time. Part Two T Chapter 6 God’s in Charge Now HE REASON THERE WERE CROWDS with Jesus that day as he rode into Jerusalem is that there were always crowds around Jesus, from the beginning. He attracted them. The first thing most people knew about Jesus was that when he arrived in the village there was a party. A celebration—whoops of delight, people dancing, women ululating. The prophet’s in town, and it’s good news all around! You didn’t have to look far to discover the reason for the celebration either. People were being healed—healed of any and every disease you can think of. Ancient medicine wasn’t quite as unsophisticated as we moderns sometimes imagine, but it wasn’t that effective either.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  We have felt the force of the western gale: the relentless power of Rome, its emperor, its armies, its steely-eyed ambition to rule the world. We have sensed the buildup of hope and national aspiration within the high-pressure system that emerged from the age-old stories of Israel, producing a complex but coherent narrative in which many of Jesus’s contemporaries believed themselves still to be living, in which indeed they were eager for the denouement, the fulfillment, the great final day. These two by themselves would have been enough, and were enough in many other instances, to produce a terrible storm with devastating results . But, from the moment Jesus of Nazareth launched his public career, he seems to have been determined to invoke the third part of the great storm as well. He spoke continually about the hurricane of which the psalmists had sung and the prophets had preached. He spoke about God himself becoming king. And he went about doing things that, he said, demonstrated what that meant and would mean. He took upon himself (this is one of the most secure starting points for historical investigation of Jesus) the role of a prophet, in other words, of a man sent from God to reaffirm God’s intention of overthrowing the might of pagan empire, but also to warn Israel that its present way of going about things was dangerously ill-conceived and leading to disaster. And with that, the sea is lashed into a frenzy; the wind makes the waves dance like wild things; and Jesus himself strides out into the middle of it all, into the very eye of the storm, announcing that the time is fulfilled, that God’s kingdom is now at hand. He commands his hearers to give up their other dreams and to trust his instead. This, at its simplest, is what Jesus was all about. 5 For others, see Pss. 22:27–28; 44:4–5; 74:12–13, 22; 93:1–2; 99:1–5. 6 See also Isa. 33:22; Obad. 17, 21; Zech. 14:9. 7 Yes, today many people are shocked at the idea of animal sacrifice. It was part of most ancient religions, Judaism included. That’s a subject for another time. Chapter 13 Why Did the Messiah Have to Die? L AYER UPON LAYER it comes, dense and rich within the texts, echo upon echo, allusion and resonance tumbling over one another, so that for those with ears to hear it becomes unmissable, a crescendo of questions to which in the end there can be only one answer. Why are you speaking like this? Are you the one who is to come? Can anything good come out of Nazareth? What sign can you show us? Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners? Where did this man get all this wisdom? How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Who are you? Why do you not follow the traditions? Do the authorities think he’s the Messiah?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  YHWH also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered his voice. And he sent out his arrows, and scattered them; he flashed forth lightnings, and routed them. Then the channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare at your rebuke, O YHWH, at the blast of the breath of your nostrils. (Ps. 18:7–15) That sounds pretty much like a hurricane to me. And perhaps something more. Whatever else the ancient Israelites believed about their God, he was not a tame God. He was not the cool, detached God of ancient Epicureanism or modern Deism. But nor was he simply the personification of those forces of nature. He uses them, riding on the wind. At other times he tells the winds to be quiet. He remains sovereign over the elements. He is, after all, their creator. This is a different sort of wind altogether. In a sense, it’s strange even to put it alongside the other two. But the reason for doing so is that the first-century Jews told stories not only about their national history, but about their God. They celebrated his power, singing psalms like the one I’ve just quoted. They held together, with fierce devotion, their robust beliefs that their God was the one and only God, their anguish was the pain of the world, and the agony of their own people was at the heart of that world. Jerusalem, as ever, stood at the point where the tectonic plates of the world crashed together. It was, it seemed, the appropriate place of prayer for a world in pain. Who Should Be King? But it was also, in Jesus’s day, a deeply puzzling place in its own right. This is where the story of God, the great hurricane that would sweep in from the third angle of the triangle, came into its own. Jesus’s contemporaries believed, because their ancient prophets had told them so, that their God had promised to live in their midst, in the Jerusalem Temple, which was the lineal descendant of Solomon’s Temple, which was itself the successor to the wilderness tabernacle constructed by Moses. But—again, as the prophets had said—Israel’s God had abandoned the Temple at the time of the exile to Babylon. Ezekiel saw it happen (chaps. 10–11). Ever afterwards, the same prophets had promised that he would one day return. He would come back to Mount Zion, to the holy city, to the Temple, to Jerusalem. “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple” (Mal. 1). “The glory of YHWH will be revealed, and all people shall see it together” (Isa. 40:5). “Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy; for in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion” (52:8). On and on go the promises, resonating through the minds and hearts and prayers of Israelites, of the Jewish people, of the Jerusalemites, of the pilgrims. Of Jesus of Nazareth.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  So many themes come rushing together at this point, both in Zechariah itself (which draws on images from many earlier texts) and in Jesus’s own dramatic acting out of the prophecy. Imagine an experienced naval commander seeing a ship approaching. If it were me, I would have to think about several things which would present themselves, to my inexperienced eye, as completely separate issues: the ship’s speed and size, its type and make, its nationality and fire power, and the likely threat it might pose. Only then might I be able to think through what was going on and take appropriate action. The experienced commander, however, takes all this in at a single glance and makes decisions instantly. In the same way, as we read the stories of Jesus, especially the stories of his final days, it takes us quite an effort to assemble in our minds the various themes that came together at that moment and to think of them as a single, coherent whole. But those who saw Jesus ride into Jerusalem that day, as the city prepared for Passover, were in the position of the experienced commander. Jesus’s action, the prophecy it evoked, the multiple themes of Passover (victory over the tyrant, freeing of slaves, sacrifice, the presence of God) would without difficulty form a single, coherent, though deeply challenging whole. What we, unschooled in their worldview, their controlling narrative, are bound (at least to begin with) to see as separate elements would have appeared to people in Jerusalem at the time as a single rich, dense event. They would have taken it in at a glance, meanings and all. So what was its “meaning”? For a start, this was an emphatically royal action, a claim to be Israel’s true king. But Zechariah’s prophecy also makes it clear that this king will come as a man of peace. As we have just seen, Jesus redefined the great coming battle, so that it would no longer be a military battle of “us” against “them,” of the forces of light fighting with literal weapons against the forces of darkness. Nevertheless, the arrival of this peaceable king will mean the establishment of his worldwide rule; as in the Psalms and Isaiah, Israel’s true king will be the king of the whole world, “from sea to sea.” The result will be the establishment of God’s covenant with his people, a covenant sealed in blood and resulting (think once more of Egypt, of the Exodus, of Passover) in prisoners being set free.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  As we saw earlier, this is a key entry point for understanding what God’s kingdom as inaugurated in Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension might actually mean. There can be no doubt that Jesus’s first followers believed that Jesus had fulfilled this vision of Psalm 2 and Daniel 7. Jesus himself had constantly hinted at something like this, though until the great events of Calvary and Easter nobody had worked out either what it might mean or how it would be put into effect. But these events, seen in this light, mean that we have to take very seriously the early Christian belief that Jesus was indeed now exalted; he was now in charge; he was already, now, calling the nations to account. And he was going to do so through his followers, those to whom he had given his Spirit. This, whether we like it or not, is where we come in. Yes, God can and does work in all sorts of ways outside the church. There are many movements of thought and energy totally beyond the life of the church in which wise Christians can discern and celebrate God’s sovereign and gracious presence. Paul, in a moment of visionary affirmation, looks out on a world full of things to celebrate: “whatever is true, whatever is holy, whatever is upright, whatever is pure, whatever is attractive, whatever has a good reputation; anything virtuous, anything praiseworthy” (Phil. 4:8). We thank God for his wonderful work well beyond the borders of Christendom. God is the sovereign creator; he can and does do all sorts of things without our knowing, without our involvement. But we do not, because of that, lose sight of one of the church’s primary roles: to bear witness to the sovereign rule of Jesus, holding the world to account. And when I say “bear witness,” I mean it in the strong sense I spoke of earlier. Like a witness in a law court, we are not just telling about our private experiences. We are declaring things that, by their declaration, will change the way things are going. This means that the church has a task that, in our modern Western democracies, we have attempted to replicate in other ways. We have tried to have some semblance of “accountability.” If the voters don’t like someone, they don’t have to vote for that candidate next time. We all know that this is a very blunt instrument. In my country, the majority of Parliamentary seats are “safe.” In any case, even if you vote for “the other lot,” you are still voting for politicians, and many people now believe that politicians are, as a class, part of the problem rather than part of the solution. In the United States, whoever you vote for, you still get a millionaire. And so on.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  He became pontifex maximus (“chief priest” in Latin) and passed that role too to his successors. Meanwhile, Augustus’s court poets and historians did a great job with their propaganda. They told the thousand-year story of Rome as a long and winding narrative that had reached its great climax at last; the golden age had begun with the birth of the new child through whom peace and prosperity would spread to the whole world. The whole world is now being renewed, sang Virgil in a passage 4 that some later Christians saw as a pagan prophecy of the Messiah. (The fathers of the American Constitution borrowed a key phrase from this poem, novus ordo seclorum, “a new order of the ages,” not only for the Great Seal of the United States, but also for the dollar bill. They were thereby making the striking claim that history turned its vital corner not with Augustus Caesar, nor even with Jesus of Nazareth, but with the birth and Constitution of the United States.) Virgil’s poem goes on to promise that from now on, in this new age, under the divine kingship of Apollo himself, the earth will produce all that one could require. Earth, sea, and heaven will rejoice at the child now to be born. Nobody knows which child Virgil was referring to, but the point is clear: the new age, for which we have waited for a millennium, is now here at last through the peaceful and joyful rule of Augustus Caesar. The message was carved in stone, on monuments and in inscriptions, around the known world: “Good news! We have an Emperor! Justice, Peace, Security, and Prosperity are ours forever! The Son of God has become King of the World!” Augustus ruled the Roman world, an increasingly massive empire, from 31 BC to AD 14. After his death, he too was divinized, and his successor, Tiberius, took the same titles. I have on my desk, as I write this, a coin from the reign of Tiberius. On the front, encircling Tiberius’s portrait, is the abbreviated title: AUGUSTUS TI CAESAR DIVI AUG F, short for AUGUSTUS TIBERIUS CAESAR DIVI AUGUSTI FILIUS, “Augustus Tiberius Caesar, son of the Divine Augustus.” On the reverse is a picture of Tiberius dressed as a priest, with the title PONTIFEX MAXIMUS. It was a coin like this one that they showed to Jesus of Nazareth, a day or two after he had ridden into Jerusalem, when they asked him whether or not they should pay tribute to Caesar. “Son of God”? “Chief Priest”? He was in the eye of the storm. That tells us almost all we need to know about the first element of our first-century “perfect storm.” But why was Rome particularly interested in the Middle East? For reasons surprisingly similar to those of today’s Western powers. Rome needed the Middle East for urgent supplies of necessary raw materials. Today it’s oil; then it was grain.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  YHWH has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations; And all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God. Depart, depart, go out from there! Touch no unclean thing; go out from the midst of it, purify yourselves, you who carry the vessels of YHWH . For you shall not go out in haste, and you shall not go in flight; For YHWH will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard. The entire flow of thought of Isaiah 40–55 as a whole leaves us in little doubt that this kingdom agenda, this rescue project, this return of YHWH to Zion, will be accomplished through the work, and now specifically the death, of the servant. This is why I said that the question of the “leader” within this picture, and then also the question of the “sacrifice,” are complicated. In Isaiah’s picture, there is no question but that YHWH himself is the “leader.” But the servant’s work is crucial. It is through his suffering and death, described here in terms of sacrifice (53:10), that the sins of the people find atonement and forgiveness. Throughout Isaiah 40–55, this “forgiveness” means, quite explicitly, return from exile; exile had been the punishment for the people’s sins, and their return is the embodiment of their forgiveness. A full picture of the servant appears in the fourth poem, Isaiah 52:13–53:12: See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. Just as there were many who were astonished at him —so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance , and his form beyond that of mortals— so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of YHWH been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  All the gospel writers draw this theme out, and it is perhaps Luke in particular who highlights it. Jesus is innocent, but he is dying the death of the guilty. He has not been advocating violent rebellion against Rome, but he is suffering the fate that Rome regularly inflicts on violent rebels. Jesus, having warned his people of what was to come, has gone to take it upon himself. His predictions of the destruction of the Temple and the city are matched, stride for stride, by his own vocation. That is part of the mystery of his crucifixion: “wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquity.” He cannot establish the new creation without allowing the poison in the old to have its full effect. He cannot launch God’s kingdom of justice, truth, and peace unless injustice, lies, and violence do their worst and, like a hurricane, blow themselves out, exhausting their force on this one spot. He cannot begin the work of healing the world unless he provides the antidote to the infection that would otherwise destroy the project from within. This is the point at which we see how the early work of Jesus’s public career, the healing, the celebrations, the forgiveness, the changed hearts, all look forward to this moment. This is what it looks like when Israel’s God becomes king. This is what it looks like when Jesus is enthroned as king of the Jews. Those two statements sit side by side. But to get the full story you have to creep around beside them, in awe, and look through the first at the second, then move to the other side, in gratitude, and see the first through the lens of the second. The Crucifixion