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.

Page 27 of 217 · 20 per page

• From How God Became King (2012)

  All this is bringing us nearer, I think, to understanding the evangelists’ atonement theology. It highlights too the distortions that result when people construct an “atonement theology” that bypasses the gospels. God himself will come to the place of pain and horror, of suffering and even of death, so that somehow he can take it upon himself and thereby set up his new style theocracy at last . The evangelists tell the story of Jesus in such a way that this combination of Israel’s vocation and the divine purpose come together perfectly into one. This, I suggest, is the reality behind the later abstractions of “humanity” and “divinity.” The humanity is the humanity of Israel, the divinity is the divinity of Israel’s God. Kingdom, Cross, and Church The third speaker invites us to listen to one particular dimension of the music of the gospels. This dimension, we recall, highlights the story of Jesus heard as the story of the launching of God’s renewed people. The gospels, in telling the story of Jesus (including the fulfillment of Israel’s long narrative and the remarkable claim that this is also the story of God in person), declare in a thousand ways that Israel is hereby transformed, through its Messiah, Jesus, into a new community, based on him but shaped by the Twelve, whom he called as one of his initial great symbolic actions. Many in Jesus’s day were seeking to renew God’s people this way and that. The gospels present Jesus as fitting exactly into that context and culture, with his prophetic ministry aimed, like all prophetic ministries over the previous centuries, at challenging Israel to turn from its wayward folly and to embrace once more its true vocation. The gospels themselves were written from and to communities of Jesus’s followers, who believed that in Jesus as Israel’s Messiah this renewal had become actual. Israel had not been abandoned. It had not been “replaced.” It had been transformed. That, indeed, was the source of many of the early Christians’ problems (should pagan converts get circumcised and keep the food laws?) as well as the root of their self-understanding. Of course, this transformation was anything but a smooth progression, a steady “development” from one phase to another. The story retains its thoroughgoing “apocalyptic” overtones all the way through: a veil is ripped back; things previously hidden are now unveiled, making the world a radically different place; events occur that change Israel and the world for ever. All of this, in its meaning for the early Christian community, is right there in the way the evangelists tell the story. At the center of it all, we find once more the themes of kingdom and cross.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Jesus himself is the new Temple at the heart of the new creation, against that day when the whole earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. And so this Temple, like the wilderness tabernacle, is a temple on the move, as Jesus’s people go out, in the energy of the Spirit, to be the dwelling of God in each place, to anticipate that eventual promise by their common and cross-shaped life and work. All this, I submit, generates a vision of the cross and its achievement so large and all-embracing that we really ought to stand back and simply gaze at it. All the “theories” of “atonement” can be found comfortably within it, but it goes far, far beyond them all, into the wild, untamed reaches of history and theology, of politics and imagination. We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more. It is the moment when the story of Israel reaches its climax; the moment when, at last, the watchmen on Jerusalem’s walls see their God coming in his kingdom; the moment when the people of God are renewed so as to be, at last, the royal priesthood who will take over the world not with the love of power but with the power of love; the moment when the kingdom of God overcomes the kingdoms of the world. It is the moment when a great old door, locked and barred since our first disobedience, swings open suddenly to reveal not just the garden, opened once more to our delight, but the coming city, the garden city that God had always planned and is now inviting us to go through the door and build with him. The dark power that stood in the way of this kingdom vision has been defeated, overthrown, rendered null and void. Its legions will still make a lot of noise and cause a lot of grief, but the ultimate victory is now assured. This is the vision the evangelists offer us as they bring together the kingdom and the cross. Kingdom and Cross in Mutual Interpretation What then can we say, in summary, about the evangelists’ portrayal of kingdom and cross, and what we ourselves can learn about each from that explosive, and usually ignored, combination? I offer three reflections about what this combination does to our vision of the kingdom. First, the evangelists insist that the kingdom truly was inaugurated by Jesus in his active public career, during the time between his baptism and the cross. That entire narrative is the story of “how God became king in and through Jesus.” But note what follows.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  We next find Israel in Egypt, forced by Pharaoh to build other sorts of cities (Exod. 1:11), but then rescued by God in his mighty act of overthrowing the tyrant and bringing his people out through the shed blood of the lamb and the crossing of the sea. We jump forward swiftly to the sad sight of Israel under the heel of the Philistines, rescued by David’s dramatic defeat of Goliath, and later not only of the Philistines, but also of other surrounding nations. Only then, once the pagan threat had been taken care of, was David’s son Solomon able at last to provide a safe home for God’s tabernacle in the city where God had promised to dwell. But the fatal twist in human nature reappears even in David and Solomon themselves, and much more in their descendants. The strange climax (or perhaps we should say the anticlimax) of the ancient scriptural story sees the Jewish people in Babylon, back in Babel once more, unable to sing God’s song in a strange land. The heart and thrust of the two great books that reflect that period, Isaiah 40–55 and Daniel—both, significantly, books on which the early Christians drew a great deal—is the clash of the kingdoms. In both cases the theme is the same: the kingdoms of the world versus the kingdom of the true God. Israel’s God confronts the pagan idols and the petty princelings who worship them. They are at present lording it over God’s people; but when God acts, as he will, he will show them in no uncertain terms that he is God and that they and their puny little human-made idols (and cities) are not. He will vindicate his people, rescuing them from their exile (Isa. 52; Dan. 9), exalting them to his right hand (Dan. 7), setting up a kingdom that cannot be shaken (Dan. 2), the true Davidic kingdom, which, built on the renewal of the covenant, will be nothing less than new creation (Isa. 54–55). In Isaiah this will be accomplished through the work of the “servant of the LORD”; in Daniel it will be accomplished through the suffering and faithfulness of God’s people. It’s the same story all the way through. And there is no doubt that this is the story the gospel writers intend, in their different ways, to retell in the basic story of Jesus himself. Isaiah and Daniel do indeed provide something of a climax to this much larger narrative. But then, growing within that soil, we find all kinds of fresh plants: a continual stream of people, movements and, writings in the postbiblical period, up to and including the revolt of bar-Kochba in the 130s, that draw on and develop the same beliefs and hopes. It’s not difficult to imagine the Judaean people, all the way through this period, singing psalms like Psalm 2, where the nations rage but God installs his king on Mount Zion and summons the nations to bow down before him:

• From How God Became King (2012)

  (We may at this point note, once again, how different all this is from the Gnostic and semi-Gnostic gospels. For them, individual “enlightenment,” rather than the communal life of Jesus’s followers, is paramount.) But when we adjust the sound from this speaker to its correct volume, we find out that there is more to listen for from this corner of the room than simply the early examples of what the church is supposed to be doing and the teaching of Jesus that gives direction and order to its life. Rather, the gospels are consciously telling the story of how God’s one-time action in Jesus the Messiah ushered in a new world order within which a new way of life was not only possible, but mandatory for Jesus’s followers. It isn’t just that the church finds itself doing a few of the things that Jesus’s first followers found themselves doing. It is that the story of the gospels, reaching its unique climax in the death and resurrection of Jesus, is told in such a way as to indicate that Jesus’s followers now have a mission, indeed a mission that goes way beyond anything they had had during Jesus’s lifetime. We have already seen that Matthew suggests a transition from a limited mission in Jesus’s lifetime to a worldwide one after the resurrection. Something similar is true in John’s gospel (not that the disciples have as much of a “mission” there during Jesus’s lifetime). In John, until Jesus is “glorified,” the Spirit is not given (John actually says, starkly, that up to that point “there was no spirit,” 7:39); but once Jesus has died and has been raised—once, in other words, Israel’s God has been glorified in him, in the “new Temple” sense that permeates John’s gospel—then the Spirit is given, so that the disciples can at last be for the world what Jesus was for Israel. “As the father has sent me, so I am sending you” (20:21) is one of the most demanding of mission charges, but also a key moment in gospel hermeneutics. That passage explains how, in the gospel writers’ own telling of the story, the unique and unrepeatable mission and achievement of Jesus becomes the mandate and pattern for the mission of the church. Thus: On the last day of the festival, the great final celebration, Jesus stood up and shouted out, “If anybody’s thirsty, they should come to me and have a drink! Anyone who believes in me will have rivers of living water flowing out of their heart, just like the Bible says!” He said this about the spirit, which people who believed in him were to receive. The spirit wasn’t available yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified. (7:37–39) “Peace be with you,” Jesus said to them again. “As the father has sent me, so I’m sending you.” With that, he breathed on them. “Receive the holy spirit,” he said. (20:21–22) Here is the heart of it.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  In fact, all four evangelists make it abundantly clear that we are to understand both Jesus’s kingdom and his death in relation to the Temple—or rather, in relation to the fulfillment of the Temple’s role in Jesus himself (this is a major theme throughout John) and his upstaging of it in his last great symbolic actions. It is now becoming more widely recognized, I think, that the synoptic evangelists present the Last Supper as a “new Temple” moment. Jesus, having pronounced God’s judgment on the old Temple in his dramatic action and then his discourse on the Mount of Olives, now gathers his friends around him to celebrate a “Passover meal with a difference,” a meal that not only looked back, like all Passover meals, to the exodus itself, but forward to the new exodus that Jesus was about to accomplish. Like all Passover meals, it was not just a signpost, but a means, through the sharing of food and wine, of partaking in that event about to be accomplished. When Jesus wanted to explain to his followers the meaning of his death, he didn’t give them a theory; he gave them a meal. The synoptics draw this out in one way, John in another (with the foot washing, chap. 13). But if what we said before about the political significance of the Temple has any significance here, this means that Jesus’s Temple redefinition was also part of what the evangelists saw as his establishment of a kingdom vastly superior to those of both Herod and Caesar. For a new theocracy to be inaugurated, a new Temple is necessary, so that the living God may there receive the worship of the world and from there administer his wise rule over creation. This is the point above all, perhaps, that today’s attempts at political theology will find opaque. For a genuinely Jewish vision of theocracy, you need God in the midst of it. But what the gospels offer us—especially John, but actually all of them—is a God who is in the midst in and as Jesus the Messiah, and a God who is then committed to remaining in the midst, through Jesus, in the person of the Spirit. Jesus himself is the new Temple at the heart of the new creation, against that day when the whole earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. And so this Temple, like the wilderness tabernacle, is a temple on the move, as Jesus’s people go out, in the energy of the Spirit, to be the dwelling of God in each place, to anticipate that eventual promise by their common and cross-shaped life and work.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago!... Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to cross over?... 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. (51:9–10; 52:10; cf. 40:10) This means that when we arrive at 53:1, there is only one possible interpretation: 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. (53:1–2) The prophet looks on in horror at the “servant,” battered and bruised beyond recognition, and says in wondering tones, “Who would have thought that he was ‘the arm of YHWH’?” Looking at him, at this “servant,” you’d never have guessed it. But the point of the larger poem, of Isaiah 40–55 as a whole, is that the servant is the one through whose representative work Israel’s God will accomplish his purposes for Israel and the whole world. The “servant” is a role made for YHWH’s own use. The purpose is to establish the kingdom; the means is the obedient suffering of Israel’s representative. This role and the accomplishment of this purpose are tasks that only YHWH himself can undertake. Here is the mystery at the heart not only of the New Testament (which went back again and again to these texts in the quest for understanding what had just happened), but of the Old as well. What we call “incarnation” thus lies at the heart of, and gives depth and meaning to, the kingdom-and-cross combination that, in turn, lies at the heart of all four gospels. And—to develop a point we hinted at a moment ago—this means that one “normal” reading of the creeds and of the whole Christian tradition at this point has to be challenged. The “divinity” of Jesus is not to be separated from his kingdom work, his cross-accomplished kingdom work. It does not, as a dogma, “come away clean.” So too with the “one like a son of man” in Daniel 7. To be sure, this strange visionary figure represents “the people of the holy ones of the Most High” (7:27). There seems no reasonable doubt that the one who is brought before the “Ancient of Days” in that great judgment scene is to be understood in this way. The passage offers two “interpretations,” one shorter and one longer, but in both this point is clear. (Some have speculated that an earlier form of the vision in 7:1–16 had a different meaning, but the text that was being read in the first century was the one we now have.) This is how it works. First, the vision.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  This is the message of God’s kingdom, all right, but it doesn’t play out in either of the obvious, simplistic ways, either as an “otherworldly” kingdom completely separate from that of Caesar or as a straightforward, old-fashioned violent revolution. For Matthew, Mark, and Luke the story is one of the key pointers, following Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and prior to his arrest and death, to what is “going on” throughout: this is the story of how God truly became king, as Jesus offered back to God what was his own, in his obedient suffering and death. And within the new world that was thereby created, the question of Caesar, his power, and his coins looks completely different. There may be a time for confrontation; there may be a time for appropriate collaboration. But all is to be done within the bounds of God’s kingdom. It cannot be otherwise. That kingdom is universal, all-present, and all-powerful. That is, after all, the message of all four gospels, and once we have turned all four speakers to their proper volume, we will not be able to miss the challenge they presented in the first century and could perhaps present again in the twenty-first. The Four Speakers Together What can we say, at the conclusion of this second part of the book, about these four speakers and about the music that the gospels want us to hear when all four speakers are properly adjusted? Let me point out one feature of what we have seen in this second part. Think back to the story of the exodus in its many elements. All first-century Jews knew this story well, just as most twenty-first century Jews do, because it was and is celebrated in song and symbol every Passover. The New Testament is full of echoes of the exodus, either as a whole or in this or that feature. Listen to the way this emerges when we adjust the volume on the speakers and pay attention to the full music of the four gospels. From the first speaker, the long narrative of Israel, we hear of the exodus in terms of rescue and journeying. The people celebrate God’s liberation, but they then wander for forty years through the wilderness before reaching their promised land. The long narrative, say the evangelists, has come to an end, a goal. Here, with John the Baptist down by the Jordan, we discover that this is where it was all going all along. It is time for the promises to be fulfilled. In the original exodus, they were fulfilled by Joshua (Yeshua in Hebrew) leading the people across the river and into their new territory. Now here is Jesus (Yeshua) doing the same.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  If you belong to Jesus the Messiah, if his Spirit dwells in you, if you are a worshipper of the one true God, maker of heaven and earth—then however you may feel at the moment, whether you are sick or healthy, handsome or jaded, you are simply a shadow of your future self. God intends to transform the “you” you are at the moment into a being—a full, glorious, physical being—who will be much more truly “you” than you’ve ever been before. Sin, by distorting and downgrading our specific God-given capacities and vocations, makes us more and more alike in our degradation. Jesus makes us more and more alive in our uniqueness, and the resurrection will complete that in a great act of new creation. Thomas à Kempis put it like this in his great hymn “Light’s Abode, Celestial Salem” (translated here by J. M. Neale): O how glorious and resplendent, Fragile body, shalt thou be; When endued with so much beauty , Full of health, and strong, and free; Full of vigor, full of pleasure That shall last eternally. And Jesus will do this, declares Paul (Phil. 3:20–21), by the power that enables him to submit everything to himself . Our resurrection, in other words, like the whole new creation, will come about because Jesus is king and Lord. Once you get the kingdom back in its place, everything else—Trinity, incarnation, atonement, resurrection itself—all gain in meaning. They stop trying to do jobs they were not supposed to do and can play the parts they were originally given. Conclusion: How to Read the Gospels My case throughout this book, then, is that we have all misunderstood the gospels. We have either followed the apparent implication of the great creeds and allowed ourselves to tell a pseudo-Christian story from which the story of Israel, on the one hand, and the story of God’s kingdom, on the other, have been quietly removed. Or we have formulated a concept of the kingdom that did in fact grasp God’s passion to put the world to rights, but we were then unable to integrate that with the incarnation and death of God’s own son. And to correct this misunderstanding it is not enough, not nearly enough, to affirm airily that we believe in the “canon” (many say that who, alas, continue to assume that the canon merely supports the “orthodoxy” they already know), still less that we are supporting something called “Nicene Christianity” and determining to read the Bible in that light.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  That message is written right across the New Testament (though the habit of having the first speaker turned way down means that many readers miss it entirely, in the letters and Revelation as much as in the gospels). But it makes enormous sense of the gospels themselves. The way they tell the story of Jesus going to the cross makes this abundantly clear. The greatest religion the world had ever known and the finest system of justice the world had ever known came together to put Jesus on the cross. The misunderstanding, betrayal, and denial of close friends adds another dimension. The mocking of the soldiers and the crowds deepens both the agony and the irony. Finally, the nations rage, as Psalm 2 said they would, rising up against the Lord and against his anointed, and God’s response is, “Yet I have set my king, my son, upon my holy hill”—no longer Zion, the ancient Temple mountain, but Golgotha, the ugly little hill a bit to the west. The cross constitutes Golgotha as the new holy mountain. This is where the nations will now come to pay homage to the world’s true Lord. The one enthroned there, with “King of the Jews” above his head, is to have the nations as his inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth as his possession. His victory over them will not be the victory of swords and guns and bombs, but the victory of his people and of their derivative suffering and testimony. That is how, for the four evangelists, the kingdom and the cross come together at last. That is how the darkest of the “powers” are to be overthrown. For God to become king, the usurping rulers must be ousted. Throughout his public career, Jesus was engaged in launching that project. But it was on the cross that it came to its triumphant conclusion. That is why, when Peter tried to turn Jesus away from his vocation to suffer, Jesus called him “satan.” That is why the mocking voices urging Jesus to come down from the cross echo so disconcertingly the mocking voices in the temptation narratives (cf. Matt. 27:39–43; 4:1–10). Without the cross, the satanic rule remains in place. That is why the cross is, for all four gospels (and, as I have argued elsewhere, for Jesus himself) the ultimate messianic task, the last battle. The evangelists do not suppose that the cross is a defeat, with the resurrection as the surprising overtime victory. The point of the resurrection is that it is the immediate result of the fact that the victory has already been won. Sin has been dealt with. The “accuser” has nothing more to say. The creator can now launch his new creation.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Yes, we think, because that is how the great scene in John 18–19 comes to its close, with Jesus speaking of kingdom, truth, and power and going to the cross to make them all happen! He descended into hell. And to his death and burial we then join “descended into hell”; those who know the single biblical reference to this (1 Pet. 3:19) know that it is not simply (though it may be this too) a statement of Jesus’s sharing in our worst nightmares. It is principally a statement of Jesus announcing to the “spirits in prison” that through his death God has won the ultimate victory. Peter goes on to speak of the immediate sequel, in which Jesus is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him. That makes the point exactly . The third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Now at last Jesus’s resurrection can mean what it meant to the gospel writers. It isn’t (as some, remarkably, still imagine) simply an “intervention” by God to rescue Jesus as a kind of special favor while leaving everyone else still in the grave. If Jesus is the one who is carrying the destiny of Israel, and if Israel is the people who are carrying the ultimate purposes of God to bring his justice and new creation to birth, then the resurrection of Jesus is the launching of the new world in which that justice and new creation have arrived at last, on earth as in heaven. “Some people standing here,” said Jesus, “won’t experience death before they see God’s kingdom come in power.” Yes, and now they have. And the ascension is then, as Luke certainly intends and John and Matthew hint, not Jesus “going away” in the sense of being out of sight and out of mind. Heaven, in biblical thought, is after all the “control room” for earth. For Jesus to be now “at God’s right hand” is for him to be given full authority over heaven and earth, as Matthew’s Jesus says explicitly. Every line of this section of the creed thus speaks powerfully about the kingdom of God. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. To the objection that the kingdom seems not to have gotten very far just yet—an objection that actually ignores the massive positive changes in the world and in our own society brought about by faithful and usually unknown Christians—this clause gives the answer: “From thence”! This is a direct allusion to Philippians 3:20–21, in which Jesus comes “from heaven,” from his place of utter sovereignty, to complete the work of establishing that sovereignty on earth. The scene here is not so much that of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, though it may include elements of that as well.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  God remembers the covenant with Abraham, passes sentence on the enslaving Egyptians, and rescues Israel from Egypt through the amazing events of Passover under the leadership of Moses. God then gives Israel the law, to be the way of life for this rescued people. But the astonishing thing about the book of Exodus, doubly astonishing as it turns out, is that God himself accompanies the people on their journey and then gives instructions for the “tabernacle,” the holy tent or “tent of meeting,” where he will be present in their midst and where he will meet, more particularly, with Moses himself. This then precipitates a near disaster because, while Moses is up the mountain receiving the detailed commands for the construction of the tabernacle, the people rebel. They persuade Aaron, Moses’s brother, to make an idol, an image, a golden statue of a calf, so they can pretend that this is the god who has brought them out of Egypt. This primal act of rebellion nearly ruins the whole plan, but—here is the second astonishing thing—God answers Moses’s urgent prayer for forgiveness and consents to go with his people, in their midst, despite their idolatry and rebellion. The book closes with a scene not only of pure grace, but of the completion of the long circle from Genesis 1: the tabernacle is constructed, and the glory of Israel’s God comes to fill it, to live among his people as they journey to their promised land. The people of Israel are, as it were, the new humanity, on their way to take possession of their new Eden. This pattern—God intending to live among his people, being unable to because of their rebellion, but coming back in grace to do so at last—is, in a measure, the story of the whole Old Testament. Magnify that exodus story, project it onto the screen of hundreds of years of history, and you have the larger story. Solomon builds the Temple, succeeding generations either corrupt it or try to reform it, but eventually, faced with overwhelming rebellion and idolatry, God abandons the Temple at last, leaving it to its fate when the Babylonians close in. (Note the irony: Babylon, “Babel,” is the place of human pride and idolatry in contrast to which God called Abraham in the first place.) The whole of what we call the Second Temple period, roughly 538 BC onward, is characterized by this sense of divine absence; God is gone, and he hasn’t come back.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The music of the second speaker, when heard in proper balance with the first, made the same point: throughout the Old Testament Israel’s God had shown himself to be more than a match for pagan rulers and authorities (the Egyptians, the Amalekites, the Philistines, the Assyrians; and think of the majestic revelation of Israel’s God in Isaiah 40–55, set over against the silly little human-made gods of Babylon). If the story of Jesus was to be seen, somehow, as the story of Israel’s God come in person, one would automatically assume that this element, of triumph over the nations and their gods, would play a significant role. And the music we hear from the third speaker, the story of Jesus told as the story of the launching of God’s renewed people, was being played out in a world where Caesar was Lord and didn’t take kindly to other “lords” claiming a similar universal sovereignty. We can be sure that the first readers of the gospels would be listening eagerly for any telltale signs of how to navigate this new and dangerous situation. How did following Jesus relate to living in Caesar’s empire? God and the Powers in Jewish Tradition Come back, for more detail, to the first of our four speakers. The entire story of Israel, on one level at least, is the story of how Israel’s God is taking on the arrogant tyrants of the world, overthrowing their power, and rescuing his people from under its cruel weight. Think back quickly through the great stories. Here is Babel—ancient Babylon—building a tower. Ever since Cain’s vain attempt to repair the damage of sin and murder by building a city (Gen. 4:17), that’s what humans have done by way of organizing themselves, and doing so, as often as not, out of willful pride (Gen. 11:1–9). Humans, even after the disaster of Genesis 3, simply can’t help planting gardens and creating communities; it’s in their DNA as God’s image-bearers. The problem is that they now do these things, and much else besides, with a fatal twist of self-serving arrogance, producing at best one parody after another of the ultimate Garden City, the new Jerusalem (Rev. 21–22). So at Babel God confuses their tongues; and he then begins, instead, in Genesis 12 the family through which all the nations will, after all, be blessed. What humans want to do by their own arrogance God will do by his own grace. The call of Abraham is God’s answer to the arrogance of human power.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  d. But the one who is thus exalted to worldwide sovereignty after his suffering is the one who then sits on the second throne in heaven. This is a huge claim, but it is exactly cognate with the implicit claim we saw in all four gospels in Chapter 5. The messianic vocation of suffering and kingship appears to be a vocation marked out in scripture for God’s own use. When we understand the ancient Jewish roots of the gospels’ “incarnational” vision of Jesus, we understand more fully that this vision belongs intimately and inextricably with the establishment of God’s kingdom, through the figure who now shares his throne, across the whole world. We understand, in other words, that the “gap” in the classic creeds—the gap between incarnation and atonement—is filled by the evangelists with their claim that in Jesus, and particularly through his suffering, Israel’s God was becoming king of the whole world. Daniel 7 is about the establishment not just of a radical and total theocracy, but of the rule (“-cracy”) of the God (“theo-”) who calls the cruel powers of the world to account and exalts those who have been crushed under their arrogance. That theme, of course, resonates with every corner of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It chimes with the song of Jesus’s mother: “Down from their thrones he hurled the rulers, up from the earth he raised the humble” (Luke 1:52). It fits exactly with the Beatitudes: “Blessings on people who hunger and thirst for God’s justice! You’re going to be satisfied” (Matt. 5:6). It dovetails precisely with Jesus’s own great redefinition of power and kingdom; the rulers of the earth behave in one way, but we’re going to do it the other way: “Anyone who wants to be first must be everyone’s slave…. The son of man didn’t come to be waited on. He came to be the servant, to give his life ‘as a ransom for many’” (Mark 10:42–45). Kingdom and cross belong exactly and profoundly together. And both gain their astonishing depth of meaning from the music we hear in the second of our speakers. The one who goes to the cross to establish God’s kingdom is none other than “the arm of YHWH,” Israel’s God in human form, the one who shares the throne of the “Ancient One.”

• From The Pisces (2018)

  It made me wonder what was inside of me. 9. I’d heard it said that when you’re feeling good is sometimes when you’re the most suicidal. Maybe it’s after you decide that you’re going to do it that you suddenly seem happier. I don’t think that’s why I walked across the beach to the ocean that night. I don’t think I was planning to jump into the ocean drunk or that I wanted to get killed by a stranger. I knew it was dangerous to be out there at midnight. I rarely even walked the boardwalk after ten or eleven. I think I just felt invincible, connected to myself, like I could do anything and be totally fine. Maybe I was looking for a new high. I climbed up on one of the big black rocks that lined the ocean in a cluster. I sat there for a little while looking out at the waves, more gray and white now that I was up close. I wondered if the rocks were somehow sentient, lonely out here in the cold moonlight. “Hi,” I said to the rocks. The rocks said nothing. They had the ocean and they had one another. I wondered if they ever got annoyed by the waves’ constant lapping, the daily irritation of their own gradual erosion. Did they secretly long for a tsunami to come eclipse them into the ocean, just to be done with it all already? Or did they enjoy that slow, rhythmic tickling? From the corner of my eye I spotted something fleshy on the edge of one of the rocks. It was a pair of hands. Fair hands, pale under the moon, with the nails bitten down to just slivers. Run! shrieked a voice inside me. A surge of adrenaline rang through my body like an alarm. But I couldn’t move. Then I saw a beautiful face, the wave of brown hair in an eye, and I gasped out loud. Was this the face of death? “So sorry,” the face said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just taking a break for a second from my swim.” “It’s okay,” I sputtered, still frozen in place. The swimmer leaned on the rock with his arms. They were thick and meaty—not cut like a bodybuilder’s, but you could see the muscles underneath what looked like a layer of baby chub. They reminded me of eating a piece of fish with thick skin and a small layer of fat, strong and also soft, very white. I wanted to bite them. His chest was hairless, and I noticed that the color of his nipples matched perfectly his lips, like pencil erasers. He looked like he was twenty-one, at most. If this was death then death was hot. “Doesn’t it scare you to be night-swimming? Isn’t the water freezing?” I asked. “I’ve got a wet suit on my lower half,” he said. “But no, it doesn’t scare me.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  But the astonishing thing about the book of Exodus, doubly astonishing as it turns out, is that God himself accompanies the people on their journey and then gives instructions for the “tabernacle,” the holy tent or “tent of meeting,” where he will be present in their midst and where he will meet, more particularly, with Moses himself. This then precipitates a near disaster because, while Moses is up the mountain receiving the detailed commands for the construction of the tabernacle, the people rebel. They persuade Aaron, Moses’s brother, to make an idol, an image, a golden statue of a calf, so they can pretend that this is the god who has brought them out of Egypt. This primal act of rebellion nearly ruins the whole plan, but—here is the second astonishing thing—God answers Moses’s urgent prayer for forgiveness and consents to go with his people, in their midst, despite their idolatry and rebellion. The book closes with a scene not only of pure grace, but of the completion of the long circle from Genesis 1: the tabernacle is constructed, and the glory of Israel’s God comes to fill it, to live among his people as they journey to their promised land. The people of Israel are, as it were, the new humanity, on their way to take possession of their new Eden. This pattern—God intending to live among his people, being unable to because of their rebellion, but coming back in grace to do so at last—is, in a measure, the story of the whole Old Testament. Magnify that exodus story, project it onto the screen of hundreds of years of history, and you have the larger story. Solomon builds the Temple, succeeding generations either corrupt it or try to reform it, but eventually, faced with overwhelming rebellion and idolatry, God abandons the Temple at last, leaving it to its fate when the Babylonians close in. (Note the irony: Babylon, “Babel,” is the place of human pride and idolatry in contrast to which God called Abraham in the first place.) The whole of what we call the Second Temple period, roughly 538 BC onward, is characterized by this sense of divine absence; God is gone, and he hasn’t come back. That is the problem faced by the prophet Malachi; the priests are bored and slack in their liturgical duties because, though they’ve rebuilt the Temple, there’s no sense of YHWH having returned, as Ezekiel had said he would. Ah, says Malachi, but the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his Temple—“but who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears” (3:1–2)? Are you ready, in other words, for another moment like that in 1 Kings 8 when Solomon dedicated the Temple and the glory of YHWH filled the house, or that moment in Isaiah 6 when the prophet saw YHWH high and lifted up, filling the Temple with his train and the house with smoke?

• From How God Became King (2012)

  We can be quite sure the gospel writers themselves had this element clearly in mind. The music from the first speaker always hinted at it: whenever Jews of the period told their story, one key element was always the question of how their God would deliver them from wicked and powerful pagan empires (echoing, of course, God’s rescue of his people from Pharaoh’s Egypt). The music of the second speaker, when heard in proper balance with the first, made the same point: throughout the Old Testament Israel’s God had shown himself to be more than a match for pagan rulers and authorities (the Egyptians, the Amalekites, the Philistines, the Assyrians; and think of the majestic revelation of Israel’s God in Isaiah 40–55, set over against the silly little human-made gods of Babylon). If the story of Jesus was to be seen, somehow, as the story of Israel’s God come in person, one would automatically assume that this element, of triumph over the nations and their gods, would play a significant role. And the music we hear from the third speaker, the story of Jesus told as the story of the launching of God’s renewed people, was being played out in a world where Caesar was Lord and didn’t take kindly to other “lords” claiming a similar universal sovereignty. We can be sure that the first readers of the gospels would be listening eagerly for any telltale signs of how to navigate this new and dangerous situation. How did following Jesus relate to living in Caesar’s empire? God and the Powers in Jewish Tradition Come back, for more detail, to the first of our four speakers. The entire story of Israel, on one level at least, is the story of how Israel’s God is taking on the arrogant tyrants of the world, overthrowing their power, and rescuing his people from under its cruel weight. Think back quickly through the great stories. Here is Babel—ancient Babylon—building a tower. Ever since Cain’s vain attempt to repair the damage of sin and murder by building a city (Gen. 4:17), that’s what humans have done by way of organizing themselves, and doing so, as often as not, out of willful pride (Gen. 11:1–9). Humans, even after the disaster of Genesis 3, simply can’t help planting gardens and creating communities; it’s in their DNA as God’s image-bearers. The problem is that they now do these things, and much else besides, with a fatal twist of self-serving arrogance, producing at best one parody after another of the ultimate Garden City, the new Jerusalem (Rev. 21–22). So at Babel God confuses their tongues; and he then begins, instead, in Genesis 12 the family through which all the nations will, after all, be blessed. What humans want to do by their own arrogance God will do by his own grace. The call of Abraham is God’s answer to the arrogance of human power.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  In both of these it appears, of course, as though it is Jesus who is on trial. But the way the evangelists tell the story—they all share, after all, in something of the nature of “apocalypse,” of the Jewish sense that the heavenly reality may need to be “revealed” behind the opaque earthly one—it becomes clear that actually it is Caiaphas and Pilate and the systems they represent and embody that are on trial—and that lose their case. Jesus, having declared that he will be vindicated, goes to his death as to an enthronement, while the Judaean leaders declare that they have no king but Caesar. Jesus, after all, has come to Jerusalem and found the Temple no longer to be the place where heaven and earth do business, but the place where mammon and violence are reigning unchecked, colluding with Caesar’s rule. Jesus himself, the evangelists are saying, is now the place where heaven and earth come together, and the event in which this happens supremely is the crucifixion itself. The cross is to be the victory of the “son of man,” the Messiah, over the monsters; the victory of God’s kingdom over the world’s kingdoms; the victory of God himself over all the powers, human and suprahuman, that have usurped God’s rule over the world. Theocracy, genuine Israel-style theocracy, will occur only when the other “lords” have been overthrown. Behind the actual human beings, whether Caiaphas, Pilate, or even Caesar himself, there stand the dark spiritual forces that they have implicitly invoked. As many scholars have argued, this should not be seen as an either/or ( either “human authorities” or “spiritual powers”). No doubt the “powers” can work independently too; but, like Rome itself in its outlying provinces, the shadowy powers of evil seem to prefer to do their dark deeds through the agency of willing collaborators. Each of the four evangelists highlights this in his own way. Luke’s Jesus declares that he saw the satan fall like lightning from heaven, though this is clearly not the end of the matter; he also says, with a wry solemnity, that the moment of his arrest is the moment when darkness does its worst (10:18; 22:53).

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The way they tell the story of Jesus going to the cross makes this abundantly clear. The greatest religion the world had ever known and the finest system of justice the world had ever known came together to put Jesus on the cross. The misunderstanding, betrayal, and denial of close friends adds another dimension. The mocking of the soldiers and the crowds deepens both the agony and the irony. Finally, the nations rage, as Psalm 2 said they would, rising up against the Lord and against his anointed, and God’s response is, “Yet I have set my king, my son, upon my holy hill”—no longer Zion, the ancient Temple mountain, but Golgotha, the ugly little hill a bit to the west. The cross constitutes Golgotha as the new holy mountain. This is where the nations will now come to pay homage to the world’s true Lord. The one enthroned there, with “King of the Jews” above his head, is to have the nations as his inheritance, the uttermost parts of the earth as his possession. His victory over them will not be the victory of swords and guns and bombs, but the victory of his people and of their derivative suffering and testimony. That is how, for the four evangelists, the kingdom and the cross come together at last. That is how the darkest of the “powers” are to be overthrown. For God to become king, the usurping rulers must be ousted. Throughout his public career, Jesus was engaged in launching that project. But it was on the cross that it came to its triumphant conclusion. That is why, when Peter tried to turn Jesus away from his vocation to suffer, Jesus called him “satan.” That is why the mocking voices urging Jesus to come down from the cross echo so disconcertingly the mocking voices in the temptation narratives (cf. Matt. 27:39–43; 4:1–10). Without the cross, the satanic rule remains in place. That is why the cross is, for all four gospels (and, as I have argued elsewhere, for Jesus himself) the ultimate messianic task, the last battle. The evangelists do not suppose that the cross is a defeat, with the resurrection as the surprising overtime victory. The point of the resurrection is that it is the imme diate result of the fact that the victory has already been won. Sin has been dealt with. The “accuser” has nothing more to say. The creator can now launch his new creation. All four dimensions—all four speakers, to continue our image—thus contribute to a richly layered narrative that we find, in different ways, in all four canonical gospels (though, noticeably, not in the so-called Gnostic gospels). Getting to this point requires considerable mental effort in today’s world and church. We have to reconstruct this story step-by-step, because so many elements of it have been simply forgotten or ignored in so much Christianity, not least, paradoxically, in those parts of the church that like to think of themselves as “biblical.”

• From How God Became King (2012)

  (1:2–3) This is how it happened. Around that time, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee, and was baptized by John in the river Jordan. That very moment, as he was getting out of the water, he saw the heavens open, and the spirit coming down like a dove onto him. Then there came a voice, out of the heavens: “You are my son! You are the one I love! You make me very glad.” (1:9–11) Mark picks up, here and throughout his gospel, a major theme from the ancient Hebrew scriptures: that when Israel’s God acts in fulfillment of his ancient promises, he will do so in dramatic and radically new ways. Here, to be sure, is a paradox we meet throughout the New Testament: God acts completely unexpectedly—as he always said he would. Just because the new events are able to be seen as the fulfillment of ancient prophecy (and Mark, like the other evangelists, is clear that this is the only right way to see them), that doesn’t mean that one can see a smooth, easy line from the ancient texts to the modern fulfillment. On the contrary, what is being fulfilled is precisely the promise of drastic, unexpected, and perhaps even unwelcome judgment and mercy. But our proper emphasis on this radical, new breaking in of God’s action in Jesus ought not to diminish the sense that, in Mark, this new thing that God is doing is the new thing he had always promised. “The time is fulfilled!” says Jesus in Mark 1:15. The bridegroom has arrived at last for the wedding party (2:19). The fresh seed is at last being sown, even though plenty of it will go to waste, because most of the hearers are in no condition to receive it (4:1–20). Mark allows the sequence of dramatic events to build up to the central moment in which Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah (8:29) and witnesses this being dramatically confirmed in the transfiguration (9:2–7). Woven into this story, as we shall see in more detail, is the dark strand that warns of Jesus’s impending death; yet this too is seen as part of the shocking and unexpected fulfillment of scriptural promises (10:45, alluding to Dan. 7 and Isa. 53). Jesus is fulfilling the story of Israel, even though this requires readers to understand Israel’s story in a new way. Luke: The Scriptures Must Be Fulfilled That the scriptures must be fulfilled is precisely the point made by Luke at key points in his gospel. Luke has structured his opening so that we hear in the background the great stories of Samuel and David, all pointing forward to the arrival of the true king.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  A new empire had been launched that would trump Caesar’s empire and all those like it, not by superior force but by a completely different sort of power altogether. And the place where this vision is set out is, to the great surprise of many who at one level know these documents well, the collection of the four gospels we find in the New Testament. This chapter has, I think, been a necessary digression. We now return to our main theme. 7 The Clash of the Kingdoms S PEAKERS TWO AND THREE NEED, as we have seen, to be turned down a bit. Their volume has been too shrill over the past few generations, and we lose thereby not only the real music they are playing—the gospels really are telling the story of Jesus as the story of the God of Israel coming in human form, and they really are telling that story as the story of the launching of God’s renewed people—but also the music from the other two speakers themselves, which have been drowned out, in some cases completely. This has not been helped by the fact that the fourth speaker has often not merely been turned down, but never switched on in the first place. Maybe, to extend the metaphor, it’s even worse; maybe the speaker needs to be retrieved from its lonely spot in the attic, dusted off, put in its place, and plugged in. Many readers of the four gospels, it appears, have managed to ignore this element altogether. The fourth element in the music to which we must pay proper attention, along with everything else, is the story of Jesus told as the story of the kingdom of God clashing with the kingdom of Caesar . God and Caesar Before we explain, a word about the shadowy powers that stand behind even Caesar. The gospels are very much aware of the dark forces that ultimately owe their origin and strength to the power sometimes called “the satan,” “the accuser.” The gospel writers have plenty to say about those dark forces, that dark power. They are quite clear where the ultimate enemy lies. Jesus reminds us not to fear people who can kill merely the body, because there is a more dangerous power lurking behind (Matt. 10:28; Luke 12:4–5). We must never imagine that in dealing with “political” forces we have gotten to the heart of it. As we shall see, it is only when we take fully into account the gospel writers’ belief that Jesus was involved in the ultimate battle against the ultimate forces of evil that we can begin to see how their combination of kingdom and cross—and, looking wider, of incarnation, kingdom, cross, and resurrection—makes sense. But that doesn’t mean that the conflict between God and Caesar is only relative or secondary. Unless we are prepared to factor this element into the story, we are one speaker short of full polyphony.