Bewilderment

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)

  (In fact, we know more about him than we do about most other people from the ancient world; but even some who wrote about him at the time admitted that they were only scratching the surface.) Jesus is mysterious because what we do know—what our evidence encourages us to see as the core of who he was and what he did—is so unlike what we know about anybody else that we are forced to ask, as people evidently did at the time: who, then, is this? Who does he think he is, and who is he in fact? Again, people who listened to him at the time said things like, “We’ve never heard anyone talking like this,” and they didn’t just mean his tone of voice or his skillful public speaking. Jesus puzzled people then, and he puzzles us still. There are three reasons for this. The first reason for our being puzzled is that, for most of us, Jesus’s world is a strange, foreign country. I don’t mean just the Middle East, a major international trouble spot then as now. I mean that people in his day and in his country thought differently. They looked at the world differently. They told different stories to explain who they were and what they were up to. We do not habitually think, look, and tell stories in the way they did. We have to get inside that world if the sense Jesus made then is going to make sense to us now. An example may help. In today’s Western world it’s common for young adults to ask their parents for financial help to get them started in life. If well- to-do parents refused such a request, we might think them mean. But when Jesus told a story about a younger son asking his father for his inheritance while the father was still alive, his hearers would have been shocked. They would have seen the son’s action as putting a curse on the father, saying, in effect, “I wish you were dead.” That gives the whole story a different flavor. You can’t assume that things worked in those days the way they work now. But if the first reason for the puzzle is that Jesus’s world is strange to us, the second is that Jesus’s God is strange to us. That idea may itself seem odd. Isn’t God simply God? Isn’t it just a matter of whether you believe in God or not? No.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But above all, they were confident. I had just come from an institution in which young people were required to be absolutely obedient and submissive. We were never supposed to call attention to ourselves, never to question or criticize established custom, and if you were invited to address your elders, you did so with deference and courtesy that bordered on the obsequious. We had knelt down when we spoke to our superiors to remind ourselves that they stood in the place of God. These young people, however, seemed openly and unashamedly rebellious. They protested noisily and vociferously. They even took part in events called demonstrations, where they publicly aired their grievances, a concept that could not have been more alien to me. What on earth were they trying to demonstrate? What had they got to be so angry about? This was the spring of 1969, and I now realize that on the international stage, the weeks that had elapsed since my departure from the convent had been momentous. Richard Nixon had been inaugurated as president of the United States, Yasser Arafat had been elected chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and a military coup had taken place in Pakistan. Palestinian terrorists had attacked an Israeli airliner at Zurich airport, Nixon had authorized the secret bombing of Cambodia, and Soviet and Chinese forces had clashed on the Manchurian border. I knew nothing of this. I had never heard of either Nixon or Arafat, and would have had difficulty in locating either Cambodia or Manchuria on the map. In the convent, we had not kept abreast of current events. In the noviceship, indeed, we did not even see newspapers. We were told of the Cuban missile crisis, which occurred a few weeks after I entered, but our superiors forgot to tell us that the conflict had been resolved, so we spent three whole weeks in terror, hourly expecting the outbreak of World War III. Mother Walter also told us about the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Catholic president. Later, this strict embargo on the news was mitigated somewhat, but in general political interest was frowned upon. As a result, I entered the secular world completely ignorant of the problems of our time, and because I lacked basic information, could not make head or tail of the newspapers. What I needed was a crash course in the current political scene, but this was not available, and I felt so ashamed of my ignorance that I did not dare to ask questions that would have revealed its abysmal depths.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Chapter 13 Why Did the Messiah Have to Die? LAYER 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? Can the Messiah come from Galilee? Why are you behaving unlawfully? Who then is this? Aren’t we right to say that you’re a Samaritan and have a demon? What do you say about him? By what right are you doing these things? Who is this Son of Man? Should we pay tribute to Caesar? And climactically: Are you the king of the Jews? What is truth? Where are you from? Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One? Then finally, too late for answers, but not too late for irony: Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us! If you’re the Messiah, why don’t you come down from that cross? Whatever we say about Jesus, there can be no doubt that his actions and his teaching raised these questions wherever he went. And Jesus had his own questions. Who do you say I am? Do you believe in the Son of Man? Can you drink the cup I’m going to drink? How do the scribes say that the Messiah is David’s son? Couldn’t you keep watch with me for a single hour? And finally and horribly: My God, my God, why did you abandon me? The answers come too in more or less equal profusion. But, like all the best answers to the hardest questions, they come themselves as a set of sparkling puzzles, as though to remind people both ancient and modern that the questions are questions precisely because something is going on that demands a collapse of categories, a breaking of boundaries, a widening of worldview to the point where the new thing, whatever it is, will make the sense it does. The reason there were so many questions, in both directions, was that—as historians have concluded for many years now—Jesus fitted no ready-made categories. To be sure, the categories were themselves flexible. They were flexible enough to allow significantly different visions of kings and prophets, as we see both from the relevant texts and from the actual movements of the period. But even at their most flexible, Jesus both fitted and didn’t fit.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  In 1978–79, a bemused world witnessed the Iranian Revolution, when an obscure mullah overthrew what had seemed to be one of the most stable and successfully secular countries in the Middle East. People were shocked. “Who ever cared about religion?” cried a frustrated official in the United States State Department. But 1979 also saw the eruption of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority into American politics. Even though its success was short lived, it proved to be a watershed. Henceforth presidential candidates often found it advisable to sport their born-again credentials. In the middle of the twentieth century, it had been assumed that secularism was the coming ideology and that religion would never again play a major role in world events. But there was now a swing away from this position. Increasingly, people who were disenchanted with modernity felt impelled to push God from the sidelines to which he had been relegated in secular culture, and back to center stage. The extremists grabbed the headlines, and at this point I regarded them simply as a lunatic fringe, a dangerous bunch of fanatics. Because I was—on principle—not interested in religion, I was unaware that fundamentalism, as this militant piety was called, was only the most visible element of a much more pervasive trend. By the late 1970s, a significant number of people all over the world, who were never in the news and who would not dream of taking part in acts of terror and violence, were demonstrating in all kinds of ways that they wanted to be more religious and to see faith reflected more prominently in public life. There was a new interest in spirituality and mysticism. Religion was making a comeback. But it was easy to remain in ignorance of this in Britain, which was going in the opposite direction, even though people there certainly shared the widespread disappointment with modernity. The depression that had festered in London during the mid-seventies had now exploded into the absolute nihilism of punk. Young men and women made themselves as ugly and cadaverous as possible. They sported wild Mohican hairstyles, caked their faces with white makeup, mutilated their bodies with razors and safety pins, and destroyed their minds with drugs. The Sex Pistols, the chief punk rock group, vomited onstage and denounced the queen, God, and Jesus Christ, loudly proclaiming the death of all values, all principles. This was a public flouting of belief per se, but like the religious fundamentalists, other Britons were looking for certainty. The old ways had been dismantled, but as yet nothing new had appeared to take their place.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  We have to imagine the disciples here in a strange mixture of joy and bewilderment. Jesus’s resurrection had caught them gloriously by surprise. It didn’t fit at all into the game plan they thought they had been working with. It didn’t fit the plan they had assumed that Jesus himself had had. They were expecting him to become king of Israel, in some reasonable if revolutionary way. With that, he would become (according to the ancient scriptural promises about Israel’s king) Lord of the world. So what does Jesus’s answer mean? Here once again we have to avoid the usual downgrading and domesticating of the apostolic mission. We have to train ourselves to see it with first-century Jewish and Christian eyes. It isn’t a matter of Jesus saying, in effect, “No, you’ve got it wrong. Forget the idea of me being some sort of a king. You just have to go and tell people to believe in me, and then you and they will all come and join me in heaven.” That is certainly not how Luke, telling the story, sees it, and it wouldn’t fit with all that we have seen of how Jesus himself saw his mission during his public career. Instead, Jesus’s answer here is designed to say that, yes, the kingdom is indeed now being launched. He is indeed Israel’s king; he is therefore, indeed, the Lord of the world. But the way his kingdom is being implemented is, once more, through these human beings. Modern Christians use the word “witness” to mean “tell someone else about your faith.” The way Luke seems to be using it is, “tell someone else that Jesus is the world’s true Lord.” The story of what happened next is written in such a way as to say, “This is how the kingdom is to come. This is how Jesus is starting to rule the world. This is what it will look like when God becomes king on earth as in heaven.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  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. He’s gone; the church has messed things up; nothing has really changed. It was a nice dream, but it’s over. If there is any truth in Christianity, it’s about a private spiritual experience. Nothing to do with the real, public world. Billy disagrees. Yes, it doesn’t look much as though Jesus is running the world right now, but that’s because he is at the moment Lord of the upper world, of “heaven,” not of earth. “Now above the sky he’s king,” as the hymn puts it. But one day, Billy believes, Jesus will return to sort it all out. Then, and only then, he’ll be truly the king of everything. Billy prefers to believe that Jesus will do this by establishing a new heaven-and-earth reality, but knows of some other Christians who think that the final kingdom-establishing act will be blowing creation to bits in a huge Armageddon moment and establishing a completely otherworldly “kingdom” in a different sphere altogether. This reminds Billy of the soldiers in Vietnam who explained that they had to destroy the village in order to save it. But the point remains: Jesus will be Lord one day, but he isn’t really at the moment. Chris and Davie are both convinced that neither Andy nor Billy is taking seriously the claims either of Jesus himself or of the New Testament. Jesus, as we have seen throughout this book, believed that God was indeed becoming king in and through his own work and that his death would be critical in bringing this about. After his resurrection, he really does seem to have taught and claimed that God’s kingdom was now becoming a reality in a new way. It really had been launched.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Talking about someone new being in charge was dangerous talk in Jesus’s day, and it’s dangerous talk still. Someone behaving as if they possess some kind of authority is an obvious threat to established rulers and other power brokers. Perhaps that’s why, particularly in the last two or three hundred years, this side of Jesus hasn’t been explored too much. Our culture has become used to thinking of Jesus as a “religious” figure rather than a “political” one. We have seen those two categories as watertight compartments, to be kept strictly separate. But it wasn’t like that for Jesus and others of his time. What would happen if we took the risk of going back into his world, into his vision of God, and asking, “Suppose it really is true?” What would it look like, in other words, if Jesus not only was in charge then, but is in charge today as well? A ridiculous idea, you might say. It’s blindingly obvious that Jesus isn’t in charge in our world. Murder, misery, and mayhem still continue, as they always have. Even Jesus’s own so-called followers contribute their fair share. (As I write this, a “Christian” mob is vowing to take violent revenge on adherents of another religion who have bombed a packed church.) What could we possibly mean by saying, “Jesus is in charge”? Well, we’ll come to that later. But before we can even get going, we have to face a problem that is peculiarly our own. Behind the three historical puzzles ( Jesus’s world, Jesus’s God, and Jesus’s behavior—acting as if he was in charge) are additional difficulties that, like the elements of a perfect storm, have come together to pose severe challenges for anyone trying to address the questions about Jesus, let alone to do so simply. Chapter 3 The Perfect Storm IT WAS LATE OCTOBER 1991. The crew of the fishing boat Andrea Gail, out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, had taken the vessel five hundred miles out into the Atlantic. A cold front moving along the Canadian border sent a strong disturbance through New England, while at the same time a large high-pressure system was building over the maritime provinces of southeastern Canada. This intensified the incoming low-pressure system, producing what locals called the “Halloween Nor’easter.” As Robert Case, a meteorologist, put it, “These circumstances alone could have created a strong storm, but then, like throwing gasoline on a fire, a dying Hurricane Grace delivered immeasurable tropical energy to create the perfect storm.”3 The hurricane, sweeping in from the Atlantic, completed the picture. The forces of nature converged on the helpless Andrea Gail from the west, the north, and the southeast. Ferocious winds and huge waves reduced the boat to matchwood. Only light debris was ever found. There had, of course, been earlier “perfect storms,” but this was the one made famous by the book and movie of that title.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  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. The disciples, however, don’t see it like that. When Peter acts as spokesman for the group, declaring that, as far as they’re concerned, Jesus is “the Messiah, . . . the son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16), he is of course echoing the voice at the baptism. Jesus acknowledges that what Peter has said is, like that voice, heaven-sent. But his attempts to explain to the disciples what his particular messianic vocation involves are met with horror and incomprehension. The disciples, we may assume, were still working on the assumption of a more or less standard messianic model, the model that had allowed the family of Judah the Hammer to become kings following military triumph and the cleansing of the Temple, the model that would animate Simon bar-Giora in the 60s and Simon the Star in the 130s. They were expecting Jesus to march on Jerusalem and, by whatever means, to overthrow the wicked Jewish leadership and the hated Romans. All the signs are that they thought he was going to be king in the normal, obvious sense and that they would form his immediate circle. James and John were still agitating for the top jobs as they made their way to Jerusalem (Mark 10:35–40). The thought of combining this model with the powerful biblical theme of the suffering and martyred people of God made no sense to them. Nor had they even glimpsed, so far as we can tell, the possibility that the Jesus they were following on the road to Jerusalem might be the living embodiment of Israel’s God, returning at last as he had promised. What Jesus had done, it seems, was not only to combine Psalm 2 with Isaiah 42, but more specifically to combine Isaiah 52:7–12 with Isaiah 52:13– 53:12, the announcement of God’s kingdom and his return to Zion with the accomplishment of the suffering servant. This combination was a small step exegetically, but a giant leap theologically, politically, and vocationally. The first passage held out the hope of God’s kingdom: “Your God reigns”—resulting in the overthrow of Babylon and the rescue of God’s people from slavery. The second held out, apparently as the means by which this would be accomplished, the suffering of the servant. Nobody, so far as we know, had dreamed of combining these ideas in this way before.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  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.” Chapter 2 The Three Puzzles JESUS 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. (In fact, we know more about him than we do about most other people from the ancient world; but even some who wrote about him at the time admitted that they were only scratching the surface.) Jesus is mysterious because what we do know—what our evidence encourages us to see as the core of who he was and what he did—is so unlike what we know about anybody else that we are forced to ask, as people evidently did at the time: who, then, is this? Who does he think he is, and who is he in fact? Again, people who listened to him at the time said things like, “We’ve never heard anyone talking like this,” and they didn’t just mean his tone of voice or his skillful public speaking. Jesus puzzled people then, and he puzzles us still. There are three reasons for this. The first reason for our being puzzled is that, for most of us, Jesus’s world is a strange, foreign country. I don’t mean just the Middle East, a major international trouble spot then as now. I mean that people in his day and in his country thought differently. They looked at the world differently. They told different stories to explain who they were and what they were up to. We do not habitually think, look, and tell stories in the way they did. We have to get inside that world if the sense Jesus made then is going to make sense to us now.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Once we get inside the world of Jesus’s day and begin to understand what he might have meant by the word “God,” we begin to understand too the breathtaking claim that Jesus was, himself, now in charge. He was the one who had “an everlasting dominion” (Dan. 7:14), a kingship that would never be destroyed. This claim can never be, in our sense or indeed in the ancient sense, merely “religious.” It involves everything, from power and politics to culture and family. It catches up the “religious” meanings, including personal spirituality and transformation, and the philosophical ones, including ethics and worldview. But it places them all within a larger vision that can be stated quite simply: God is now in charge, and he is in charge in and through Jesus. That is the vision that explains what Jesus did and said, what happened to Jesus, and what his followers subsequently did and said. And what happened to them too. But here is the puzzle—the ultimate puzzle of Jesus. This puzzle boils down to two questions. First, why would anyone say this of Jesus, who had not done the things people expected a victorious king to do? Why, indeed, did Jesus end up being crucified with the words “King of the Jews” above his head? And why would anyone, three minutes, three days, or three hundred years after that moment, ever dream of taking it seriously? Second, what on earth might it mean today to speak of Jesus being “king” or being “in charge,” in view of the fact that so many things in the world give no hint of such a thing? Those are the questions that will now occupy us in the rest of this book. In Part Two, we shall look at Jesus’s public career, watching him stake the claim that God’s kingdom was being launched then and there and hearing him explain it to his puzzled hearers. We shall then see where it led him and learn how he understood his own forthcoming death as the means by which, in a strange and dark mystery, God’s kingdom would be established forever. That will open a new way for us to consider, in Part Three, what it might mean in today’s and tomorrow’s world to speak of Jesus as being truly in charge—and, equally important, not just to speak of it, but to help make it happen. But, as we draw these introductory chapters to a close, we return to the image of the perfect storm.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Either way, deeply mysterious though it remains, we should recognize that when Jesus announced his intention to launch God’s kingdom at last, he did it in a way that involved and included other human beings. God works through Jesus; Jesus works through his followers. This is not accidental. Some things (like the crucifixion itself) had to be done by Jesus himself, alone. Other things (like the itinerant ministry around Galilee) could and should be shared. God and Jesus don’t do what they do by blasting a way through all opposition. They do what they do by working with the grain of the cosmos, by planting seeds that grow secretly, by calling humans to be cocreators. God’s kingdom comes like a farmer sowing a fresh crop or like a vineyard owner looking for workers to pick the grapes, bringing people on board to help. When God goes to work—when Jesus becomes king—human beings are not downgraded, reduced to being pawns or ciphers. In God’s kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king. That is how Jesus goes to work in the present time. Exactly as he always did. That is why Jesus answers his followers the way he does at the start of the book of Acts (where we left them at the end of the previous chapter). The disciples ask Jesus if this is now the moment for God’s kingdom to be “restored to Israel.” Jesus, answering obliquely, as he does so often when correcting the assumptions of questioners, tells them that they are to be his “witnesses”: So when the apostles came together, they put this question to Jesus. “Master,” they said, “is this the time when you are going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” “It’s not your business to know about times and dates,” he replied. “The father has placed all that under his own direct authority. What will happen, though, is that you will receive power when the holy spirit comes upon you. Then you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judaea and Samaria, and to the very ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:6–8) We have to imagine the disciples here in a strange mixture of joy and bewilderment. Jesus’s resurrection had caught them gloriously by surprise. It didn’t fit at all into the game plan they thought they had been working with. It didn’t fit the plan they had assumed that Jesus himself had had. They were expecting him to become king of Israel, in some reasonable if revolutionary way. With that, he would become (according to the ancient scriptural promises about Israel’s king) Lord of the world. So what does Jesus’s answer mean? Here once again we have to avoid the usual downgrading and domesticating of the apostolic mission. We have to train ourselves to see it with first- century Jewish and Christian eyes.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Chapter 5 The Hurricane T HE GALE OF ROME and the high-pressure system of Jewish hopes. It takes one more wind to make the perfect storm. And, as in the original Massachusetts disaster, this one was of a different order altogether. To understand this great cyclone, this tropical hurricane, you have to understand, as I said before, something about the ancient Jewish vision of God. This always was the highly unpredictable element within the Jewish story itself. God remained free and sovereign. Again and again in the past, the way Israel had told its own story was different from the way God was planning things. The people, no doubt, hoped that the way they were telling their own story would fit in comfortably enough with the way God was seeing things, but again and again the prophets had to say that this was not so. Often God’s way of telling the story cut clean against the national narrative. And Jesus believed that this was happening again in his own time. God had promised to come back, to return to his people in power and glory, to establish his kingdom on earth as in heaven. The Jewish people always hoped that this would simply underwrite their national aspirations; he was, after all, their God. They wanted a divine hurricane simply to reinforce their already overheated high-pressure system. But the prophets, up to and including John the Baptist, had always warned that God’s coming in power and in person would be entirely on his own terms, with his own purpose—and that his own people would be as much under judgment as anyone, if their aspirations didn’t coincide with God’s. Jesus not only believed that this was another of those moments where the true, prophetic vision of the divine hurricane would clash with the current national mood. He believed, it seems—the stories he told at the time bear this out quite strikingly—that as he came to Jerusalem he was embodying, incarnating, the return of Israel’s God to his people in power and glory. But it was a different kind of power, a different kind of glory. This is another point that Jesus Christ Superstar got exactly right. Jesus is approaching Jerusalem, and Simon the Zealot urges him to mount a proper revolution. Jesus, he says, will then get the power and the glory forever. But then Jesus sings, hauntingly, the lines that make clear that there is a radical difference between the national aspiration, as voiced by the Zealots, and the divine purpose. Neither Simon nor the crowds nor the other disciples nor Jerusalem itself have any idea what power is. They don’t understand what glory is. They simply haven’t a clue.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  They told different stories to explain who they were and what they were up to. We do not habitually think, look, and tell stories in the way they did. We have to get inside that world if the sense Jesus made then is going to make sense to us now. An example may help. In today’s Western world it’s common for young adults to ask their parents for financial help to get them started in life. If well-to-do parents refused such a request, we might think them mean. But when Jesus told a story about a younger son asking his father for his inheritance while the father was still alive, his hearers would have been shocked. They would have seen the son’s action as putting a curse on the father, saying, in effect, “I wish you were dead.” That gives the whole story a different flavor. You can’t assume that things worked in those days the way they work now. But if the first reason for the puzzle is that Jesus’s world is strange to us, the second is that Jesus’s God is strange to us. That idea may itself seem odd. Isn’t God simply God? Isn’t it just a matter of whether you believe in God or not? No. The word “God” and its various equivalents in other languages, ancient and modern, may mean “the supreme or ultimate reality” or “a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship.” Those are, actually, the two basic definitions offered by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary . But a brief study of the world’s great religions, including those of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Indians, and Chinese, or for that matter a glance at the different religious movements in the Western world over the last few centuries, will show that there are many different views of what this “supreme or ultimate reality” is like. It isn’t enough to ask whether someone believes or does not believe in “God.” The key question is which God we’re talking about. Part of the reason why Jesus puzzled the people of his day was that he was talking about “God” most of the time, but what he was saying both did and did not make sense in relation to the “God” his hearers had been thinking of. We need, then, to get inside Jesus’s world. And, as we do so, we need to try to catch a glimpse of what he meant when he spoke of God. These are two of the key puzzles.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But one prophet after another, one psalm after another had indicated that things were not necessarily going to work quite that neatly, and indeed that they might not work that way at all. Israel had had, in the past, a bad habit of allowing national expectation and aspiration to get out of line with the divine purpose; perhaps that had happened again. Certainly John the Baptist had thought so. All the signs are that Jesus thought so too and had no hesitation in saying so. His kingdom-of-God movement was then aimed not only (like all kingdom-of-God movements) against the might of pagan empire and the forces of greedy paganized behavior within Israel itself; it was also aimed at subverting the way in which the national hope was being conceived and expressed. Jesus spoke for a divine hurricane that was approaching from quite a different angle to both the Roman gale and the Jewish high-pressure system. He was therefore walking into the perfect storm. Rome was brooding in the background, its imperial needs and ambitions ready to enforce themselves in the usual way. Israel was celebrating yet another Passover, another freedom festival, and longing for national liberty and victory over paganism. And God, the God whom Jesus called “Abba, father,” was apparently sending him on a mission that was neither of the above, that would be opposed by both, and that would appear to end in abject and horrible failure. If we can hold this picture in our minds, we are well on the way to understanding who Jesus was and why he did what he did. The best description of how this storm reached its height is, I think, the account in John 18–19 of what happens when Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, engages in conversation with Jesus. It seems to be, in theory, a kind of judicial hearing, but the conversation constantly threatens to lapse into a sharp-edged discussion about worldviews, with the chief priests looking on and giving their point of view as well. That gives us the three-angled picture I am talking about. But before we can come back to that, we must look at two other pictures. First, in the present chapter, we must examine the key places in Israel’s scriptures where the perfect storm seems to be anticipated or even predicted. Second, in the next chapter, we must look at Jesus’s own actions over the course of the last few days before his execution. Isaiah’s Servant First, then, the scriptures. We remind ourselves that the backdrop to all of this was the Exodus, with its seven themes: the tyrant, the leader, the divine victory, sacrifice, vocation, the divine presence, and the promised inheritance. These themes were reworked at the time of the Babylonian exile and afterwards, producing several key texts.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Messiah? Well, Jesus wasn’t doing the things you would expect a messiah to do, and yet so much of what he did and said seemed irresistibly messianic. Rabbi? Clearly, he wasn’t simply a rabbi with a different message, and yet he was a teacher, interpreting and expounding the scriptures and applying them urgently to what he believed was their moment of ultimate fulfillment. Priest? Well, priests taught people the law, and Jesus was doing that in a sense, though it wasn’t like anything they’d heard before. And priests also went up to Jerusalem to serve their turn in the Temple. 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.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The disciples, however, don’t see it like that. When Peter acts as spokesman for the group, declaring that, as far as they’re concerned, Jesus is “the Messiah, . . . the son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16), he is of course echoing the voice at the baptism. Jesus acknowledges that what Peter has said is, like that voice, heaven-sent. But his attempts to explain to the disciples what his particular messianic vocation involves are met with horror and incomprehension. The disciples, we may assume, were still working on the assumption of a more or less standard messianic model, the model that had allowed the family of Judah the Hammer to become kings following military triumph and the cleansing of the Temple, the model that would animate Simon bar-Giora in the 60s and Simon the Star in the 130s. They were expecting Jesus to march on Jerusalem and, by whatever means, to overthrow the wicked Jewish leadership and the hated Romans. All the signs are that they thought he was going to be king in the normal, obvious sense and that they would form his immediate circle. James and John were still agitating for the top jobs as they made their way to Jerusalem (Mark 10:35–40). The thought of combining this model with the powerful biblical theme of the suffering and martyred people of God made no sense to them. Nor had they even glimpsed, so far as we can tell, the possibility that the Jesus they were following on the road to Jerusalem might be the living embodiment of Israel’s God, returning at last as he had promised. What Jesus had done, it seems, was not only to combine Psalm 2 with Isaiah 42, but more specifically to combine Isaiah 52:7–12 with Isaiah 52:13–53:12, the announcement of God’s kingdom and his return to Zion with the accomplishment of the suffering servant. This combination was a small step exegetically, but a giant leap theologically, politically, and vocationally. The first passage held out the hope of God’s kingdom: “Your God reigns”—resulting in the overthrow of Babylon and the rescue of God’s people from slavery. The second held out, apparently as the means by which this would be accomplished, the suffering of the servant. Nobody, so far as we know, had dreamed of combining these ideas in this way before. Nor had anyone suggested that when the prophet spoke of “the arm of YHWH” (53:1)—YHWH himself rolling up his sleeves, as it were, to come to the rescue—this personification might actually refer to the same person, to the wounded and bleeding servant.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Once we get inside the world of Jesus’s day and begin to understand what he might have meant by the word “God,” we begin to understand too the breathtaking claim that Jesus was, himself, now in charge. He was the one who had “an everlasting dominion” (Dan. 7:14), a kingship that would never be destroyed. This claim can never be, in our sense or indeed in the ancient sense, merely “religious.” It involves everything, from power and politics to culture and family. It catches up the “religious” meanings, including personal spirituality and transformation, and the philosophical ones, including ethics and worldview. But it places them all within a larger vision that can be stated quite simply: God is now in charge, and he is in charge in and through Jesus. That is the vision that explains what Jesus did and said, what happened to Jesus, and what his followers subsequently did and said. And what happened to them too. But here is the puzzle—the ultimate puzzle of Jesus. This puzzle boils down to two questions. First, why would anyone say this of Jesus, who had not done the things people expected a victorious king to do? Why, indeed, did Jesus end up being crucified with the words “King of the Jews” above his head? And why would anyone, three minutes, three days, or three hundred years after that moment, ever dream of taking it seriously? Second, what on earth might it mean today to speak of Jesus being “king” or being “in charge,” in view of the fact that so many things in the world give no hint of such a thing? Those are the questions that will now occupy us in the rest of this book. In Part Two, we shall look at Jesus’s public career, watching him stake the claim that God’s kingdom was being launched then and there and hearing him explain it to his puzzled hearers. We shall then see where it led him and learn how he understood his own forthcoming death as the means by which, in a strange and dark mystery, God’s kingdom would be established forever. That will open a new way for us to consider, in Part Three, what it might mean in today’s and tomorrow’s world to speak of Jesus as being truly in charge—and, equally important, not just to speak of it, but to help make it happen. But, as we draw these introductory chapters to a close, we return to the image of the perfect storm.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  As part of his campaign, he told stories. Not just any old stories. These stories were, for the most part, not “illustrations,” preachers’ tricks to decorate an abstract or difficult thought, to sugarcoat the pill of complicated teaching. If anything, they were the opposite. They were stories designed to tease, to clothe the shocking and revolutionary message of God’s kingdom in garb that left the hearers wondering, trying to think it out, never quite able (until near the end) to pin Jesus down. They were stories that, eventually, caused some to decode his deep, rich message in such a way as to frame a charge against him, either of blasphemy, sedition, or “leading the people astray.” The stories were full of echoes. They resonated with ancient scriptural promises; they reminded their hearers of Israel’s future hopes and claimed by implication that these hopes were now being realized, even if not in the way they had imagined. These explanatory stories—the “parables”—were not, as children are sometimes taught in Sunday school, “earthly stories with heavenly meanings,” though some of them may be that, as it were, by accident. Some, indeed, are heavenly stories, tales of otherworldly goings-on, with decidedly earthly meanings. That’s exactly what we should expect if Jesus’s kingdom announcement was as we are describing it, with God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven. A good example is Luke 16:19–31, where the strange tale of two dead people inhabiting different worlds has as its punch line a warning about caring for the poor and the urgent need to repent: “There was once a rich man,” said Jesus, “who was dressed in purple and fine linen, and feasted in splendor every day. A poor man named Lazarus, who was covered with sores, lay outside his gate. He longed to feed himself with the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. “In due course the poor man died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died, and was buried. As he was being tormented in Hades, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, and Lazarus in his bosom. “‘Father Abraham!’ he called out. ‘Have pity on me! Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue! I’m in agony in this fire!’ “‘My child,’ replied Abraham, ‘remember that in your life you received good things, and in the same way Lazarus received evil. Now he is comforted here, and you are tormented.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  They were stories designed to tease, to clothe the shocking and revolutionary message of God’s kingdom in garb that left the hearers wondering, trying to think it out, never quite able (until near the end) to pin Jesus down. They were stories that, eventually, caused some to decode his deep, rich message in such a way as to frame a charge against him, either of blasphemy, sedition, or “leading the people astray.” The stories were full of echoes. They resonated with ancient scriptural promises; they reminded their hearers of Israel’s future hopes and claimed by implication that these hopes were now being realized, even if not in the way they had imagined. These explanatory stories—the “parables”—were not, as children are sometimes taught in Sunday school, “earthly stories with heavenly meanings,” though some of them may be that, as it were, by accident. Some, indeed, are heavenly stories, tales of otherworldly goings-on, with decidedly earthly meanings. That’s exactly what we should expect if Jesus’s kingdom announcement was as we are describing it, with God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven. A good example is Luke 16:19–31, where the strange tale of two dead people inhabiting different worlds has as its punch line a warning about caring for the poor and the urgent need to repent: “There was once a rich man,” said Jesus, “who was dressed in purple and fine linen, and feasted in splendor every day. A poor man named Lazarus, who was covered with sores, lay outside his gate. He longed to feed himself with the scraps that fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. “In due course the poor man died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died, and was buried. As he was being tormented in Hades, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, and Lazarus in his bosom. “‘Father Abraham!’ he called out. ‘Have pity on me! Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue! I’m in agony in this fire!’ “‘My child,’ replied Abraham, ‘remember that in your life you received good things, and in the same way Lazarus received evil. Now he is comforted here, and you are tormented.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I saw it again in the eyes of Sister Mary Sylvia, a nun in my college. She had recently come from India to take a degree in English literature and was living in my old convent at Cherwell Edge. In India, apparently, she had earned a first-class degree, had run schools, and had held high office in her order. But the move from India seemed to have unhinged her completely. She was quite unable to write a coherent essay, complete the simple procedures that enabled her to take books out of the college library, or remember the times of lectures and seminars. I knew about this all too well because—as one familiar with the arcane ways of nuns—I was constantly called to the rescue. When I tried to help Sister Mary Sylvia with her essays, I noticed that she simply could not take in what I was trying to tell her. One day, when she failed to turn up to the philology class that, as usual, was being held in the small seminar room, I found her sitting all alone in the dining hall with her notebook, smiling benignly, while puzzled college servants tried to work around her, waxing the floor and laying the tables for dinner. She was clearly in shock, could make no sense of her surroundings, and had entirely lost her bearings. I was in better shape, but I sensed something of what she was going through. Deprived of the familiar, I too seemed to have lost my way in a world that meant nothing to me. When, later that year, I watched my namesake Neil Armstrong make his “giant leap for mankind” and jump onto the pitted surface of the moon, the utterly bleak, dark, and eerily empty lunar landscape epitomized exactly what planet Earth had become for me.