Hope

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 126 of 216 · 20 per page

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The world is out of joint, and God’s “judgment” will perform a great act of new creation through which it will be restored to the way God always intended it to be. To speak of the second coming is therefore to speak of God’s whole new world, the new world envisaged in Revelation 21–22 or Romans 8, and of Jesus at the middle of it, administering God’s just, wise, and healing rule. Jesus is the truly human being who will, in the end, take the properly human role (as in Genesis) of reflecting the creator’s image of wise and fruitful order into the whole creation. That is what his “coming” and his “judgment” will mean. God will do for the whole cosmos, in the end, what he did for Jesus at Easter; the risen Jesus, remember, is the prototype of the new creation. God will do this through Jesus himself; the ascended Jesus, remember, is the ruler within the new creation as it bursts in upon the old. And God will do it through the presence of the risen and ascended Jesus when he comes to heal, to save, and also to judge. That is why it is not arrogant to believe in the second coming. There are arrogant ways of thinking and speaking about it, of course, as though when Jesus returns we, his people, will be able to put our noses in the air and look down smugly on everyone else. A moment’s reflection will show how silly this would be. Think back over the last twenty-four hours or the last seven days. Suppose Jesus had been there, physically present beside you, throughout that time. Would you have been happy to have him see what you did? Hear what you said? Know what you thought? When he comes, as the New Testament insists, he will bring to light all the hidden things that are now in darkness and expose the thoughts and intentions of the heart. He comes, of course, as the one who died for us; there is no doubting his love. But his love is the love that wants the very best for us and from us, not the sentimental kind that doesn’t want to make a fuss and so refuses to confront the thing that’s actually wrong. He loves in the way a doctor or a surgeon loves, wanting the best, working for life, dealing powerfully and drastically with the cancer or the blocked artery. The only proper Christian way to think of the second coming is, as I said, with humility and patience. But also with faith, hope, and love. “And our eyes at last shall see him, through his own redeeming love.” That is our hope, our longing, our delight. Even so, we pray with the second to last verse of the Bible, “Come, Lord Jesus.” Jesus Today Jesus yesterday, Jesus tomorrow.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Herod the Great is important for our story not just because he provides a backdrop to the life of Jesus, but because he shows, admittedly in an almost caricatured fashion, what it might have meant for someone at the time to be “king of the Jews.” It meant victory; it meant Temple; it meant establishing the Jewish people in peace and prosperity. Herod tried to set his sails by the great high-pressure system of ancient Jewish narrative, while cleverly trimming them so as to avoid the impact of the gale blowing increasingly from Rome. However much his aspirations had shrunk, by the time of his death, to a thin, shrivelled little parody of his original hopes, we can still see in Herod a glimpse of the story that might make sense of it all, the story that stretched back to the ancient scriptures and on into a future that, to the eye of faith and hope, might yet produce the true king who would succeed where others had failed. Simon Bar-Giora The other failed king was Simon bar-Giora. He appeared at yet another time of social and political chaos, near the start of the great revolt against Roman rule that lasted from AD 66 to 70 and that ended with total catastrophe and the Temple’s destruction. There were plenty of other would-be leaders, prophets, and so on at the time, some emerging from families long associated with anti-Roman activity. But it was Simon who was ruling Jerusalem as the Romans closed in. Simon gained popular support, and then actual power, by announcing freedom for slaves. That was always a good move, not only in itself, but because the ancient memory of being set free from slavery in Egypt has always been central to Jewish self-understanding. Faced with other warlords and troublemakers, many of the leading men in Jerusalem were happy to give Simon power and to line up behind him. He instituted martial law, executing and imprisoning people he suspected might be traitors. Anyone who has tried to make sense of what was going on in Jerusalem in those years knows that it was a highly confusing period, and if that is so for us as historians, it must have been even more so for the people there at the time. Simon’s agenda, clearly, would have been the usual one: defeat the enemy, cleanse the Temple, and establish his own kingdom.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  It would come when the last great world empire had done its worst. Indeed, it would result in the overthrow of that dark power. This is the long story, the great narrative of hope, the prospective eschatology, within which many Jews of Jesus’s day were living, had been living for a long time, and would continue to live. In Jesus’s day it was obvious which world power had taken on the role of Egypt and Babylon. This is where our high-pressure system meets our gale. The long story of Israel must finally confront the long story of Rome. This is no time to be out on the sea in an open boat. Or riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. The clash of these two stories produced several movements within a couple of hundred years on either side of the time of Jesus. We shall look at these in a later chapter. For the moment we move on to the third element in the perfect storm of the first century. 4 Eclogues 4. Chapter 3 The Perfect Storm I T 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. Those of us who study and write about Jesus find ourselves at the mercy of our own perfect storm. The very mention of Jesus raises all kinds of winds and cyclones today. Listen to the buildup of the western wind. “How do we know those things really happened? Isn’t it the sort of legend people always tell about remarkable characters? Hasn’t modern science and history shown we can’t believe that kind of tale? And anyway, weren’t the books about Jesus written a long time later, by people who wanted to make him out to be someone extra special, so that they could boost their own religious beliefs or even establish some kind of power for themselves?

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  David is not, actually, to build the house for God. His son will do it. But, more important, God will make David a “house”—a house, that is, not made with stone and timber, but a “house” in the sense of a family: When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. (2 Sam. 7:12–14) That promise was remembered and pondered again and again in the days to come, right up to the time of Jesus. Nobody, it seems, was absolutely sure what it would mean in practice. But many saw the royal house of Israel as the means by which the living God would establish his own kingdom, his own rule or reign. There is a sense in which it isn’t an either/or choice, either God or David. Somehow it seems to be both. This is the point at which we can understand only too well how it was that the Israelite people of old, and the Jewish people of Jesus’s day, could very easily forget that their national dream and God’s purposes for them might actually be two quite different things. The prophets existed to remind them of the fact; but prophets were easy to ignore or forget. Or kill. God as King As it was, the more the story of Israel went on, the more the ancient poets and prophets spoke explicitly about God himself being king, taking charge, coming to sort everything out. They sang memorable songs about what it would be like when God did this. These poems, we should remind ourselves, continued to be sung in the Jerusalem Temple right through to the time of its destruction in AD 70, as they continue to be sung in synagogues and private homes, wherever Jews say their prayers, to this day. What follows is a small selection of many similar passages: 5 YHWH is king forever and ever; the nations shall perish from his land. O YHWH, you will hear the desire of the meek; you will strengthen their heart, you will incline your ear to do justice for the orphan and the oppressed, so that those from earth may strike terror no more. (Ps. 10:16–18) Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with loud songs of joy. For YHWH, the Most High, is awesome, a great king over all the earth. He subdued peoples under us, and nations under our feet. He chose our heritage for us, the pride of Jacob whom he loves.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  9:9–11) We notice the echoes of promises made to David in Psalm 2 and elsewhere: when the true king of Israel arrives, he will be king not only of Israel, but of the whole world. That is part of the point, as we have seen again and again with the promises about God’s victory over the nations (or, just possibly, God’s welcoming of them into a kind of extended holy people). When God acts as Israel believes he will, it will be not only to rescue his people, but to establish his sovereign rule over the whole world. God will finally be in charge from one sea to the other, from the River to the ends of the earth. And what will it look like? Like a humble figure, riding into Jerusalem on a donkey . The Coming Anointed One Nobody in the two hundred years before Jesus and nobody in the hundred years of continuing struggle after his time seems to have put all this together and suggested that Israel’s God might come in the form and person of the Davidic king . Or, if they did, we have no record of it. The closest we come might be bar-Kochba, proclaiming himself in AD 132 to be a great light from heaven, the promised and long-awaited “star.” We will look at his movement later on. But of course the prime example of a movement that held together the themes of God’s kingdom, on the one hand, and a messianic kingdom, on the other, was indeed that of Jesus himself. Within a few years of his death, the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth were speaking and writing about him, and indeed singing about him, not just as a great teacher and healer, not just as a great spiritual leader and holy man, but as a strange combination: both the Davidic king and the returning God. He was, they said, the anointed one, the one who had been empowered and equipped by God’s Spirit to do all kinds of things, which somehow meant that he was God’s anointed, the Messiah, the coming king. He was the one who had been exalted after his suffering and now occupied the throne beside the throne of God himself. But they also believed that Jesus had thereby fulfilled the dreams of those who wanted God, and God alone, to be king. Jesus, they believed, had lived and worked within the same overall story as other would-be kings of the time. But he had transformed the story around himself. In Jesus, they believed, God himself had indeed become king. Jesus had come to take charge, and he was now on the throne of the whole world. The dream of a coming king—of God himself as the coming king, ruling the world in justice and peace—had come true at last.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Of course, as the biblical story itself abundantly shows, things were never that simple. The people at the time of the Exodus were fearful. Moses himself tried to get out of his dangerous new role. The people grumbled and sometimes clamored to go back to Egypt. When the holy law arrived from Mount Sinai, its first task was to condemn the people—including Aaron!—for making an idol, a golden calf, instead of worshipping the one God, whose only appropriate “image” is a living, breathing human being. The covenant was broken before it had even really begun, and God very nearly withdrew his promise to travel in person with the Israelites. Whatever the ancient promises meant, and whatever this new fulfillment might involve, it certainly didn’t make the people pure, holy, and faithful overnight. But this was the story that sustained the Israelites for the next thousand years and more, up to the time of Jesus—and, of course, sustains the Jewish people to this day. This was the story Jesus knew from boyhood. This was the story—the tyrant, the leader, the victory, the sacrifice, the vocation, the presence of God, the promised inheritance—within which it made sense to talk about God taking charge. This was the story about God becoming king. This was the story Jesus’s hearers would have remembered when they heard him talking about God taking charge at last. Since we have reason to believe that Jesus was one of the greatest communicators of all time, we must assume that this was the story he wanted them to think of. He must have known what he was doing, what pictures he was awakening in people’s minds. When he was talking about God taking charge, he was talking about a new Exodus. Chapter 7 The Campaign Starts Here KEEP THESE SPECTACLES ON, then, as we come back to Jesus and to what he was saying about God—about Israel’s God. Jesus was going about declaring, after the manner of someone issuing a public proclamation, that Israel’s God was at last becoming king. “The time is fulfilled!” he said. “God’s kingdom is arriving! Turn back, and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). “If it’s by God’s finger that I cast out demons,” he declared, “then God’s kingdom has come upon you” (Luke 11:20).

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  That’s why it’s only when Jesus and his followers go back into the house, away from the crowds, that he explains what he means. The purity rules on which Judaism thrived then and, for the most part, thrives still today are (he says) irrelevant. (Pause for sharp intake of breath from those of his hearers, i.e., most of them, who knew the stories of the Maccabean martyrs being tortured and killed for refusing to eat pork.) What goes into you from the outside merely passes through and out the other end. The real uncleanness comes from the heart. That’s where thoughts leading to all kinds of evil—murder, adultery, immorality, theft, lying, slander—are lurking. That’s the source from which they come bubbling out, unbidden, into actual deeds and words. That’s the thing that really makes you “unclean,” not eating with unwashed hands or indeed eating “unclean” food. So what is Jesus saying? That some people are simply permanently unclean—namely, all those who find these things bubbling up in their hearts? Hardly. There wouldn’t be too many “clean” people around if that were his point. No, his point is that when God becomes king, he provides a cure for uncleanness of heart. Again and again it comes, in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), on the edge of one remark after another. When God becomes king, he will come with a message of forgiveness and healing, and this is designed not just to remove old guilt or to cure old disease, but to renew the whole person from the inside out. This is the point at which Jesus’s whole agenda embraces the “vocation” aspect of the ancient Exodus story. Exactly this point emerges again, though again it’s cryptic, in Mark 10:1–12: Jesus left the region, and went to the districts of Judaea across the Jordan. A large crowd gathered around him, and once more, as his custom was, he taught them. Some Pharisees approached him with a question. “Is it permitted,” they asked, “for a man to divorce his wife?” They said this to trap him. “Well,” answered Jesus, “what did Moses command you?” “Moses permitted us,” they replied, “to write a notice of separation and so to complete the divorce.” “He gave you that command,” said Jesus, “because you are hard-hearted. But from the beginning of creation ‘male and female he made them; and that’s why the man must leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife; so that the two become one flesh.’ “There you are, then: they are no longer two, but one flesh. What God has joined, humans must not split up.” When they were back indoors, the disciples asked him about this. “Anyone who divorces his wife,” said Jesus, “and marries someone else commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries someone else she commits adultery.”

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  He has won the victory over the wicked tyrant. He is the king. Fourth, the rescue of God’s people was achieved in such a way as to make it clear to them that this was an act of special favor and mercy. “Passover” is called that because, on the last night in Egypt, the angel of death, bringing judgment on all the firstborn of Egypt, “passed over” the Israelite houses where a lamb had been sacrificed and its blood daubed on the doorposts. The shared family meal of that night has been repeated ever since, constituting the people as the rescued, freed family of God. And it was during the preparations for Passover when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the donkey. Fifth, the Israelites arrived at Mount Sinai, where the “marriage covenant” between them and their God was sealed. God, for his part, gave them his law, the way of life through which they were to show the world what its maker had had in mind. Sixth, God himself went with the Israelites on their journey, in a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. The book of Exodus closes with the making of the tabernacle, where God would come to live in the midst of his people. Half a millennium after Moses’s day, David and Solomon would plan and build a permanent version of this tabernacle, the Temple in Jerusalem. It was to the Temple that Jesus of Nazareth came that day, to perform a strange, dramatic symbolic gesture and to debate with the teachers of the law, as the winds began to blow more fiercely and the perfect storm of history reached its height. Seventh, all this happened in fulfillment of ancient promises. God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that their family would have the land of Palestine as their inheritance. Now at last those promises were coming true. Hope had been deferred for a long time. Now it was being realized. All this is what I meant when I said earlier that the festival Jesus chose as his moment to act was “dense with detail and heavy with hope.” For us, the picture has to be assembled step by step; for them it was like a living room in their own home, full of pictures and ornaments they knew extremely well, and none of them without significance. And the significance, for everyone who shared in the festival, was hope. What God had done before God would do again. Of course, as the biblical story itself abundantly shows, things were never that simple. The people at the time of the Exodus were fearful. Moses himself tried to get out of his dangerous new role. The people grumbled and sometimes clamored to go back to Egypt.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  In fact, don’t believe most of what you read about the Rapture. Many Christians, particularly in North America, have been taught for the last century and a half that when Jesus returns he will come down from “heaven” and that his faithful people (i.e., Christians) will then fly upward into the sky to meet him and be taken to heaven with him forever. Books, movies, a million radio and TV shows, and tens of millions of sermons have drilled this picture into the popular imagination. Indeed, for some people today the Rapture is more or less the center of their faith. But it’s a complete misunderstanding. It’s based on a misreading of what Paul says about the return of Jesus in 1 Thessalonians 4:14–17, just four verses, with the idea of a “rapture” in only one, as the basis for a complete theory of everything : For, you see, if we believe that Jesus died and rose, that’s the way God will also, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep. Let me explain (this is the word of the Lord I’m speaking to you!). We who are alive, who remain until the Lord is present, will not find ourselves ahead of those who fell asleep. The Lord himself will come down from heaven with a shouted order, with the voice of an archangel and the sound of God’s trumpet. The Messiah’s dead will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, will be snatched up with them among the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. And in this way we shall always be with the Lord. What Paul is doing, not for the first time, is mixing his metaphors. The basis of it all, offered here as comfort and hope for the grieving, is that the Lord “will come down from heaven.” Paul describes this in language that would remind biblically minded hearers of the scene in which Moses comes down the mountain. That’s the significance of the archangel’s voice and the trumpet. But then God’s people will be exalted, like the “one like a son of man” in Daniel 7:13, so that after their own suffering and death they will be with their Lord forever. And the result is that Jesus will have his “royal appearing,” like Caesar coming back to Rome after a visit to the colonies. His glad, loyal citizens will “go out to meet him,” not in order to stay with him out in the countryside, away from the city, but to escort him in triumph and splendor back into his capital. Of course these metaphors, when pressed, don’t all fit together. You’re not supposed to be able to draw the scene in a sketch-pad.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  To begin with, you might suppose that this is simply a discussion of a particular point of family ethics, namely, the question of divorce. But—remember Herod Antipas and the reason John the Baptist got into trouble!—it can never be merely that. The question turns out to be powerfully loaded, to carry all the freight of the question of what it will it look like when God becomes king. Jesus’s interlocutors remind him that Moses gave permission for divorce. Yes, says Jesus, but that wasn’t how it was meant to be from the beginning. Jesus goes back to the story of creation itself, in which man and woman are to be joined permanently, as “one flesh.” Within the story of Genesis itself, of course, this is powerfully symbolic: the coming together of man and woman is the sign of the belonging together of heaven and earth themselves, of the integration of God’s astonishingly variegated creation. What Jesus is claiming is that when God becomes king creation itself is renewed, so that the rule within the kingdom is the rule of what creation was meant to be. And that includes lifelong, faithful monogamous marriage. This is, no doubt, as much of a challenge today as it was to Jesus’s first hearers (Matt. 19:10). But the underlying point comes in Jesus’s response to the Pharisees when they ask why, if God intended lifelong marriage, Moses gave permission for divorce. “It was because of your hard hearts,” replies Jesus, sending them back again to the beginning, to the creation story in Genesis 1–2, for the real standard. So what is he saying? That he is going to force this new agenda on people, even though their hearts are still hard? No. Putting this together with all the other passages about the heart, we can say with confidence that Jesus’s point was this. When God becomes king, on earth as in heaven, he will provide a cure for hardness of heart. The healing that Jesus offered for sick bodies was to penetrate to the very depths of one’s being. Transformed lives, healed from the inside out, are to be the order of the day when God becomes king. In neither of these cases is there any chance of this teaching collapsing into a private piety. One cannot conclude from these passages that Jesus is “really” teaching about a “religion of the heart,” which has nothing to do with public life. To take the first passage (Mark 7:1–23; Matt. 15:1–20), the question of whether Jesus and his followers are being loyal to Israel’s law is a question about whether Jesus is a true teacher or a false one. The law is quite specific (at least, as interpreted by the stricter minds of the day); if Jesus and his followers are transgressing it, that shows that they are on the wrong track, and that Jesus’s claim to be announcing and indeed spearheading God’s kingdom movement must be false, deluded, or perhaps even demonic.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Many people in America today were brought up in strict Christian homes and churches of one sort or another. There was a set package. Jesus, the Bible (if you were Protestant), the Mass (if you were Catholic), family, strict morals, the Rapture (for some Protestants), purgatory (for some Catholics), and ultimately a straight choice between heaven and hell—all of that describes the world many remember only too well. And many of those who do remember it remember it with a shudder. That’s the small, narrow world from which (whew!) the healthy skepticism of the modern world has rescued them. So, for many Americans today, and others elsewhere too, Jesus is part of the tight little world, closed and closed-minded, from which they have thankfully escaped. If you want to know why the “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Atkins sell so many books, the answer is that they’re offering the modernist version of the good old-fashioned theological term “assurance.” They are assuring anxious ex-believers that the nightmare of small-minded and stultifying “religion” is gone forever. In my own country things are a bit different. Few people in Britain today have had that kind of strict upbringing. But skepticism still thrives. Those same atheistic books denouncing the church, Christianity, and religion in general sell by the cartload. Two generations after most people stopped sending their children to Sunday school, it seems that people still want to strike out at the religion they haven’t got. Do they suspect that God, or someone, is still out there and might be dangerous? In any case, such rumors need to be stifled. The general public wants them to be stifled. We have our dreams of being free, grown-up humans, and we don’t want to bend the knee to anyone, especially that fussy old God or that strange character Jesus! Actually, the skeptics, who take grim comfort from the apparent decline of many mainline churches, don’t often focus on Jesus himself. They have far softer targets to aim at (badly behaved clergy, for a start). But if they do mention Jesus, they tend to dismiss him with a wave of the hand. Just a first-century fanatic whose wild- eyed followers turned him into a god. Or, damning him with faint praise, just a mild-mannered first-century moralist, one of many great teachers down through the ages. Those are the internal dynamics of the western wind, the howling gale of contemporary skepticism. Meanwhile, however, millions around the world, and tens of thousands in Britain and the United States too, tell a different story. They claim to have discovered Jesus as a living, challenging, healing presence. Stories abound of changed lives, of physical and emotional healing. New churches have sprung up, full of eager and excited people, often young people. Addicts are cured. Dysfunctional families are reunited. Real help is given to the sick, the poor, the prisoners. Failing schools are turned around. New energy is found for creative social and cultural projects.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  But if that is so, then forgiveness must mean that exile is now over. “Comfort, O comfort my people,” sang one of the greatest prophets. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from YHWH’s hand double for all her sins” (Isa. 40:1–2). And, as the prophecy that follows makes clear, this word of forgiveness is part of the overall message that Israel’s God is in fact king. He will be known as king through his victory over the tyrannical pagan kingdom of Babylon and his bringing his people back home to their land. This was to be the new Exodus: tyrant, rescue, vocation, God’s presence, inheritance. Just as physical healing is the up-close-and-personal version of what it looks like when God takes charge, to fix and mend the whole world, so individual forgiveness is the up-close-and-personal version of what it looks like when God does what he promised and restores his exiled people. As we saw, most Jews of Jesus’s day saw the Babylonian exile as only the start of a much longer period of history in which God’s people remained unredeemed, unrescued, and unforgiven. When Jesus was announcing forgiveness, both on the one-to-one personal scale and more widely, this was the story people would have had in their heads. And this was the story we must assume Jesus intended them to have in their heads. The First Announcement This is how we should understand both the big announcements and the intimate words of consolation. The most formal of the announcements comes, in Luke’s gospel (4:16–30), at the start of Jesus’s public career. Jesus goes back to his hometown of Nazareth and on the sabbath day goes to the synagogue— a place of worship, but also the communal “gathering place” (that’s what the word means), the place where people come together to discuss, to think things through, to study the law and to reflect on what it means. Jesus stands up to read from the prophet Isaiah and chooses another of the great passages about the coming new age, the release from slavery, the new Exodus, and restoration after the exile, which formed the hope that sustained so much Jewish life of his day. This is the passage often referred to as Jesus’s “Nazareth Manifesto”: He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. On the sabbath, as was his regular practice, he went into the synagogue and stood up to read. They gave him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  And when the explanation came—significantly, in the passage where Jesus is sending back a difficult answer to his imprisoned cousin John—it picks up a strand in the ancient Jewish expectation that had, all along, gone with the dream of the final battle, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the return of Israel’s God to Zion. But it hadn’t been featured in the programs of the other would-be royal or kingdom-of-God movements—presumably because those at the head of them were not gifted with healing, while those in that world who did have such gifts (we have records of some such) did not see that as setting them on the track of a kingdom-of-God movement. Jesus, however, makes the connection. When he tells John’s messengers that the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, and so forth, he is quoting directly from Isaiah’s vision of a “return from exile” that would also be nothing short of a new creation: Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. (Isa. 35:5–6) Interestingly, similar language also shows up in a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, showing that other Jews of roughly the same period were reading the Isaiah passage as a prediction of what the Messiah was to do: “For the heavens and the earth shall listen to his Messiah . . . for he will honor the devout on the throne of his everlasting kingdom, setting the prisoners free, opening the eyes of the blind, raising up those who are brought low . . . and the Lord shall do wonderful deeds which have not been done, as he said. For he shall heal those who are badly wounded, and raise up the dead, and send good news to the afflicted.” (4Q521, col. 2; my translation) And then Jesus adds, as a warning, that if people want to understand what’s going on they will have to do some thinking and be prepared for a dangerous political stance. “And God bless you if you’re not upset by what I’m doing.” In other words, they shouldn’t look at his work and imagine that he must be a charlatan, out for his own ends, in league with the devil, or off on some fantasy trip that has nothing to do with Israel’s aspirations, the ancient promises of God, or the hope of the world at large. They shouldn’t look at all this and imagine it has nothing to do with God becoming king—with God taking over, calling the petty old tyrant up the road to account.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  How can you go on believing, from generation to generation, that one day God will come and take charge? Re-Living the Exodus Answer: you tell the story, you sing the songs, and you keep celebrating God’s victory, even though it keeps on not happening. As we have seen, the story—the Story above all stories for the Jewish people—was the story of the Exodus, the time when God heard the cries of his people in their slavery in Egypt and came to rescue them, bringing them through the Red Sea at Passover-time, leading them through the desert and home to their promised land. Since Jesus himself seems to have deliberately chosen the Exodus story, the Passover story, as the setting for the carefully staged climax to his own public career, it’s important that we think for a moment about the seven great features of this story, which all first-century Jews would have known in their bones. All this—we are still learning to take off our modern Western spectacles and put on first-century Jewish ones!—is essential if we are to understand what Jesus thought he was doing. If we don’t get this straight, we shall simply squash Jesus into the little boxes of our own imaginations rather than seeing him as he was. Here are the seven themes of the Exodus: • Wicked tyrant • Chosen leader • Victory of God • Rescue by sacrifice • New vocation and way of life • Presence of God • Promised/inherited land First, the Exodus story was all about a wicked tyrant—Pharaoh, the king of Egypt—who had enslaved God’s people. Pharaoh is, as it were, the most visible symptom of the problem the people were facing. Second, God chose a leader. Moses was called, along with his brother Aaron and sister Miriam, to tell the people that God was now at last coming to their rescue. Moses then, at God’s behest, led the people out of slavery to freedom. Third, God won a great victory over Pharaoh and his people. This took the form of divine judgment, beginning with a sequence of plagues and reaching its decisive climax when the Red Sea, which had parted to let the Israelites through, rushed back and drowned the Egyptian army. This divine victory was celebrated in a great song whose closing line gives us the direct link to what Jesus was saying: “ YHWH will reign forever and ever” (Exod. 15:18). This is what it means to say that Israel’s God has taken charge.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  So far as we know, this story was unique in the ancient world. Even the Romans had not thought of themselves in this way, with the sense of a great story now at last reaching its climax, until Augustus and his court poets used the idea in their propaganda. (This is interesting in itself. It’s clear from earlier Jewish texts that the Jews didn’t get the idea from Livy or Virgil. But it’s equally obvious that the Roman poets didn’t borrow it from the Jews either. Faced with these two parallel movements, we can see already why they crashed into each other, as you would expect in a perfect storm.) As far back as we can trace their ancient scriptures—what Christians call the Old Testament—the Jewish people and their ancestors had believed, or had been told by their prophets to believe, that their story was going somewhere, that it had a goal in mind. Despite many setbacks and disappointments, their God would make sure they reached the goal at last. After all, they were taught that their God was the one true God of all the world. He wasn’t simply one more god among many. It was therefore impossible that his will for the world would ultimately be thwarted. And, since the present state of affairs was clearly less than ideal, he would do whatever it took to sort things out. His people would, in the meantime, find themselves caught up in the story of how that would happen. Thus, whereas the Romans had what we might call a retrospective eschatology, in which people looked back from a “golden age” that had already arrived and saw the whole story of how they had arrived at that point, the Jews cherished and celebrated a prospective eschatology, looking forward from within a decidedly ungolden age and longing and praying fervently for the freedom, justice, and peace that, they were convinced, were theirs by right. God would do it! It was going to happen at last! The stories the Jews told (and when I say “told,” I mean not only told one another, read out aloud in their meetinghouses, studied privately, and turned into prayer, but also celebrated in national festivals, which involved most of the population and brought vast pilgrim crowds from all over the world) were not simply stories of small beginnings, sad times at present, and glorious days to come. They were more specific, more complex, dense with detail, and heavy with hope. Their theme came to its fullest flowering in the great story of the Exodus, when, roughly fifteen hundred years before the time of Jesus, Moses had led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, across the Red Sea (which miraculously parted to let them through), and through the desert to the promised land. The Jews lived on the hope that it would happen again. The tyrants would do their worst, and God would deliver the people.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  This sense of looking forward was heightened by the larger sabbatical scheme in which the seventh year was a year of agricultural rest and the seven-times-seventh year the year of jubilee, the time for slaves to be freed, for debts to be cancelled, for life to get back on track. As we have already seen in this book, the theme of jubilee ties in closely and naturally with the great all-encompassing theme of the Exodus. The jubilee was, as it were, the once-in-a-lifetime “exodus” that everyone could experience. We don’t know whether or to what extent the jubilee as set forth in Leviticus 25 was actually practiced in Jesus’s day. But it remained in the scriptures as a reminder that God’s time was being marked out week by week, seven years by seven years, half century by half century. Matthew hints at all this in his own way, right at the start of his gospel, by arranging Jesus’s genealogy in three groups of fourteen generations (that is, six sevens), so that Jesus appears at the start of the sabbath-of-sabbaths moment. And, as we have seen, people in Jesus’s day were pondering, calculating, and longing for the greatest superjubilee of them all, the “seventy weeks” (that is, seventy times seven years) of Daniel 9:24. The great sabbath was coming! Soon they would be free! Now, and only now, do we see what Jesus meant when he said the time is fulfilled. That was part of his announcement right at the start of his public career (Mark 1:15). Only this, I believe, will enable us to understand his extraordinary behavior immediately afterwards. He seems to have gone out of his way to flout the normal sabbath regulations. Most people in the modern church have imagined that this was because the sabbath had become “legalistic,” a kind of observance designed to boost one’s sense of moral achievement, and that Jesus had come to sweep all that away in a burst of libertarian, antilegalistic enthusiasm. That, though commonplace, is a trivial misunderstanding. It is too “modern” by half. Rather, the sabbath was the regular signpost pointing forward to God’s promised future, and Jesus was announcing that the future to which the signpost had been pointing had now arrived in the present. In his own career. He was doing the “God’s-in-charge” things. He was explaining what he was doing by talking about what God was doing. The time was fulfilled, and God’s kingdom was arriving.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  Let me also present my case clearly as a Native Christian: while I understand that the concept of messiahship for both communities is not the same, I believe Jesus is the fulfillment of both the Hebrew Covenant and the Native Covenant. I honor both sacred stories and I believe that they continue in the narrative of Christ. In this way, what I embrace as the “new” covenant of Jesus does not erase either the experience of Israel or Native America, but weaves through these living traditions to confirm them for generations to come. Jesus emerges from the context of the Hebrew Covenant. Jesus also emerges from the Native Covenant. In doing so, I believe Jesus both corrects and confirms the original covenants God made with God’s people. Israel and Native America are not alone in having a sacred memory of the encounter with God. There are many “old testaments.” Accepting this broad definition for testaments, the record of any people’s experience of God, gives us a much richer understanding of catholicity. As Christians, it means our faith is not catholic because it requires universal adherence to one culture’s traditions. Instead, Native American theology suggests that we are catholic because we have a universal respect for the many testaments of world communities. Conversion to a particular tradition, therefore, is a denial of catholicity. It turns universal gospel into parochial piety. People of every culture and continent have experienced God, sought to understand God, and recorded a memory of God in their sacred stories. Some embrace a monotheistic vision of God, some see a plural reflection of God in creation. As a Christian, I do not denigrate any of these memories since I believe God was present and active in relating to all of humanity throughout history. All I do is make my own profession of faith: that at one point in our shared history God entered into time and space to reveal the purpose of all of our “old testaments.” Within only a short time after the voice spoke to me I was teaching this approach on the seminary level. I was actively introducing this Native American theology into the life of the church. I was able to do so only because good people, both Native and non-Native, both Traditional and Christian, who felt empowered and challenged by the notion of the Native Covenant invited me to teach. I moved from the Dakotas to Minneapolis/St. Paul. I started teaching at a Lutheran seminary and I watched what the voice had created start to take root in Christian theology and grow. To understand the vision quest and the Messiah to whom it leads, we must first understand the voice of God and the many ways it seeks to communicate with us. God speaks to us all. God seeks us all. Not because we are heroic or unique, but because we are weak and ordinary. We are, all of us, parts of the ancient covenants God has made with our ancestors.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I share this piece as a reminder (to both the reader and myself) that inherent in the noble search for new directions in BFT is the diffident, exciting, uncertainty of that new-new—that tricky, impolitic thing that positions itself precariously on the firm foundation of black feminist intellectual labor and a destabilizing, clearly crunk willingness to strip the house down [to] it[s] structural beams, if necessary. Like all successful renovation projects, it is driven by love, newly identified needs and a tacit preparedness to do violence to whatever came before it. This is not a comfortable or easily habitable space. Like my co-contributors to this volume, I pacify myself with hope that the ends will justify the means. All the women are white; all the men are black … but are all the blacks are African-American? The enquiry that catalyzed my search for a black feminist politics of pleasure came, unwittingly, from a graduate student at Stanford. I’d been invited by the university to have a public conversation on hip-hop and feminism with Dr. H. Samy Alim commemorating the tenth anniversary of my book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down. After 10 years of writing/discussing/living/breathing hip-hop and feminism, I could hardly imagine a question I hadn’t already answered in some form or another, but suddenly there it was: virginal, terrific and tongue-tying: “Could you speak a bit about the ways your Caribbean-ness plays in shaping your theorization of hip-hop feminism, specifically your engagement with the erotic?” Like most terrific questions, it was one I had yet to think about—and certainly not in the context of my feminism. I knew intuitively that there was no “neat answer” to where the Caribbean-ness in my hip-hop feminist self began and ended. Any attempt would require less of an answer than a story—and one that does not easily recognize the geo-political convenience of borders, processes of citizenship or nationalities. Like the transnational imaginary that the hyphen implies, the alleged margins—Caribbean, American, hip-hop, feminist—continuously shift and do so with problematic fluidity. Rather than delineating the specifics of its stops and starts, I’d come to understand both my identity and my feminism as a ting that bends and leans, intersects and divides, stops h’an drops h’an bubbles and wines. I also knew that my commitment to hold the erotic front and center in hip-hop feminism was a deliberate one. But the question being asked required a specific accounting for elements routinely ignored in BFT—namely pleasure, the erotic and US black multi-ethnicity. It required mining what Caribbean rhetorician Professor Kevin A. Browne describes as the space between the Caribbean and the American—and when it comes to BFT there was no politics of articulation around that.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  That is why it is not arrogant to believe in the second coming. There are arrogant ways of thinking and speaking about it, of course, as though when Jesus returns we, his people, will be able to put our noses in the air and look down smugly on everyone else. A moment’s reflection will show how silly this would be. Think back over the last twenty-four hours or the last seven days. Suppose Jesus had been there, physically present beside you, throughout that time. Would you have been happy to have him see what you did? Hear what you said? Know what you thought? When he comes, as the New Testament insists, he will bring to light all the hidden things that are now in darkness and expose the thoughts and intentions of the heart. He comes, of course, as the one who died for us; there is no doubting his love. But his love is the love that wants the very best for us and from us, not the sentimental kind that doesn’t want to make a fuss and so refuses to confront the thing that’s actually wrong. He loves in the way a doctor or a surgeon loves, wanting the best, working for life, dealing powerfully and drastically with the cancer or the blocked artery. The only proper Christian way to think of the second coming is, as I said, with humility and patience. But also with faith, hope, and love. “And our eyes at last shall see him, through his own redeeming love.” That is our hope, our longing, our delight. Even so, we pray with the second to last verse of the Bible, “Come, Lord Jesus.” Jesus Today Jesus yesterday, Jesus tomorrow. What about Jesus today? We omitted (deliberately) one of the other vital events that, in the New Testament, complete the story of Jesus. The resurrection is all about Jesus as the prototype of the new creation. The ascension is all about Jesus as the ruler of the new creation as it breaks into the world of the old. The second coming is all about Jesus as the coming Lord and judge who will transform the entire creation. And, in between resurrection and ascension, on the one hand, and the second coming, on the other, Jesus is the one who sends the Holy Spirit, his own Spirit, into the lives of his followers, so that he himself is powerfully present with them and in them, guiding them, directing them, and above all enabling them to bear witness to him as the world’s true Lord and work to make that sovereign rule a reality. This—the coming of the Spirit, the story of Pentecost as in Acts 2—is a vital part of the story of Jesus. Again, I and others have written a good deal about this. All we can do here is to summarize the main points in the light of what we’ve said about Jesus so far.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  9:24). Nobody quite knew when you should start the counting and hence when the great moment would finally arrive, but many people during the centuries on either side of Jesus of Nazareth were eager to find out. Different theories were advanced. Each generation hoped that the divine arithmetic would work in their favor. The problem with the story of Judah the Hammer only gradually dawned on people in the next generation. It was that, despite the early excitement and the continuing enthusiasm of some, it became apparent that the prophecies had still not been fulfilled. Utopia had not arrived. The Hasmoneans, Judah’s family, were themselves far from perfect rulers. Pressure groups arose to try to force the issue. The most famous came to be known as the Pharisees, who, as we’ve seen, were a populist movement deeply loyal to the ancient traditions as they understood them, fervently expecting their God to act once more. But the point is that the great story had been etched into their minds and into their scripture-reading habits: the wicked rulers, the people’s suffering, the hero, the battle, the victory, the rule over surrounding nations, the establishment of God’s dwelling. This was what people were praying for, hoping for, waiting for when Jesus of Nazareth came on the scene. Simon the Star Before we come back to Jesus himself, we need to jump forward, past his day, to another movement that tells us a good deal about how people were telling the story and trying to live it out. We turn from Judah the Hammer to Simon the Star. Or rather, Simon Son-of-the-Star. The year is AD 132, almost exactly a hundred years after the public career of Jesus of Nazareth and hence almost exactly three hundred years after Judah the Hammer. CHRONOLOGY OF SIMON SON-OF-THE-STAR AD 115–17Unsuccessful Jewish revolts against Rome in Egypt, Cyrene, Cyprus 117Hadrian becomes emperor 132Hadrian institutes anti-Jewish legislation, builds temple of Jupiter in Jerusalem 133Start of bar-Kochba rebellion; Rabbi Akiba hails bar-Kochba as the Messiah 133Coins with “year 1” 134Coins with “year 2” 135Coins with “year 3” 135Rome crushes rebellion; bar-Kochba and Akiba killed The story starts off the same. Another wicked king; another time of intense suffering; and another new hero emerges, winning (it seems) some initial victories. Another three-year campaign. The aim was the same: defeat the pagan enemy, reestablish the Temple, liberate the Judaeans, and establish a new king as master in his own realm, and perhaps more widely. The wicked king this time was the Roman emperor Hadrian. People in my country still know his name, because he built a wall across the north of England, more than two thousand miles from Jerusalem, to keep his empire safe from the wild tribes of Scotland. Like many other successful emperors, Hadrian was brilliant and ruthless. Two of his predecessors, Vespasian and Titus, had defeated the Jewish rebels in a famous and bitter war, culminating in the burning of the Temple in AD 70.