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.

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• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Like the “servant” in Isaiah, the phrase “son of man”—or, more properly, “one like a son of man”—has been endlessly discussed and debated in itself as well as in relation to the sayings attributed to Jesus. I have taken what seems to me the commonsense view of the chapter as a whole: that the vision and interpretations of chapter 7 are telling substantially the same story as chapters 1–6, namely, the story of pagan empire reaching its height and Israel’s God then stepping in to call “time” on the whole sequence, to bring arrogant paganism to judgment, and to establish instead his own kingdom in and through his faithful people. This is the story, in other words, of how God becomes king, overcoming the kingdoms of the world and establishing, through his faithful people, his own sovereign rule over the whole world instead. Exactly as in Isaiah, we should expect (rather than be surprised by) a certain fluidity between the people of Israel and a single representative. I have taken too what seems to me the commonsense view of the fresh use of Daniel 7 in the gospel accounts of Jesus. The parallel between the sequence of events in Daniel 7 and the very similar sequence in Daniel 2, where it is the “stone” that becomes the new, God-given kingdom, enables us to link this reading of Daniel quite closely with Jesus of Nazareth, who not only spoke repeatedly of the “son of man,” but also used the figure of the “stone” to describe his own role, his own fate, and his own coming kingdom at the end of a not dissimilar story of several stages of wickedness ending in a moment of judgment. When the “wicked tenants” kill the “son” and throw him out of the vineyard, the owner will come and take vengeance on them; and this will fulfill the text from Psalm 118:22, which declares that “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone” (Mark 12:10–11). The rejected and vindicated stone, the rejected and vindicated “son,” and the suffering and vindicated “son of man”—it’s all of a piece, all resonating within the same overall scriptural narrative.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  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. Understand the Exodus, and you understand a good deal about Judaism. And about Jesus. Jesus chose Passover, the great national festival celebrating the Exodus, to make his crucial move. We will look in more detail at the Exodus story a little later. It was celebrated annually at Passover and in other festivals too. But the Exodus, in turn, looked back farther, to the divine call to the original patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Their story in turn looked back farther still, to the mysterious but powerful story of creation itself, when Israel’s God had brought his beautiful, ordered, and living creation out of the primal waters of chaos. The God who brought order out of chaos and who brought his enslaved people out of Egypt would do it again. Creation and covenant: God made the world, God called Israel to be his people, and God would remake his world in order to rescue his people Israel.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  As I stressed in Surprised by Hope, 12 when we think about God’s kingdom in the present and the future, we must always be clear that the ultimate triumph is God’s work and God’s alone. Billy reacts rightly against any suggestion that we, in the present, are “building God’s kingdom.” Only God does that. We do not have God’s kingdom in our pockets, to dispense at will. But what Billy doesn’t realize is that we may be called, nonetheless, to build for God’s kingdom. What we do in the present, as Paul insists, is not wasted (1 Cor. 15:58). It will all be part of the eventual structure, even though at the moment we have no idea how. So what is Jesus up to in the present time? What does it mean to think of him as king, already, now? What will it look like, particularly, not only to think of him in this way, but actually to work for his kingdom? God’s Rule—Through Us As usual, when a discussion reaches deadlock, it’s probably because one or more key factors have been left out of consideration. And in this case we don’t have to look far to see what’s missing. The crucial factor in Jesus’s kingdom project picks up the crucial factor in God’s creation project. God intended to rule the world through human beings. Jesus picks up this principle, rescues it, and transforms it. Rescues it? Yes, because humans, of course, have messed the world up. Whatever you think of the much misunderstood doctrine of original sin (that’s a topic for another time), it would be extremely foolish to suppose that humans, left to themselves, have not done amazingly horrible things as well as amazingly wonderful ones. Humans make bombs as well as music. They build torture chambers as well as hospitals and schools. They create deserts as well as gardens. And yet the vocation sketched in Genesis 1 remains: humans are to be God’s image-bearers, that is, they are to reflect his sovereign rule into the world. Humans are the vital ingredient in God’s kingdom project.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  So what was its “meaning”? For a start, this was an emphatically royal action, a claim to be Israel’s true king. But Zechariah’s prophecy also makes it clear that this king will come as a man of peace. As we have just seen, Jesus redefined the great coming battle, so that it would no longer be a military battle of “us” against “them,” of the forces of light fighting with literal weapons against the forces of darkness. Nevertheless, the arrival of this peaceable king will mean the establishment of his worldwide rule; as in the Psalms and Isaiah, Israel’s true king will be the king of the whole world, “from sea to sea.” The result will be the establishment of God’s covenant with his people, a covenant sealed in blood and resulting (think once more of Egypt, of the Exodus, of Passover) in prisoners being set free. And, as often in Zechariah and in other prophecies of the time, if this great event were to happen, it could only mean that Israel’s God was at last coming back. His glorious Presence was once again to appear. All this, I suggest, Jesus’s followers and the watching people of Jerusalem would have taken in right away, with no particular mental effort. Their minds were already in tune with the various elements and with the controlling drama within which they made sense. And if that’s what it all meant for them, it can hardly have meant any less for Jesus himself. So when Jesus came into the Temple and performed another dramatic action, driving out the money changers and the dealers selling animals for sacrifice, this too would have been seen within a web of prophetic allusion and symbolism. Jeremiah, after all, had famously smashed a pot at the same place (Jer. 19), symbolizing the coming judgment. But what was Jesus intending to communicate? What did he mean by his action? Like many others, I have become convinced that Jesus’s dramatic action was a way of declaring that the Temple was under God’s judgment and would, before too long, be destroyed forever. That is certainly how the gospel writers saw it. Matthew, Mark, and Luke follow the incident with a string of discussions that all turn on the question of whether Jesus has the right to do this kind of thing, what he means by it, what sort of a revolution he has in mind, and so on, all of which lead readers into the long discourse in which Jesus solemnly declares that the Temple is to be destroyed within a generation (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21). John, who describes Jesus’s action in the Temple much earlier in his gospel, has Jesus saying something cryptic about the Temple being destroyed and then rebuilt in three days—a saying that then turns up in the other gospels, in garbled form, when Jesus is on trial before the chief priests (John 2:19; Matt. 26:61; 27:40).

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  That’s because we are Platonists at heart, supposing that if there is a “heaven,” it must be nonphysical, beyond the reach of space, time, and matter. But suppose Plato was wrong? Suppose, in other words, that the ancient Israelite scriptures were right, and that heaven and earth were after all the twin halves of God’s created reality, designed eventually to come together. Suppose that what has kept them apart all this time is that the human creatures who were put in charge of the “earthly” part of this creation had rebelled, and that their rebellion had generated a sufficient head of steam for “earth” to declare, as it were, independence, the desire to rule itself. And suppose that this self-rule had become extremely powerful, keeping the two spheres separate and effectively tyrannizing “earth” with the regular weapon of the tyrant, that is, death itself. Suppose, then, that the creator God had finally come in person to break the tyrant’s weapon and inaugurate the new world in which the original purpose of creation would be fulfilled after all. That, it seems, is what the early Christians believed was going on when they met Jesus, very much alive again and appearing to be equally at home in “heaven,” where they couldn’t see him, and on “earth,” where they could. Think back to what we said earlier about space, time, and matter. What we are witnessing in the resurrection stories—which, obviously, are quite unlike any other stories before or since and therefore invite the skepticism they have received as much in the ancient as in the modern world—is the birth of new creation. The power that has tyrannized the old creation has been broken, defeated, overthrown. God’s kingdom is now launched, and launched in power and glory, on earth as in heaven. This is what Jesus said would happen within the lifetime of his hearers. A new power is let loose in the world, the power to remake what was broken, to heal what was diseased, to restore what was lost. The kingdom that Jesus had inaugurated strangely, mysteriously, and partially during his public career through his healings, feastings, and teachings was now unveiled in a totally new dimension. If we think of Jesus during his lifetime in the way we have throughout this book and then ask about the meaning of Easter, the answer is obvious. This is the real beginning of the kingdom. Jesus’s risen person— body, mind, heart, and soul—is the prototype of the new creation. We have already seen him as the Temple in person, as the jubilee in person. Now we see him as the new creation in person. The thing about the new creation is that it simply overflows with the power of love. Read the stories, especially the longer ones in Luke 24 and John 20–21. Jesus meets his followers. They are sorrowful, ashamed, and anxious. He calls them by name.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  To us Westerners, that sounds a bit gloomy, as though it’s a perpetual act of contrition, dredging up our “sins” in order to hear someone declare them forgiven (until next time!). But it’s far, far bigger than that. The old creation lives by pride and retribution: I stand up for myself, and if someone gets in my way I try to get even. We’ve been there, done that, and got the scars to prove it. Now there is a completely different way to live, a way of love and reconciliation and healing and hope. It’s a way nobody’s ever tried before, a way that is as unthinkable to most human beings and societies as—well, as resurrection itself. Precisely. That’s the point. Welcome to Jesus’s new world. Here, then, is the message of Easter, or at least the beginning of that message. The resurrection of Jesus doesn’t mean, “It’s all right. We’re going to heaven now.” No, the life of heaven has been born on this earth. It doesn’t mean, “So there is a life after death.” Well, there is, but Easter says much, much more than that. It speaks of a life that is neither ghostly nor unreal, but solid and definite and practical. The Easter stories come at the end of the four gospels, but they are not about an “end.” They are about a beginning. The beginning of God’s new world. The beginning of the kingdom. God is now in charge, on earth as in heaven. And God’s “being-in-charge” is focused on Jesus himself being king and Lord. The title on the cross was true after all. The resurrection proves it. Ascension and Enthronement If Easter is about Jesus as the prototype of the new creation, his ascension is about his enthronement as the one who is now in charge. Easter tells us that Jesus is himself the first part of new creation; his ascension tells us that he is now running it. Once more, you can only understand the ascension if you push out of your mind the idea of “heaven” you began with and try to imagine a more biblical picture instead. For most people today, as we’ve said already, “heaven” is a location of a completely different sort from the world in which we live. It is timeless, nonphysical, immaterial. (People sometimes say “spiritual” at this point, but that’s a misleading description of the way the early Christians thought and spoke. For them, “spiritual” had to do with the work of God’s Spirit; and God’s Spirit was at work most definitely within, not apart from, the world of space, time, and matter.) So when Luke tells the story of Jesus going up to heaven in a cloud, forty days after his resurrection, and when Paul writes of Jesus being “exalted” to heaven (e.g., Phil. 2:9–11), the one thing we should not think of is that, after his death, Jesus is now “going to heaven” in the normal modern sense of that phrase.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  27:40), echoing the same voice in the desert, “If you really are God’s son, tell these stones to become bread!” (Matt. 4:3). Somehow it appears that Jesus’s battle with the satan, which was the battle for God’s kingdom to be established on earth as in heaven, reached its climax in his death. This is a strange, dark, and powerful theme to which we shall return. For the moment the point is clear: Jesus is indeed fighting what he takes to be the battle against the real enemies of the people of God, but it is not the battle his followers or the wider group of onlookers was expecting him to fight. Jesus has redefined the royal task around his own vision of where the real problem lies. And he has thereby redefined his own vocation, which he takes to be the true vocation of Israel’s king: to fight and win the key battle, the battle that will set his people free and establish God’s sovereign and saving rule, through his own suffering and death. Cleansing the Temple The same is true when we consider the other great “royal” aspiration: to cleanse or rebuild the Temple. We regularly refer to the striking action Jesus performed in the Temple as his “cleansing of the Temple.” We don’t, perhaps, always realize that any such action was staking an implicitly royal claim: it was kings, real or aspiring, who had authority over the Temple. It was Israel’s kings or would-be kings who planned it (David), built it (Solomon), cleansed it (Hezekiah, Josiah, Judah the Hammer), rebuilt it (Zerubbabel, Herod the Great), and hoped to defend it (Simon bar-Giora) or to rebuild it once more (Simon the Star). In each case, of course, building the Temple was associated with the larger story of victory over enemies, liberation for the people, and so on. It was the Exodus narrative, in other words, the Passover narrative, all over again; and we shouldn’t forget that a key element in the Passover narrative was always the presence of Israel’s God himself with his people, in the pillar of cloud and fire and then, apparently more permanently, in the tabernacle. Passover implies Presence. Jesus, as we have seen, chose the Passover season as the moment to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, deliberately awakening in the onlookers’ minds the powerful prophecy of Zechariah 9:9–11: Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth . As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The book that picks this up most explicitly is Daniel. It tells the story of the Jewish heroes, Daniel and his friends, resisting pagan kings and being vindicated by God. As we have seen, this is the book that, in strange, lurid imagery, speaks of the power of pagan kingdoms reaching their horrible height, of God’s own people suffering at their hands, and then of God doing a new thing, setting up his own sovereign rule once and for all. In terms of the image we used earlier on, it’s the story of the gale, the high-pressure system, and the hurricane: the build-up of pagan power, the hope of Israel, and the victory of God. It’s the story of the Exodus turned in a new direction. It’s the story of David, only now in a new dimension. It’s the story of exile and restoration, but now with a new destination. Some people believed it had all come true in and through Judah and his brothers. In particular, the book of Daniel sets up its own cryptic puzzle. How long, asks the prophet, will the exile last? How long will we have to wait before God performs the final great rescue operation? Will it be seventy years (as others had foretold)? No, comes the answer, it will be seventy times seven—that is, 490 years (Dan. 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

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Besides that, there is a great chasm standing between us. People who want to cross over from here to you can’t do so, nor can anyone get across from the far side to us.’ “‘Please, then, Father,’ he said, ‘send him to my father’s house. I’ve got five brothers. Let him tell them about it, so that they don’t come into this torture-chamber.’ “‘They’ve got Moses and the prophets,’ replied Abraham. ‘Let them listen to them.’ “‘No, Father Abraham,’ he replied, ‘but if someone went to them from the dead, they would repent!’ “‘If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets,’ came the reply, ‘neither would they be convinced, even if someone rose from the dead.’” The message, then, remains very much about what ought to be happening here and now, on “earth,” not just in “heaven. ” Many of Jesus’s stories pick up Israel’s stories from long before, stories about God and Israel, the Exodus, the creation itself, the trials and tribulations of God and God’s people, and—not least—the horrible exile in Babylon and God’s repeated promises to restore his people’s fortunes at last. This, in particular, is the reason why some of Jesus’s key parables were about seeds being sown. The idea of a farmer sowing a seed—to be sure, one of the most natural and common sights in an agricultural economy—had been used centuries before by the prophets to promise that Israel’s God, having plucked up the plant that was Israel, would come back and sow once more the seeds that would bear fruit, fruit that this time would last (see, e.g., Isa. 1:9; 6:13; 37:31–2; Jer. 31:27; Ezra 9:2). Here is Matthew’s parable of the sower (parallels are in Mark 4:1–20 and Luke 8:4–15): That very day Jesus went out of the house and sat down beside the sea. Large crowds gathered around him, so he got into a boat and sat down. The whole crowd was standing on the shore. He had much to say to them, and he said it all in parables. “Listen!” he said. “Once there was a sower who went out to sow. As he sowed, some seed fell beside the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some seed fell on rocky soil, where it didn’t have much earth. It sprang up at once because it didn’t have depth of soil. But when the sun was high it got scorched, and it withered because it didn’t have any root. Other seed fell in among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it. And other seed fell into good soil, and produced a crop, some a hundred times over, some sixty, and some thirty times over. If you’ve got ears, then listen!” His disciples came to him. “Why are you speaking to them in parables?” they asked. “You’ve been given the gift of knowing the secrets of the kingdom of heaven,” he replied, “but they haven’t been given it.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  As we have seen, this is the book that, in strange, lurid imagery, speaks of the power of pagan kingdoms reaching their horrible height, of God’s own people suffering at their hands, and then of God doing a new thing, setting up his own sovereign rule once and for all. In terms of the image we used earlier on, it’s the story of the gale, the high-pressure system, and the hurricane: the build-up of pagan power, the hope of Israel, and the victory of God. It’s the story of the Exodus turned in a new direction. It’s the story of David, only now in a new dimension. It’s the story of exile and restoration, but now with a new destination. Some people believed it had all come true in and through Judah and his brothers. In particular, the book of Daniel sets up its own cryptic puzzle. How long, asks the prophet, will the exile last? How long will we have to wait before God performs the final great rescue operation? Will it be seventy years (as others had foretold)? No, comes the answer, it will be seventy times seven—that is, 490 years (Dan. 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.

• 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.

• 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.