[Jesus] believed that Israel was at the cross-roads, that she must choose between two conceptions of her national destiny, and that the time for choice was terrifyingly short. This explains why, in his instructions to his disciples, he speaks of ‘towns where they receive you’ and ‘towns where they do not receive you’. He seems to have expected not individual but mass response. ‘It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the judgment than for that town.’ The disciples were not evangelistic preachers, sent out to save individual souls for some unearthly paradise. They were couriers proclaiming a national emergency and conducting a referendum on a question of national survival. {GB Caird}
People will contest whether ‘this’ saying or ‘that’ event actually took place or took place as the evangelists said it did. The explanatory power of any reconstruction of Jesus’ life, message, and aims comes down to whether or not it presents a realistic and persuasive narrative about Jesus. That means a narrative that illuminates our available sources, where the Jesus presented makes sense within his Jewish context, and yet is also a believable precursor to some aspects of the life and formation of the early church. Any ‘Jesus’ who is radically unlike the Jews of Galilee, or disconnected from what his earliest followers believed about him, is highly unlikely to be the genuine Jesus who taught in synagogues in Galilee, healed blind men in Judea, was crucified just outside Jerusalem, and spawned a movement that came to be known as ‘the Nazarenes’.
In what follows we cannot canvass every event in Jesus’ life. Nor can we explore the intentionality behind every saying. Instead, we will try to imagine what it would have been like to be on the road with Jesus. What did Jesus say and do? How does this show us what Jesus was trying to achieve and what he thought his mission was really about? It will soon become clear that Jesus saw himself as announcing and enacting God’s rescue plan for Israel. At the heart of his message was the claim that the new exodus, foretold by the prophets, was coming true. He warned Israel that its day of decision had arrived: ‘salvation’ was to be found not in military revolution against Rome, nor in political quietism in collaboration with Rome, but by the return of YHWH to Zion, a return that Jesus himself embodied. God—the true God, the creator, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—was coming back at last, coming to be king. And this was happening in and through Jesus’ own work. [page 189]
PRECURSORS AND PROPHETS: FROM JOHN THE BAPTIST TO JESUS OF NAZARETH
The first-century Jewish world, with all its pluriformity, had certain dynamics running through it, not least an undercurrent of potential or actual revolution. (We sketched this in an earlier chapter and restate it here as a necessary part of understanding Jesus.) This was not confined to the lowest social classes, but enjoyed the support of at least some Pharisees and, eventually, even some aristocrats. Before Jesus came onto the scene, Palestine had known a number of revolutionary movements that resulted in uprisings in 4 BC and AD 6 and were mercilessly crushed. Concurrently, several prophetic movements were spawned as well, where key figures announced that God was about to do something radical and redemptive for his covenant people. [page 190]
John the Baptist came on to the scene some time in the late 20s and quickly became a figure of widespread popularity and political notoriety. He was significant enough that Josephus takes note of him as he does other prophetic figures. We find also that followers of the Baptist continued to revere him after his death and were found as far away as Ephesus. John announced imminent judgment on the nation of Israel, and urged it to repent, warning the Jews that their status as YHWH’s covenant people would not be enough by itself to deliver them from the coming disaster. Concurrent with that, he also spoke of a ‘Stronger One’ who among other things would baptize with the ‘Holy Spirit and fire’. The sense of that phrase is not entirely clear, but it may be idiomatic for plunging people into the fiery breath of YHWH, so that the coming one would usher in a divine judgment, a judgment resulting either in a purging of the wicked or in a purification for the prepared. Either way, the Baptist was enacting a coded dramatization of the exodus, hinting strongly that the new exodus, the return from exile, was about to take place. [page 190]
John’s activities and teachings were clearly ‘political’ as well as ‘religious’. This is so not simply because it seems that Herod Antipas was a prime target of his invective (anyone behaving like Herod had lost all right to be ‘king of the Jews’, so John’s announcement of a ‘stronger’ one who was coming had clear negative implications for Herod and his supporters), but also because anyone collecting people in the Jordan wilderness was symbolically saying: this is the new exodus. Anybody offering water-baptism for the forgiveness of sins was saying: you can have, here and now, what you would normally get through the Temple cult. Anybody inviting those who wished to do so to pass through an initiatory rite of this kind was symbolically saying: here is the true Israel, coming through the waters like Israel through the Red Sea and the Jordan itself: the true Israel that will be vindicated by YHWH. By implication, those who did not join in had forfeited the right to be regarded as the covenant people. [page 191]
Across the breadth of our sources, Jesus seems to fit into various ‘types’ of Jewish holy men, including rabbi, sage, healer, exorcist, messiah, and philosopher. Yet if one category stands out, in terms of Jesus’ public persona, it is that he is consistently seen as a prophet—by his disciples, by those who witnessed his healings, by Pharisees, by pilgrims entering Jerusalem for Passover, by his Judean opponents, by the early church (which indeed, according to Ac. 3.22, saw Jesus as ‘the prophet’ of Dt. 18.18–19), and, importantly, by Jesus himself. While the evangelists hint at various typologies that are applied to Jesus, ranging from new Moses to new David, there is characteristic emphasis on Jesus as a prophetic figure. So although Jesus’ followers came to regard him as far more than a prophet (and Jesus himself said that about John the Baptist!), they never saw him as less.[page 193]
Like Ezekiel, Jesus predicted that the Temple would be abandoned by the Shekinah, left unprotected to its fate. Like Jeremiah, Jesus constantly ran the risk of being called a traitor to Israel’s national aspirations, while claiming all the time that he was nevertheless the true spokesman for the covenant God. This, as we shall see, lies behind a good part of the story of Jesus’ action in the Temple, and his subsequent ‘trial’: Jesus had predicted the destruction of the Temple, and was on trial not least as a false prophet.[page 194]
Above all, Jesus adopted the style of the prophet Elijah, and consciously seemed to imitate him, particularly in his mixture of healings, mighty deeds, and warnings of judgment. Jesus explained the nature of his ministry by using both Elijah and Elisha as models. It is highly unlikely that the early church, seeing Jesus as the Messiah, and indeed as the embodiment of Israel’s God, and hence regarding John, not Jesus, as Elijah, created this identification out of nothing. Thus, even if John himself seems to have thought that Jesus might be the new Elijah, Jesus seems to have returned the compliment.[pages 194-195]
Like Elijah or Jeremiah, Jesus was proclaiming a message from the covenant God, and living it out with symbolic actions. He was confronting the people with the folly of their ways, summoning them to a different way, and expecting to take the consequences of doing so. And, like the prophets before him, Jesus was not afraid to take on the establishment.[page 197]
Elijah had stood alone against the prophets of Baal and the wickedness of King Ahab. Jeremiah had announced the doom of the Temple and the nation in the face of royalty, priests, and official prophets. Though all had followers, all were politically lonely figures. All were accused of troubling the status quo. When people ‘saw’ Jesus as a prophet, this was the kind of model they had in mind.[page 197]
THE CAMPAIGN BEGINS: JESUS AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD
The advocates of the Fourth Philosophy, Josephus tells us, were ‘zealous’ in their attempts to get rid of Rome because they believed that there should be ‘no King but God’. All of this, of course, was claiming the fulfilment of an important theme in Israel’s scriptures: that the God who was always king in theory would show himself to be king indeed by the mighty acts of delivering his people. This would be the type of kingdom envisaged in Daniel 2 and 7, a never-ending dominion ruled by the living God.[page 197-198]
Thus, ‘kingdom of God’, historically and theologically considered, was a slogan whose basic meaning was the claim that Israel’s God was the world’s true Lord, and that Caesar, or indeed Herod, was not. The one God would rule Israel in a whole new way, returning in power and glory to rescue his people, rebuke the wicked, and set up a new rule of justice and peace. ‘Kingdom of God’ meant that Torah would be fulfilled at last, that the Temple would be rebuilt and the Land cleansed. Israel’s God would rule in the way he always intended, through properly appointed persons and means.[page 198]
But however the slogan ‘kingdom of God’ was interpreted in detail, it clearly implied a new order, fulfilling the prophecies of the Psalms, of Isaiah 40—55, and of Daniel, in which Israel would be vindicated, and then ruled over, by its God—and, by implication, one in which the rest of the world would somehow itself be ruled, whether for blessing or judgment, through Israel.[page 198]
The Jews of Jesus’ day, as is well known, had been living under foreign rule for several centuries. The worst thing about that was not the high taxation, the alien laws, the brutality of oppression, and so on, awful though that often was. The worst thing was that the foreigners were pagans. If the people of Israel were truly God’s people, why were the pagans ruling over them? If Israel was called to be God’s true humanity, surely these foreign nations were like the animals over which Adam and Eve were to rule.[page 198]
Jesus was not staking out virgin territory. He was tapping into a long-cherished hope for a new exodus, a new Temple, a reconstitution of the twelve tribes, a renewal of the covenant, a national forgiveness of sins, the release from captivity, an epoch of justice and peace, and an end to foreign rule. In other words, God was now unveiling his age-old plan, bringing his sovereignty to bear on Israel and the world as he had always intended, bringing justice and mercy to all. And he was doing so, apparently, through Jesus. Jesus was declaring that the clock was standing at ten seconds to midnight, that D-Day had arrived, that Israel’s God was at last becoming king.[page 199]
For example, in the ‘Nazareth Manifesto’ we find something like a kind of political declaration about what Jesus and this kingdom stood for and the constellation of hopes that it activated:
He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’ [page 199]
In Jesus’ words, the message of forgiveness and jubilee wasn’t meant to give everyone a sense of assurance that all would be well because they were, after all, the chosen people. Instead, he was warning them that they might be wrong. John the Baptist had already announced that physical Abrahamic descent was no guarantee of avoiding the coming judgment . . . According to Jesus, in God’s new reordering of power, insiders became outsiders and outsiders became insiders, invited guests were locked outside and bystanders were jostled into the wedding banquet, the first would be last and the last would be first. Israel’s God wasn’t simply coming to endorse the people’s national ambitions, to ratify the status quo, or to give sanction to their prejudices.[page 201-202]
It was one thing to say that the kingdom was beginning, but quite another to prove it. Jesus did not engage in empty sloganeering or drop vague platitudes about God’s reign breaking in. To the contrary, he brought about what he talked about. The kingdom’s arrival was evidenced by Jesus’ exorcisms, performed in the spirit’s power. These showed that Jesus was plundering the Satan’s kingdom; the healing of sick people signaled that a matrix of prophetic expectations was at last being made good.[page 202]
The contrast with the normal Temple procedure was striking: instead of the priest, or the high priest, declaring that Israel’s sins were forgiven, for instance on the Day of Atonement, Jesus spoke as if he had the God-given right to do so. Many sneered at the people Jesus was forgiving, thinking that the boundaries of God’s favour stopped with themselves and their colleagues. Jesus pushed back, and insisted that the boundaries were now being drawn in a whole new way.[page 202]
This brings us of course to a key tenet of Jesus’ message: the place of national Israel in God’s kingdom. First, Jesus believed, on the basis of the whole narrative of Israel’s scriptures, that the creator God had purposed from the beginning to address and deal with the problems within his creation through Israel. Israel was not just to be an ‘example’ of a nation under God; Israel was to be the ‘kingdom of priests’, the Servant charged with being the light of the world, the means through which the world would be saved. Second, Jesus believed, as did many though not all of his contemporaries, that this vocation would be accomplished through Israel’s history reaching a great moment of climax, in which Israel itself would be saved from its enemies, and through which the creator God, the covenant God, would at last bring his love and justice, his mercy and truth, to bear upon the whole world, bringing renewal and healing to all creation. In technical language, what we’re talking about here is election and eschatology: God’s choice of Israel to be the means of saving the world; God’s bringing of Israel’s history to its moment of climax, through which justice and mercy would embrace not only Israel but also the whole world.[page 202-203]
By choosing twelve disciples, heralding the signs of restoration like healings and preaching good news to the poor, Jesus was in effect saying that the restoration of Israel had now begun around him and his twelve followers. They were the vanguard for the renewed Israel. That is why Jesus chose twelve, to reign over a renewed nation.[page 203-204]
If Israel’s people would not be Israel-for-the-sake-of-the-world, trusting instead in their own power to defeat Rome, then Jesus and his followers would be; and the rest of Israel would face the consequences of its obstinacy. The coming of God’s kingdom meant that a transformed Israel would transform the world.[page 204]
The parables were centred on God, God’s people, and God’s word. They set forth the pressing challenge: would Israel respond appropriately to the message and the messenger?[page 204]
Through his actions, Jesus gained the reputation for being ‘a glutton and a drunkard and a friend of tax-collectors and sinners’. How could this Jesus fellow, a clever rabbi, a mighty healer, and even a prophet by all accounts, stoop to the level of keeping company with folk who were morally wretched and ceremonially impure? Wasn’t Jesus concerned about his reputation or with his own personal purity, which Israel’s worship demanded? Ought not a prophet to be rebuking and admonishing people like these? Jesus’ answer was that it wasn’t the healthy who needed a physician, but the sick. God had always been in the business of welcoming prodigal children home.[page 205-206]
He was modelling and articulating a new praxis, a new way of being Israel. He was challenging his contemporaries to a new way of covenantal life, a righteousness better than that of the scribes, a way of forgiveness and prayer, a way of jubilee, which his audience could practice in their own villages, right where they were. The key thing was that the inbreaking kingdom Jesus was announcing created a new world, a new context, and he was challenging his hearers to become the new people that this new context demanded, the citizens of this new world.[page 206]
The work of the kingdom is in fact summed up pretty well in the beatitudes. Blessed are the poor, the mourners, the meek, those hungering for justice, the merciful, the pure-hearted, peacemakers, and the persecuted. These people are not only blessed, but more than that, even in their vulnerability and weakness, they are the ones precisely through whom Jesus intends blessings to flow to others. These sayings are about the type of people through whom Jesus intends to transform the world. When God wants to change the world, he doesn’t launch missiles. Instead, he sends in the meek, the mourners, and the merciful. When God wants to put things to right, he doesn’t scramble combat jets; he calls people to love and do justice. Through those kinds of people the blessings of God’s reign begin to appear in the world.[page 207]
That was what the renewed Israel of the new age was supposed to look like. Not the elitist micro-piety of Pharisaic leaders who claimed that their tradition represented the true measure of righteousness; nor the fanatical violence of zealous Judeans who wanted to purge Palestine of gentiles; nor the compromised Jewishness of the Herodians who dressed up Hellenistic values in Jewish clothes; nor the members of the equally compromised aristocracy who ran the Temple for their own profit. The ‘sermon’ was, and still is, a manifesto for those who glimpse the truth of Jesus’ kingdom-message and find themselves called to order their lives accordingly.[page 208]
JESUS VERSES THE TEMPLE
A climactic and dramatic prophetic action in Jesus’ ministry was his ‘cleansing’ of the Temple. Most contemporary writing about Jesus rightly focuses on the Temple, what Jesus did there and what happened as a result. The Temple in this period was of course the heart and centre of Judaism, the vital symbol around which everything else circled. It was supposed to be where YHWH himself dwelt, or at least had dwelt and would do so again. It was the place of sacrifice, not only the place where sins were forgiven but also the place where the union and fellowship between Israel and its God was endlessly and tirelessly consummated.[PAGE 208]
The last great would-be messiah of the period, Bar-Kochba, had coins minted (this was itself an act of rebellion) on which the Temple façade was pictured. His own intentions were clear: he was going to rebuild the Temple and establish himself as king. Temple and messiahship went hand in hand.[page 208-209]
The Qumranites were strongly opposed to the present ruling elite—that, indeed, was the reason why they existed as a separate group in the first place—and hence to the present Temple, the power base of their rivals. They looked for a time when a new Temple would be built, presumably with their own group running it. The Pharisees had already begun to articulate the view that the blessings one normally got by going to the Temple could be had instead by the study and practice of Torah: ‘If two sit together and study Torah, the Divine Presence rests between them.’40 This early rabbinic saying meant that one could have the Temple-privilege of being in the presence of God anywhere in the world. This theology, designed of course not least for Jews in the Diaspora where regular Temple attendance was out of the question, came into its own after AD 70, and arguably helped the Pharisees’ successors, the rabbis, to survive and regroup after that great catastrophe. Thus, though the Pharisees were not themselves opposed to the existing Temple, in their thinking it was already relativized. This was another reason why they scrutinized and criticized Jesus, who was also offering an alternative to the Temple.[page 209]
Many of the disadvantaged within Judaism saw the Temple as standing for everything that was oppressing them: the rich, corrupt aristocracy and its systematic injustices. A sign of this attitude was the tell-tale actions of the rebels during the war; when they took over the Temple, they did the ancient equivalent of destroying the central computer in a bank: they burned all the records of debt.[page 209]
His attitude to the Temple was not ‘this institution needs reforming’, nor ‘the wrong people are running this place’, nor yet ‘piety can function elsewhere too’. His deepest belief regarding the Temple was eschatological: the time had come for God to judge the entire institution. It had come to symbolize the injustice that characterized the society on the inside and on the outside. It appeared to have rejected the vocation to be the light of the world.[page 210]
Jesus acted and spoke during his Galilean ministry as if he was in some sense called to do and be what the Temple was and did. His offer of forgiveness, with no prior condition of Temple-worship or sacrifice, was the equivalent of someone in our world offering, as a private individual, to issue someone else a passport or a driver’s license. He was undercutting the official system, and claiming by implication to be establishing a new one in its place. In addition, as we have seen, a good deal of Jesus’ warning about impending judgment was focused on the Temple, and the string of public discussions that followed his action, both in John’s gospel and in the synoptics, strongly indicates that this was the subtext of the entire episode. Jesus’ Temple-action, in other words, was indeed an acted parable of judgment.[page 210-211]
When he came to Jerusalem, in fact, the city was not (so to speak) big enough for the two of them together.[page 211]
All excerpts above taken from: The New Testament in Its World, An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians, N. T. Wright (Author) , Michael F. Bird (Author), ISBN:9780310499305, Release: November 19, 2019
The Carpenter's Nail 