Throughout The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, N.T. Wright offers his historical reconstruction of the Jewish messiah. He locates Jesus precisely as "a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequences if they did not, doing all this in symbolic actions, and indicating in symbolic actions, and in cryptic and coded sayings, that he believed he was Israel's messiah, the one through whom the true God would accomplish his decisive purpose." (50)
What is the kingdom that Jesus is announcing? "The coming kingdom of God was not... a matter of abstract ideas or timeless truths. It was not about a new sort of religion, a new spiritual experience, a new moral code (or new strength to observe existing ones). It was not a doctrine or a soteriology (a systematic scheme for individual salvation or a general statement about how one might go to heaven after death). It was not a new sociological analysis, critique, or agenda. It was about Israel's history reaching its climax, about Israel's history moving toward its decisive moment." (35) As a prophet of the kingdom, "Jesus was telling his contemporaries that the kingdom was indeed breaking into history, but that it did not look like what they had expected. The time of restoration was at hand, and people of all sorts were summoned to share and enjoy it, but Israel was warned that its present ways of advancing the kingdom were counterproductive and would result in national disaster. Jesus was therefore summoning his hearers to be Israel in a new way, to take up their proper roles in God's unfolding drama, and he assured them that if they followed him in this way, they would be vindicated when the great day came." (35-36) Jesus stood against those religious teachers who believed that God's kingdom would come only if Israel purged herself of the untouchables and the impure; he stood against those religious elite who believed that God's kingdom would come about through compromise with the Roman overlords; and he stood against those who believed that God's kingdom would come when the righteous took up Sword & Shield and evicted the Roman overlords from their God-given territory. Jesus spent most of his career away from the big cities of Sepphoris and Jerusalem, and his hearers were mostly composed of the peasant class who were more prone towards the violent theologies of the revolutionaries; much of his teaching is directed at those who believed, like the zealots in the days prior to the Jewish Revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem, that God's kingdom had to be seized by force of arms. Opposition faced him from all directions, and throughout the gospel we see a building crescendo of conflicts--with both the Romans, and the religious leaders, and demonic powers themselves--that would culminate with the crucifixion.
In proclaiming the kingdom, Jesus was offering an invitation; he invited his hearers "to become kingdom people themselves, to seize the chance and to become the real returned-from-exile people of God." (37) Jesus' invitation served as the beginning stage of his movement to gather support. "We should not be surprised that Jesus, in making his kingdom announcement, kept on the move, going from village to village, and, so far as we can tell, staying away from Sephhoris and Tiberias, the two largest cities in Galilee. He was not so much like a wandering preacher giving sermons or a wandering philosopher offering maxims as like a radical politician gathering support for a new and highly risky movement." (36) This movement, Wright argues, took place in four stages: the invitation, the welcome, the challenge, and the summons.
The Invitation. Jesus' invitation is seen throughout the synoptic tradition: "Repent and believe in the Good News." Wright observes, "In our world, telling people to repent and believe is likely to be heard as a summons to give up personal sins and accept a body of dogma or a scheme of religious salvation... As we see in Josephus, [however,] the phrase means, basically, 'Give up your agendas and trust me for mine.'" (38) The invitation was a political challenge; to repent and believe may mean more than that, but it certainly doesn't mean less. But what agendas was Jesus telling his hearers to abandon? "He was telling his hearers... to give up their agendas and to trust him for his way of being Israel, his way of bringing the kingdom, his kingdom agenda... [He] was urging them [to] abandon their crazy dreams of nationalist revolution." (37) Jesus stood against the fervor of nationalist revolution because "he saw it as, paradoxically, a way of being deeply disloyal to Israel's God: specifically, to Israel's vocation to be the light of the world. Within that, Jesus challenged his contemporaries to abandon the attitudes and practices toward one another which went with that xenophobic nationalism, especially the oppression of the poor by the rich." (38) Jesus offered a new way of being Israel, the true way of being Israel: "the way of turning the other cheek and going the second mile, the way of losing your life to gain it, the way of a new community in which debts and sins were to be forgiven." (38) Israel's vocation from the Get-Go was to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and the city on a hill that couldn't be hidden. These phrases have become common currency in Christian thought since Jesus used them (note: the Sermon on the Mount); but Jesus' use of them wasn't original. He was reminding his hearers of their vocation, challenging their current mode-of-living as disloyal to the God-given vocation of Israel, and encouraging his hearers to see their vocation anew. They had to get beyond their pride in God's election and their fierce nationalism, or they would face the wrath of God. (more on that in a moment)
The Welcome. Jesus' welcome is seen most vividly in how he ate with "the worst of the worst." John Dominic Crossan makes Table Fellowship integral to his understanding of Jesus, and in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, he shows just how subversive and shocking Jesus' "open commensality" really was. Marcus Borg, discussing the purity system within Israel at the time, shows in a variety of his works how Table Fellowship wasn't a casual act but something endowed with significance; and Wright might add that this significance is eschatological in nature. Jesus didn't incur the anger and opposition of the Pharisees because he associated with disreputable characters you shouldn't be seen with; rather, "[he] was welcoming sinners into fellowship with himself precisely as part of his kingdom announcement; he was declaring that this welcome constituted them as members of the kingdom. In Judaism, repentance and forgiveness were focused, ultimately, on the temple itself, where the sacrificial system existed to provide the way of restitution for those who, through their sin, had stained, fractured, or jeopardized their membership within Israel. Jesus was offering forgiveness to all and sundry, other there on the street, without requiring that they go through the normal channels. That was his real offense." (38-39, italics mine)
The Challenge. While the church has taken Jesus’ teachings as a new sort of moral code, Jesus’ proposed modus vivideni was revolutionary in nature. “Jesus was challenging his contemporaries to live as the new covenant people, the returned-from-exile people, the people whose hearts were renewed by the word and work of the living God… His critique of, and warning to, his contemporaries, and his challenge to a different way of being Israel, were based on his firm belief that he was charged by Israel’s God with inaugurating the kingdom.” (39) Wright continues, “Not all of Jesus’ hearers could literally follow him on his travels. But all could practice his way of life, a way of forgiveness and prayer, a way of jubilee, a way which renounced xenophobia toward those outside Israel and oppression of those inside.”
The Summons. Applying the logic of challenge to the Sermon on the Mount, we see that category of teachings not as a compendium of moral ethics but as “the summons to Israel to be Israel indeed at the critical junction of her history, the moment when, in the kingdom announcement of Jesus, the living God is at work to reconstitute his people and so fulfill his long-cherished intentions for them and for the whole world.”
Heeding the invitation, experiencing the welcome, embracing the challenge, and obeying the summons—in short, following Jesus—wasn’t a casual act. “To take up the cross and follow Jesus meant embracing Jesus’ utterly risky vocation: to be the light of the world in a way the revolutionaries had never dreamed of. It was a call to follow Jesus into political danger and likely death, in the faith that by this means Israel’s God would bring Israel through its present tribulations and out into the new day that would dawn.” Jesus’ challenge wasn’t just a challenge on a moral plain (as if that weren’t difficult enough!) but on a political plane, as well. His challenge ran against the beliefs and motivations of the zealous revolutionaries who in a few decades would revolt against Rome and be utterly destroyed, and thus his challenge came with a warning.
The Warning. On page 40, Wright says, “Jesus announced that God’s judgment would fall first and foremost on Israel itself, because it had failed to respond to the summons to be the light of the world, living instead by oppression and injustice within its own society and by violence, actual or intended, toward those outside.” The judgment on Israel would at the same time be a vindication of Jesus and his message. “The vindication of God’s true people would consist, therefore, in God’s endorsement, not of the nation, but of those who followed the true way; these consisted, basically, of [Jesus] and his followers, seen as the true representatives of Israel.” (40-41) While Jesus’ warnings about impending judgment have been interpreted as pointing to “the postmortem condemnation of unbelievers or of the eventual destruction of the space-time world”, his words on judgment, rooted in the first-century, address not an eschatological judgment but an historical one (and I use those terms loosely). “Jesus was warning his contemporaries that if they did not follow his way, the way of peace and forgiveness, the way of the cross, the way of being the light of the world, and if they persisted in their determination to fight a desperate holy war against Rome, then Rome would destroy them, city, temple, and all, and that this would be, not an unhappy accident showing that YHWH had simply forgotten to defend them, but the sign and the means of YHWH’s judgment against his rebellious people.” (emphasis mine) Throughout his ministry, Jesus “claimed that he was the one who was truly loyal to Israel’s God and his purposes, warning the others about the perils of disloyalty, challenging them to join him in the true way of being Israel at the vital turning point of history, and declaring that he, and his way, would be vindicated by God.” (43)
In this vein, Wright looks at Jesus’ epic opposition against the Pharisees. This opposition “came about not because he was an antinomian, or because he believed in justification by faith while they believed in justification by works, but because his kingdom agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off its frantic and paranoid self-defense, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace instead the vocation to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth.” (44-45) His criticism of Israel’s attitude towards outsiders was rivaled only by his criticism of Israel’s social injustices on the inside. The Judaism of Jesus’ day was marked by great disparity between the rich and the poor; some scholars, such as Marcus Borg, have speculated that the urban ruling elite—Jewish politicians, priests, and aristocracy—controlled most of Israel’s wealth. The priestly class, in particular, used their religious position to legitimize their treatment of the poor. Both Jesus’ criticism of Israel from within and from without came to a head in Jerusalem. Just as the people of Jeremiah’s day elevated the Temple to a lofty position while ignoring the corruption in their own society, so it was with the people of Jerusalem: as Jeremiah condemned the Temple to destruction, so Jesus did, too, in a series of parables and actions that culminated with his “cleansing of the Temple.” By disrupting the Temple’s function, he symbolically enacted the Temple’s destruction; by condemning it as a den of bandits, he was calling attention to the revolutionary fervor that was steadily-growing.
Jesus was likened to Jeremiah, and he was certainly a prophet. But was he more than that? Wright believes it to be so; he writes that Jesus “believed himself to be Israel’s messiah, the focal point of its long history, the one through whom Israel’s God would at last deal with its exile and sin and bring about its longed-for redemption.” (49) Wright notes that such a conviction wasn’t “a particularly odd thing for a first-century Jew with a strong sense of God’s presence and purpose, and a clear gift for charismatic leadership, to think. Others thought much the same, with local and personal variations.” What marks Jesus out from other would-be messiahs is the resurrection (but more on that anon). As messiah, Wright says, Jesus “believed himself called to take on the real enemy, of which Rome, as many of his contemporaries would have agreed, was but the symbol and pawn. And what was that real enemy? Evil itself, threatening God’s kingdom and people through Rome, but itself a suprapersonal, supranational power, sometimes capable of being referred to under the quasi-personal language of ‘the accuser’ (In Hebrew, ‘the satan.’)… Jesus saw himself engaged in a running battle with this enemy throughout his short public career and [he] saw these skirmishes pointing toward a greater showdown yet to come.” (48)
The Showdown. But how would this showdown come about? Jesus “denounced the use of military action, and he advocated the deeper revolution of loving one’s enemies, taking up one’s cross, losing life in order to gain it… [This subversive way of life was] an agenda and vocation to which he knew himself called, and one that he announced as the way of being God’s true Israel. It was his own fresh construal of the law and the prophets, the controversial way by which, he proposed, Israel’s God would make Israel at last what it had always been called to be, the light of the nations.” (96) The weapon he would choose is the weapon he had advocated, that of nonviolence. Particularly by letting evil exhaust itself on him, he would defeat it. Such a belief sounds whacky to us twenty-first century westerners, but it made perfect sense to a reforming Jew of Jesus’ day. “[The] best first-century context in which to understand Jesus’ own intention as he went to Jerusalem, as he agonized in Gethsemane, and as he faced accusers and governors, torturers and executioners, is the belief, found in many Jewish sources stretching back into the prophets and on into the Christian era, that when Israel’s redemption came about it would be born through a period of intense suffering.” (98) By enduring what’s been called the “messianic woes,” Jesus would fight the great battle. “He would take upon himself the ‘messianic woes’ on behalf of Israel. He would go through the darkest night and lead the way into the dawn of a new day. This was how he would fight the final battle against the real enemy. This is how he would build the true temple. This, in other words, was how he would win the victory that would establish him as Israel’s true messiah and transform the kingdom from its current present-and-future state into a fully present reality.” (98) Thus “he went to Jerusalem determined to announce his particular kingdom message in word and (particularly) in symbolic action, knowing what the inevitable reaction would be, and believing that this reaction would itself be the means of God’s will being done.” (99)
This doesn’t make much sense to us Westerners. Suffering was a part of life for first-century Jews in ways that it’s never been for us in our sociological and psychological isolation from suffering. Jesus’ thoughts on suffering and victory seem paradoxical, but they were intimately connected to Jesus’ understanding of Israel’s covenant God and Israel’s scriptures. “The visions of Zechariah, so dark and opaque to the twentieth century, seem to have been luminous to [Jesus], to have shaped his vocation and choice of action. Daniel’s vision of the vindication of ‘one like a son of man,’ the symbolic representative of Israel, seems to have provided him with inspiration and cryptic vocabulary. And the poems about the ‘servant’ in Isaiah 40-55 gave particular focus to his sense of call and direction. Others Jews roughly contemporary with him had used them as well… His messianic vocation climaxed in the call to suffer Israel’s death, Israel’s supreme moment of exile, on Israel’s behalf.” (97, emphasis mine) We see again that “[Jesus] seems to have believed that it was his vocation to take upon himself, actually and symbolically, the fate which he had announced for the nation as a whole… He would go ahead of the nation to take upon himself the judgment of which he had warned, the wrath of Rome against rebel subjects. That was what his royal vocation demanded.” (97-98)
Jesus' death wasn't peculiar: the chief priests and religious leaders connived with the Roman authorities and the Romans put him to death. Such had happened to numerous would-be messiahs and reform figures. What separated Jesus from the rest is that he came back. The bodily resurrection of Jesus is a justifiable historical event; but what does it mean? "[The] meaning of the resurrection must begin with the validation of Jesus as messiah, as Paul says in Romans 1.4. It means that Israel's God, the creator, has affirmed that Jesus really was, all along, his 'son.' It means, therefore, the acceptance and validation of his messianic achievement, supremely in his crucifixion: the resurrection declares that the cross was a victory, not a defeat." (125-126) Wright examines the relationship between Jesus' resurrection and new creation. "God's new world had been brought to birth. When Jesus emerged, transformed, from the tomb on Easter morning, the event was heavy with symbolic significance, to which the evangelists drew attention, without wishing to detract from the historical nature of what they were talking about. It was the first day of God's new week, the moment of sunrise after the long night, the time of new meetings, new meals, of reconciliation and new commissioning. It was the beginning of the new creation." God's new age has dawned, inaugurated by Jesus in his resurrection, and those who belong to him are called to a vocation of holiness; they are to embrace "the fully human life, reflecting the image of God, that is made possible by Jesus' victory on the cross and that is energized by the Spirit of the risen Jesus present within communities and persons.... [Get] rid of all the dehumanizing behavior that destroys God's good creation and the creatures made in his image, all anger and lust, greed, and pride. The resurrection thus opens the door to a new world; a new mode of life for the whole cosmos and for all who will dwell in it here and hereafter." (127)
The Summons. Applying the logic of challenge to the Sermon on the Mount, we see that category of teachings not as a compendium of moral ethics but as “the summons to Israel to be Israel indeed at the critical junction of her history, the moment when, in the kingdom announcement of Jesus, the living God is at work to reconstitute his people and so fulfill his long-cherished intentions for them and for the whole world.”
Heeding the invitation, experiencing the welcome, embracing the challenge, and obeying the summons—in short, following Jesus—wasn’t a casual act. “To take up the cross and follow Jesus meant embracing Jesus’ utterly risky vocation: to be the light of the world in a way the revolutionaries had never dreamed of. It was a call to follow Jesus into political danger and likely death, in the faith that by this means Israel’s God would bring Israel through its present tribulations and out into the new day that would dawn.” Jesus’ challenge wasn’t just a challenge on a moral plain (as if that weren’t difficult enough!) but on a political plane, as well. His challenge ran against the beliefs and motivations of the zealous revolutionaries who in a few decades would revolt against Rome and be utterly destroyed, and thus his challenge came with a warning.
The Warning. On page 40, Wright says, “Jesus announced that God’s judgment would fall first and foremost on Israel itself, because it had failed to respond to the summons to be the light of the world, living instead by oppression and injustice within its own society and by violence, actual or intended, toward those outside.” The judgment on Israel would at the same time be a vindication of Jesus and his message. “The vindication of God’s true people would consist, therefore, in God’s endorsement, not of the nation, but of those who followed the true way; these consisted, basically, of [Jesus] and his followers, seen as the true representatives of Israel.” (40-41) While Jesus’ warnings about impending judgment have been interpreted as pointing to “the postmortem condemnation of unbelievers or of the eventual destruction of the space-time world”, his words on judgment, rooted in the first-century, address not an eschatological judgment but an historical one (and I use those terms loosely). “Jesus was warning his contemporaries that if they did not follow his way, the way of peace and forgiveness, the way of the cross, the way of being the light of the world, and if they persisted in their determination to fight a desperate holy war against Rome, then Rome would destroy them, city, temple, and all, and that this would be, not an unhappy accident showing that YHWH had simply forgotten to defend them, but the sign and the means of YHWH’s judgment against his rebellious people.” (emphasis mine) Throughout his ministry, Jesus “claimed that he was the one who was truly loyal to Israel’s God and his purposes, warning the others about the perils of disloyalty, challenging them to join him in the true way of being Israel at the vital turning point of history, and declaring that he, and his way, would be vindicated by God.” (43)
In this vein, Wright looks at Jesus’ epic opposition against the Pharisees. This opposition “came about not because he was an antinomian, or because he believed in justification by faith while they believed in justification by works, but because his kingdom agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off its frantic and paranoid self-defense, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace instead the vocation to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth.” (44-45) His criticism of Israel’s attitude towards outsiders was rivaled only by his criticism of Israel’s social injustices on the inside. The Judaism of Jesus’ day was marked by great disparity between the rich and the poor; some scholars, such as Marcus Borg, have speculated that the urban ruling elite—Jewish politicians, priests, and aristocracy—controlled most of Israel’s wealth. The priestly class, in particular, used their religious position to legitimize their treatment of the poor. Both Jesus’ criticism of Israel from within and from without came to a head in Jerusalem. Just as the people of Jeremiah’s day elevated the Temple to a lofty position while ignoring the corruption in their own society, so it was with the people of Jerusalem: as Jeremiah condemned the Temple to destruction, so Jesus did, too, in a series of parables and actions that culminated with his “cleansing of the Temple.” By disrupting the Temple’s function, he symbolically enacted the Temple’s destruction; by condemning it as a den of bandits, he was calling attention to the revolutionary fervor that was steadily-growing.
Jesus was likened to Jeremiah, and he was certainly a prophet. But was he more than that? Wright believes it to be so; he writes that Jesus “believed himself to be Israel’s messiah, the focal point of its long history, the one through whom Israel’s God would at last deal with its exile and sin and bring about its longed-for redemption.” (49) Wright notes that such a conviction wasn’t “a particularly odd thing for a first-century Jew with a strong sense of God’s presence and purpose, and a clear gift for charismatic leadership, to think. Others thought much the same, with local and personal variations.” What marks Jesus out from other would-be messiahs is the resurrection (but more on that anon). As messiah, Wright says, Jesus “believed himself called to take on the real enemy, of which Rome, as many of his contemporaries would have agreed, was but the symbol and pawn. And what was that real enemy? Evil itself, threatening God’s kingdom and people through Rome, but itself a suprapersonal, supranational power, sometimes capable of being referred to under the quasi-personal language of ‘the accuser’ (In Hebrew, ‘the satan.’)… Jesus saw himself engaged in a running battle with this enemy throughout his short public career and [he] saw these skirmishes pointing toward a greater showdown yet to come.” (48)
The Showdown. But how would this showdown come about? Jesus “denounced the use of military action, and he advocated the deeper revolution of loving one’s enemies, taking up one’s cross, losing life in order to gain it… [This subversive way of life was] an agenda and vocation to which he knew himself called, and one that he announced as the way of being God’s true Israel. It was his own fresh construal of the law and the prophets, the controversial way by which, he proposed, Israel’s God would make Israel at last what it had always been called to be, the light of the nations.” (96) The weapon he would choose is the weapon he had advocated, that of nonviolence. Particularly by letting evil exhaust itself on him, he would defeat it. Such a belief sounds whacky to us twenty-first century westerners, but it made perfect sense to a reforming Jew of Jesus’ day. “[The] best first-century context in which to understand Jesus’ own intention as he went to Jerusalem, as he agonized in Gethsemane, and as he faced accusers and governors, torturers and executioners, is the belief, found in many Jewish sources stretching back into the prophets and on into the Christian era, that when Israel’s redemption came about it would be born through a period of intense suffering.” (98) By enduring what’s been called the “messianic woes,” Jesus would fight the great battle. “He would take upon himself the ‘messianic woes’ on behalf of Israel. He would go through the darkest night and lead the way into the dawn of a new day. This was how he would fight the final battle against the real enemy. This is how he would build the true temple. This, in other words, was how he would win the victory that would establish him as Israel’s true messiah and transform the kingdom from its current present-and-future state into a fully present reality.” (98) Thus “he went to Jerusalem determined to announce his particular kingdom message in word and (particularly) in symbolic action, knowing what the inevitable reaction would be, and believing that this reaction would itself be the means of God’s will being done.” (99)
This doesn’t make much sense to us Westerners. Suffering was a part of life for first-century Jews in ways that it’s never been for us in our sociological and psychological isolation from suffering. Jesus’ thoughts on suffering and victory seem paradoxical, but they were intimately connected to Jesus’ understanding of Israel’s covenant God and Israel’s scriptures. “The visions of Zechariah, so dark and opaque to the twentieth century, seem to have been luminous to [Jesus], to have shaped his vocation and choice of action. Daniel’s vision of the vindication of ‘one like a son of man,’ the symbolic representative of Israel, seems to have provided him with inspiration and cryptic vocabulary. And the poems about the ‘servant’ in Isaiah 40-55 gave particular focus to his sense of call and direction. Others Jews roughly contemporary with him had used them as well… His messianic vocation climaxed in the call to suffer Israel’s death, Israel’s supreme moment of exile, on Israel’s behalf.” (97, emphasis mine) We see again that “[Jesus] seems to have believed that it was his vocation to take upon himself, actually and symbolically, the fate which he had announced for the nation as a whole… He would go ahead of the nation to take upon himself the judgment of which he had warned, the wrath of Rome against rebel subjects. That was what his royal vocation demanded.” (97-98)
Jesus' death wasn't peculiar: the chief priests and religious leaders connived with the Roman authorities and the Romans put him to death. Such had happened to numerous would-be messiahs and reform figures. What separated Jesus from the rest is that he came back. The bodily resurrection of Jesus is a justifiable historical event; but what does it mean? "[The] meaning of the resurrection must begin with the validation of Jesus as messiah, as Paul says in Romans 1.4. It means that Israel's God, the creator, has affirmed that Jesus really was, all along, his 'son.' It means, therefore, the acceptance and validation of his messianic achievement, supremely in his crucifixion: the resurrection declares that the cross was a victory, not a defeat." (125-126) Wright examines the relationship between Jesus' resurrection and new creation. "God's new world had been brought to birth. When Jesus emerged, transformed, from the tomb on Easter morning, the event was heavy with symbolic significance, to which the evangelists drew attention, without wishing to detract from the historical nature of what they were talking about. It was the first day of God's new week, the moment of sunrise after the long night, the time of new meetings, new meals, of reconciliation and new commissioning. It was the beginning of the new creation." God's new age has dawned, inaugurated by Jesus in his resurrection, and those who belong to him are called to a vocation of holiness; they are to embrace "the fully human life, reflecting the image of God, that is made possible by Jesus' victory on the cross and that is energized by the Spirit of the risen Jesus present within communities and persons.... [Get] rid of all the dehumanizing behavior that destroys God's good creation and the creatures made in his image, all anger and lust, greed, and pride. The resurrection thus opens the door to a new world; a new mode of life for the whole cosmos and for all who will dwell in it here and hereafter." (127)
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