When someone asked Augustine what God was doing before creation he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions.
Chapter 1: A very odd sort of king
My computer will, I am reliably informed, do a large number of complex tasks. I only use it, however, for three things: writing, email, and occasional internet searches. If my computer were a person, it would feel frsutrated and grossly unvervalued, its full potential nowhere near realized. We are, I believe, in that position today when we read the stories of Jesus in the gospels. We in the churches use these stories for various obvious things: little moralizing sermons on how to behave in the coming week, aids to prayer and meditation, extra padding for a theological picture largely constructed from elsewhere. The gospels, like my computrer, have ever right to feel frustrated. Their full potential remains unrealized.
Worse, Jesus himself has every right to feel frustrated.
You see, the reason Jesus wasn't the sort of king people had wanted in his own day is - to anticipate our conclusion - that he was the true king, but they had become used to the ordinary, shabby, second-rate sort. They were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but he was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within a quite new framework. They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music.
Perhaps, indeed, it has been the same in our own day. Perhaps even 'his own people' - this time not the Jewish people of the first century, but the would be Christian people of the Western world - have not been ready to recognize Jesus himsefl. We want a 'religious' leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus' contemporaries did.
Like many thousands of young Jews in that period, he died by crucifixion
Chapter 2: Three puzzles
Throughout his short p[ublic cvarer Jesus spoke and acted as if he was in charge.
Jesus did thjings people didnt think you werte allowed to do, and he explained them by saying he had the right to do them.
Chapter 3: The perfect Storm
If you want to know why the 'new atheists' like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Atkins sell so many books the answer is that they're offering the modernist version of the good old fashioned theological term 'assurance'. they are assuring anxious ex-believers that the nightmare of small-minded and stultifying 'religion' is gone for ever.
We have dreams of being free, grown-up humans, and we don;t want to bend the knee to anyone, especially that fussy old God or that strange character Jesus! Actually, the sceptics, who take grim comfort from the apparent decline of many mainstream churches, don't often focus on Jesus himself. They have far softer targets to aim at (badly behaved clergy, for a start). But if they do mention Jesus, they tend to dismiss him with a wave of the hand. Just a first-century fanatic whose wild-eyed followers turned him into a god. Or, damning him with faint praise, just a mild-mannered first century moralist, one of many great teachers down through the ages. Those are the internal dynamics of the westerly wind, the howling gale of contemporary scepticism.
If we don't make the effort to do this reconstruction, we will, without a shadow of a doubt, assume that what Jesus did and said makes the sense it might have made in some other context - perhaps our own. That has happened again and again. I believe that this kind of easy-going anachronism is almost as corrosive to genuine Christian faith as scepticism itself.
Chapter 4: The making of a first-century storm
The Roman storm...
'Caesar' was simply his family name, but Julius made it a royal title from that day on (the words 'kaiser' and 'Tsar' are variation on 'Caesar')
If you'd asked anybody in the Roman Empire, from Germany to Egypt, from Spain to Syria, who the 'son of god' might be, the obvious answer, the politically correct answer, would have been 'Octavian'.
Meanwhile, Augustus's court poets and historians did a great job with their propaganda. They told the thousand-year story of Rome as a long and winding narrative that had reached its great climax at last; the golden age had begun with the birth of the new child through whom peace and prosperity would spread to the whole world.
Why was Rome then particularly interested in the Middle East?
For reasons surprisingly similar to those of today's Western powers. Rome needed the Middle East for urgent supplies of necessary raw materials. Today it's oil; then it was grain.
The Jewish storm...
This is the story within which many Jews of Jesus' day believed, passionately, that they themselves were living. They were not just telling it as an ancient memory. They were, themselves, actors within its ongoing drama.
Progress: This is the so-called Whig view of history writ large: history is the story of movement of progress freedom, and we must go forward and make the next one happen, and the next one after that. Despite all the tyrannies of the last century, people today still believe this myth of progress, as evidenced by the numerous proposals you read or hear that begin, 'Now that we live in this day and age...' or 'Now that we live in the twenty-first century...' Those phrases signal the presence of some kind of 'progressive' agenda. People who think like that are actors in a play whose script they already know.
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, peace that they they were convinced were theirs by right. God would do it! It was going to happen at last!
Understand the Exodus and you understand a good deal about Judaism. And about Jesus. Jesus chose Passover, the great national festival celebration the Exodus, to make his crucial move.
Every time the Jewish people told the story (and they told it often) that was what they were thinking and hoping and praying for. It was this hope, this story that generated the second great storm wind, the powerful high-pressure system, into whose path Jesus of Nazareth decided to walk. And eventually, to ride a donkey.
Commenting on living in Jerusalem for 3 months in 1989 and seeing different banners/poster with religious slogans on:
It was because of what Hitler did that God would now do a new thing. And it was because of what Hitler did that this Jewish community was praying and waiting and longing for - the Messiah. 'Hitler and the Messiah!' 'Hitler and the Messiah!' The great wicked ruler and the coming great deliverer! That was the message I saw then.
Chapter 5: The hurricane...
God remained free and sovereign. Again and again in the past, the way Israel had told its own story was different from the way God was planning things. The people, no doubt, hoped that the way they were telling their own story would fit comfortably enough with the way God was seeing things, but again and again the prophets had to say that this was not so. Often God's way of telling the story cut clean against the national narrative. And Jesus believed that this was happening again in his own time.The wind of God:
Here then is the third element in the first-century perfect storm: the strange, unpredictable and highly dangerous divine element. The wind of God.
But the prophets, up to and including John the Baptist, had always warned that God's coming in power and in person would be entirely on his own terms, with his own purpose - and that his own people would be as much under judgement as anyone, if their aspirations didn't coincide with God's.
Jesus not only believed that this was another of those moments... he believed, it seems... that as he came to Jerusalem he was embodying, incarnating, the return of Israel's God to his people in power and glory.
Jesus said 'this is God's chosen moment, and you were looking the other way'
Your dreams of national liberation, leading you into head-on confrontation with Rome, were not God's dreams. God called Israel, so that through Israel he might redeem the world; but Israel itself needs redeeming as well. Hence God comes to Israel riding on a donkey, in fulfilment of Zechariah's prophecy of the coming peaceful kingdom, announcing judgement on the system and the city...
Whatever else the ancient Israelites believed about their God, he was not a tame God.
Jerusalem, as ever, stood at the point where the tectonic plates of the world crashed together. It was, it seemed, the appropriate place of prayer for a world in pain.
As Bob Dylan once said, '"I am the Lord thy God" is a fine saying as long as it's the right person who's saying it.'
"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... 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.
We notice a constant triple theme in these songs (psalms). First, Israel's God is celebrated as king especially in Jerusalem, in his home in the Temple. Second, when Israel's God is enthroned as 'king', the nations are brought under his rule. Israel rejoices, but all the other nations will be included as well... Third, when God is king, the result is proper justice, real equity, the removal of all corruption and oppression.
The coming anointed one:
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
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.
This claim can never be, in our sense or indeed the ancient sense, merely 'religious'. It involves everything, from power and politics to culture and family.
But here is the puzzle - the ultimate puzzle of Jesus. This puzzle boils down to two questions. First, why would anyone say this of Jesus, who had not done the things people expected a victorious king to do? (and why would anyone, three minutes, three days, or three hundred years after that moment, ever dream of taking it seriously?). Second, what on earth might it mean today to speak of Jesus being 'king' or being 'in charge', in view of the fact that so many things in the world give no hint of such a thing?
Jesus strides into the middle of this perfect storm, announcing that the kingdom of God is at hand:
He commands his hearers to give up their other dreams and to trust his instead. This, at its simplest, is what Jesus was all about.
Chapter 6: God's in charge now
With almost every bodily problem came some sort of social problem: the farm worker who couldn't plough any more, the 'unclean' woman who couldn't share food with her family. So wherever Jesus went, he healed people.
There is every reason to suppose that this is exactly what most people saw going on as Jesus of Nazareth launched his strange, short public career.
Those who loved and worshipped Jesus wouldn't have invented tales of his being involved in dark arts. People don't accuse you of being in league with the devil unless you are doing pretty remarkable things... the explanation Jesus gave for what going on was that something new was happening - something powerful, dramatic, different. If all he'd been doing was encouraging people to feel better about themselves and not actually transforming their real lives, there would have been nothing to explain.
It may be time to be sceptical about scepticism itself.
...for the last two hundred years that's been the mood in Western society too. By all means, people think, let Jesus be a soul doctor, making people feel better inside. Let him be a rescuer, snatching people away from this world to 'heaven'. But don't let him tell us about a God who actually does things in the world. We might have to take that God seriously, just when we're discovering how to run the world our own way. Scepticism is no more 'neutral' or 'objective' than faith. It has thrived in the post-enlightenment world, which didn't want God to be king.
To the voices that trumpet their support for a 'supernatural' God doing 'miracles' through his divine 'son', I would just say, for the moment, 'be careful with your worldview. You're in danger of reaffirming the very split-level cosmos that Jesus came to reunite.
Heralds of the king
Jesus was going about sorting out the near-at-hand stuff. But he was talking, the whole time, about God being in charge on a larger scale as well. The close-up actions pointed to that greater reality. They were signs that it was starting to come true.What went wrong?
The same thing is true under a great empire. When Caesar's herald comes into town and declares 'we have a new emperor,' it isn't an invitation to debate the principle of imperial rule. It isn't the offer of a new feeling inside. It's a new fact, and you'd better readjust your life around it.
If we are to understand Jesus, we have to learn to see the world as his contemporaries saw it.
How can you go on believing, from generation to generation, that one day God will come and take charge?
Answer: you tell the story, you sing the songs, and you keep celebrating God's victory, even though it keeps on not happening.
The festival Jesus chose to demonstrate his kingship and to act (by riding in on a donkey) was 'dense with detail and heavy with hope.'
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.
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
The gospel isn't a new idea you might like to think about, but a new fact that you'd better get used to.
The proclamation of a new emperor, then, carried weight. It wasn't a take-it-or-leave-it affair. It meant that Tiberius was now in charge -and that his local agents, with his backing, had to be obeyed. Or else.
Jesus went around saying that God was in charge now. Imagine what it would be like, in Britain or the United States today, if, without an election or any other official mechanism for changing the government, someone were to to on national radio and television and announce that there was no a new prime minister or president. 'From today onwards,' says the announcer, 'we have a new ruler!' That's not only exciting talk. It's fighting talk. It's treason! It's sedition!
When a regime is already in power and is simply transferring that power to the next person in line, you just announce that it's happening. But if you make that announcement while someone else appears to be in charge, you are saying, in effect, 'The campaign starts here.'
...Jesus was concerned not just with outward structures, but with realities that would involve the entire person, the entire community. No point putting the world right if the people are still broken.
Matthew lets the list build up (of sick people being healed) until we almost take it for granted: yes, here's a person who's sick; Jesus will cure her.
He will be known as king through his victory over the tyrannical pagan kingdom of Babylon and his bringing of his people back home to their land. This was to be the new Exodus: tyrant, rescue, vocation, God's presence, inheritance. Just as physical healing is the up-close-and-personal version of what it looks like when God takes charge, to fix and mend the whole world, so individual forgiveness is the up-close-and-personal version of what it looks like when God does what he promised and restores his exiled people.
The people who will benefit will be the outsiders, the wrong people, the foreigners.
Forgiveness was at the heart of his message. This was a striking departure from the otherwise universal practice of Jewish martyrs, for whom it was a point of honour to call down heaven's curses upon their torturers and executioners.
John and Herod
John the Baptist publicly denounced this arrangement (Herod marrying his niece who was also his half-brother's wife). I don't think he was simply concerned with Antipas's immoral behaviour, though that was flagrant enough. I think the point was, more tellingly, that anyone who behaved in that way could not possibly, not ever, not in a million years, be regarded as the true 'king of the Jews'. John was expecting a true 'king of the Jews'; Antipas had just demonstrated his utter unsuitability for the position.
Jesus was well aware that what he was doing didn't fit with what people were expecting. But he believed that he was indeed launching God's kingdom-campaign. He was the on in whose presence, work and teaching Israel;s God was indeed becoming king.
He chooses twelve of his closest followers and seems to set them apart as special associates. For anyone with eyes to see, this says clearly that he is reconstituting God's people, Israel, around himself.
This is a campaign. It's a rebel; movement, a risky movement, a would-be royal movement under the nose of the present would-be 'king of the Jews', Herod Antipas himself.
