Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

by N.T. Wright

Jesus—the Jesus we might discover if we really looked!—is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we—than the church!—had ever imagined.

It is we, the churches, who have been the real reductionists. We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself.

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 quite a new framework.

He was the king, all right, but he had come to redefine kingship itself around his own work, his own mission, his own fate.

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’s contemporaries did.

The sources we have for his public career—the four gospels in the New Testament—are dense, complex, and multilayered. They are works of art (of a sort) in their own right. But it is quite impossible to explain their very existence, let alone their detailed content, unless Jesus was himself not only a figure of real, solid history, but also pretty much the sort of person they make him out to be.

But Jesus is also deeply mysterious. This isn’t just because, like any figure of ancient history, we don’t know as much about him as we might like. (In fact, we know more about him than we do about most other people from the ancient world; but even some who wrote about him at the time admitted that they were only scratching the surface.)

But when Jesus told a story about a younger son asking his father for his inheritance while the father was still alive, his hearers would have been shocked. They would have seen the son’s action as putting a curse on the father, saying, in effect, “I wish you were dead.” That gives the whole story a different flavor.

It’s not comfortable being out on an open boat when these two winds strike from their different directions. Believe me—it’s where I’ve lived for the last forty years. The winds are howling around you, you can hardly hear yourself think, and you suspect that neither side can hear too well either. It’s a dialogue of the deaf. If the western wind here stands for the rationalistic skepticism of the last two hundred years and the high-pressure system to the north stands for the “conservative” Christian reaction to that sneering modernist denial, what is the tropical hurricane? We’ll come to that presently. For the moment, let’s examine these first two storm systems a bit more closely.

The two violent winds of skepticism and conservatism have picked up extra energy from massive social, political, and cultural storms that have raged across the Western world over the last two or three hundred years and that seem, as we speak, to be coming to something of a climax.

we declare ourselves to be in favor of this package and against that one. And we make life uncomfortable for anyone who wants to sit loose, to see things differently.

If you want to know why the “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Atkins sell so many books, the answer is that they’re offering the modernist version of the good old-fashioned theological term “assurance.” They are assuring anxious ex-believers that the nightmare of small-minded and stultifying “religion” is gone forever.

There is nothing to lose and everything to gain by proper inquiry.

Out of these very disparate sources we have to reconstruct the setting in which what Jesus did and said made the sense it did, so much sense that some thought he was God’s Messiah and others thought he had to be killed at once. If we don’t make the effort to do this reconstruction, we will, without a shadow of 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 skepticism itself.

So if we are going to approach Jesus himself in a fresh way and ask the right questions instead of the wrong ones, we need to get our minds and imaginations into Jesus’s own day by examining another “perfect storm,” the one into which Jesus himself was walking.

As he rode into Jerusalem that fateful spring day, what did he think he was doing?

the questions his closest friends wanted to ask as they woke him up in the middle of an actual storm on the Sea of Galilee. It’s still a dangerous place today. There are signs in the parking lots on the western side of the sea warning that high winds can sweep giant waves right over parked vehicles. But Jesus wasn’t fazed.

a man who seemed to be asleep in the middle of it all, but who then stood up and told the wind and the waves to stop.

until thirty years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, Rome had been a republic. An intricate system of checks and balances ensured that nobody could hold absolute power, and those who did have power didn’t have it very long.

Again and again in the past, the way Israel had told its own story was different from the way God was planning things.

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.

This is God’s moment, declares Jesus, and you were looking the other way.

He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep. (Isa. 40:10–11)

His explanations only make sense if the thing they are explaining is sufficiently startling to raise questions.

In Jesus’s own day, there were plenty of people who didn’t want to believe his message, because it would have challenged their own power or influence. It would have upset their own agenda.

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. Skepticism is no more “neutral” or “objective” than faith.

the one God, whose only appropriate “image” is a living, breathing human being.

Families can be torn apart by a single incident or one person’s behavior that is never faced and so never forgiven.

This was the time for God to take charge, to fix and mend things, to make everything right.

to try to get through to them the message that what they have longed for is happening at last, but it doesn’t look as they thought it would! God is at last doing the great new thing he’s always promised for Israel—but the wrong people seem to be getting the message, and many of the right people are missing it entirely!

“You abandon God’s commands, and keep human tradition! “So,” he went on, “you have a fine way of setting aside God’s command so as to maintain your tradition.

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.

Transformed lives, healed from the inside out, are to be the order of the day when God becomes king.

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.

Faced with Jesus’s dramatic sayings and actions, we assume that they meant then what they would mean within our world. We should resist this assumption.

That is the curse of the false either/or that has been wished on scholarship these many years: either robust skepticism or grit-your-teeth conservatism.

Suppose this God did after all make the world. And suppose he were to claim, at long last, his sovereign rights over that world, not to destroy it (another philosophical mistake) or merely to “intervene” in it from time to time (a kind of soggy compromise position), but to fill it with his glory, to allow it to enter a new mode in which it would reflect his love, his generosity, his desire to make it over anew.