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

by N.T. Wright

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’s contemporaries did. But if Christians don’t get Jesus right,

It isn’t enough to ask whether someone believes or does not believe in “God.” The key question is which God we’re talking about.

Throughout his short public career Jesus spoke and acted as if he was in charge.

after his death his associates started to claim that he was now in charge, for real. And they started to act as if it was true. This isn’t about “religion” in the sense the Western world has imagined for over two hundred years. This is about everything: life, art, the universe, justice, death, money. It’s about politics, philosophy, culture, and being human. It’s about a God who is so much bigger than the “God” of ordinary modern “religion”

“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.

we fail to recognize this multilayered complexity, we will simply repeat the age-old mistake of imagining Jesus in our own image or at least placing him, by implication, in our own culture. And part of the whole point of the Christian message is that what happened back then, what happened to Jesus, what happened through him, was a one-time, never-to-be-repeated piece of history.

Maybe the reason Jerusalem was seen as the center of the world was because that’s where all the pressure was concentrated. That’s where the fault lines all came together, where the tectonic plates ground relentlessly into one another, as indeed they still do. And it is to Jerusalem that we have to go to understand Jesus of Nazareth. That’s where the real perfect storm took place. That’s where all the dark forces converged, one spring day in, most likely, the year we call AD 30 (or, less likely, 33).

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.”

The second great element in Jesus’s perfect storm, the overheated high-pressure system, more turbulent and complex than the first element, is the story of Israel. As far back as we can trace their ancient scriptures, the Jewish people had believed that their story was going somewhere, that it had a goal in mind. Despite many setbacks and disappointments, their God would make sure they reached the goal at last. This is the story within which many Jews of Jesus’s day believed, passionately, that they themselves were living.

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 judgment as anyone, if their aspirations didn’t coincide with God’s.

Here, then, is the third element in the first-century perfect storm: the strange, unpredictable, and highly dangerous divine element. The wind of God. This is God’s moment, declares Jesus, 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.

The divine hurricane sweeps in from the ocean, and to accomplish its purpose it must meet, head-on, the cruel western wind of pagan empire and the high-octane high-pressure system of national aspiration. Jesus seizes the moment, the Passover moment, the Exodus moment, not least because these too speak of the sovereign freedom and presence of God as much over his rebellious and incomprehending people as over the tyranny of Egypt.

Here are the seven themes of the Exodus: • Wicked tyrant • Chosen leader • Victory of God • Rescue by sacrifice • New vocation and way of life • Presence of God • Promised/inherited land First,

Forgiveness and healing! The two go so closely together, personally and socially.

Jesus isn’t going around trying to drum up support like today’s politicians. He is much more like a rebel leader within a modern tyranny, setting up an alternative government, establishing his rule, making things happen in a new way. He chooses twelve of his closest followers and seems to set them apart as special associates.

two major parts to their kingdom agenda: the battle(s) they fought or intended to fight, and the Temple they cleansed, rebuilt, or wanted to rebuild and defend. What did Jesus do with those great interlocking themes of the battle and the victory, on the one hand, and the building or cleansing of the Temple, of the place of God’s presence, on the other?

semi-Deist type of Christianity—the type of thing a lot of Christians in the eighteenth century, and many since then, have thought they should be defending. In this sort of Christianity, “God” is in heaven and sends his divine second self, his “Son,” to “demonstrate his divinity,” so that people would worship him, be saved by his cross, and return with him to heaven. But in first-century Christianity, what mattered was not people going from earth into God’s kingdom in heaven. What mattered, and what Jesus taught his followers to pray, was that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.

Plenty of Christians, alas, have imagined that a “divine Jesus” had come to earth simply to reveal his divinity and save people away from earth for a distant “heaven.”

has been all too possible to use the doctrine of the incarnation or even the doctrine of the inspiration of scripture as a way of protecting oneself and one’s worldview and political agenda against having to face the far greater challenge of God taking charge, of God becoming king, on earth as in heaven.

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.

His great Sermon on the Mount opens with the Beatitudes, which are normally read either as a special form of “Christian ethic” (“This is how you are to behave, if you want to be really special people”) or as the rules you must keep in order to “go to heaven when you die.” This latter view has been reinforced by the standard misreading of the first Beatitude. “Blessings on the poor in spirit! The kingdom of heaven is yours” (Matt. 5:3) doesn’t mean, “You will go to heaven when you die.” It means you will be one of those through whom God’s kingdom, heaven’s rule, begins to appear on earth as in heaven.

The Sermon on the Mount is a call to Jesus’s followers to take up their vocation as light to the world, as salt to the earth—in other words, as people through whom Jesus’s kingdom vision is to become a reality.

When God wants to change the world, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the mourners, those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice, the peacemakers, and so on.

vision of the church’s calling—to be the means through which Jesus continues to work and to teach, to establish his sovereign rule on earth as in heaven—is an ideal so high that it might seem not only unattainable, but hopelessly out of touch, triumphalistic, and self-congratulatory.

for every foolish or wicked Christian leader who ends up in court, in the newspapers, or both, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands who are doing a great job, often unnoticed except within their own communities.

The effect of perspective (we only notice the things that get into the papers, but the papers only report the odd and the scandalous) means that almost all of what is done by the churches goes unreported, allowing sneering outsiders to assume that the church is collapsing into a little heap of squabbling factions. Mostly it isn’t.

we must never forget that the way Jesus worked then and works now is through forgiveness and restoration. His spectacular conversation with Peter (John 21:15–19), who would certainly have had his name in the papers after his appalling behavior on the night Jesus was arrested, shows a depth of love and trust. The church is not supposed to be a society of perfect people doing great work. It’s a society of forgiven sinners repaying their unpayable debt of love by working for Jesus’s kingdom in every way they can, knowing themselves to be unworthy of the task.

I suspect that part at least of the cause of the scandals that have afflicted some parts of the church is creeping triumphalism, which allows some people to think that because of their baptism, vocation, ordination, or whatever, they are immune to serious sin—or that, if it happens, it must be a “blip” rather than a telltale sign of a serious problem.

third point is perhaps the most important, and it opens up a whole new area at which we hinted earlier on and to which we now return. The way in which Jesus exercises his sovereign lordship in the present time includes his strange, often secret, sovereignty over the nations and their rulers. What does this mean?

The idolization of “progress,” of “moving with the times,” is part of the same movement. “Now that we live in the twenty-first century . . .” people begin, as though it were obvious that one’s ethics or theology ought to change with the calendar. All this is a form of creeping pantheism, of looking at certain trends in the wider world and deducing that they are what “God” is doing.

(It’s also very selective; it cheerfully screens out all the inventions of modernism, such as guillotines and gas chambers, which do not exactly fit the picture of an upward journey into light.) Just as we must not be triumphalistic or complacent about what Jesus is doing in and through the church, so we ought not to be complacent about how “wonderfully” God is at work in the world outside the church. But we must give full weight to the difficult but important biblical vision of God’s sovereignty over the nations and his determination to shape their fortunes to serve his larger purposes. This belief

God desires order, not chaos, and calls human rulers, whether they know it or not, to bring that order about.

God will in the end call the nations to account.

this has actually changed the meanings of both words. “State” has expanded to do some of what “church” should be doing; and the churches themselves have colluded with the privatization of “religion,” leaving all the things that the church used to be best at to the “state” or other agencies. “Religion,” as one recent writer says, then “dwindles to a kind of personal pastime, like breeding gerbils or collecting porcelain.”13 No wonder, when people within the church speak up or speak out on key issues of the day, those who don’t like what they say tell them to go back to their private “religious” world. But speak up and speak out we must, because we have not only the clear instruction of Jesus himself, but the clear promise that this is how he will exercise his sovereignty; this is how he will make his kingdom a reality.

we must take seriously the early Christian belief that with the death and resurrection of Jesus something decisive happened to the “principalities and powers.” Paul, writing to the Colossians from a Roman prison, is under no illusions about the continuing actual bodily power of the pagan empire whose captive he is. But he can still speak of the great victory that Jesus has already won over the rulers.

We live in the period of Jesus’s sovereign rule over the world—a reign that has not yet been completed, since, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:20–28, he must reign until “he has put all his enemies under his feet,” including death itself. But Paul is clear that we do not have to wait until the second coming to say that Jesus is already reigning.

We cannot, in other words, agree with Billy that this reign is postponed to the second coming. That, on the contrary, is when it will be complete.