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

by N.T. Wright

the Jesus whom I study historically is the Jesus I worship as part of the threefold unity of the one God.

Jesus’s way of running the world here and now is, however surprisingly, through his followers.

Two generations after most people stopped sending their children to Sunday school, it seems that people still want to strike out at the religion they haven’t got. Do

believe that this kind of easy-going anachronism is almost as corrosive to genuine Christian faith as skepticism itself.

We should be grateful to the whole post-Enlightenment movement we loosely call “modernism” for reminding us that they matter, even as we should firmly decline the same movement’s unwarranted restriction of the kinds of answers it is prepared to accept.

fact, I increasingly suspect that a good deal of the “methods” developed within professional biblical scholarship over the last two hundred years have been, themselves, the product of a worldview that may not have been truly open to discovering the real Jesus.

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, and peace that, they were convinced, were theirs by right.

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.

People don’t accuse you of being in league with the devil unless you are doing pretty remarkable things.

It just suggests that we keep an open mind and recognize that skepticism too comes with its own agenda.

was to the Temple that Jesus of Nazareth came that day, to perform a strange, dramatic symbolic gesture and to debate with the teachers of the law, as the winds began to blow more fiercely and the perfect storm of history reached its height.

Gods people bore the temple. Gods people built the temple. God brought the temple to the people. Gods people become the temple.

An announcement like this isn’t simply a proclamation. It’s the start of a campaign.

Matthew, telling the story of his own call (9:9–13), puts it as one in a long list of healing stories. Presumably this is because that’s how he himself had experienced

Forgiveness has a claim to be the most powerful thing in the world. It transforms like nothing else.

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

It’s a kind of corporate forgiveness, tapping into the ancient Jewish hope of the “jubilee,”

the present rulers were being called to account and were indeed being replaced. This was the time for God to take charge, to fix and mend things, to make everything right.

Antipas’s symbol was a particular kind of reed that grows beside the Sea of Galilee.

by means of this storytelling technique, the strange-story-plus-interpretation, is able to unveil, and therefore actually to set forward, the purposes of heaven on earth.

there must have been more wrong with “earth” than anyone had supposed.

(Pause for sharp intake of breath from those of his hearers, i.e., most of them, who knew the stories of the Maccabean martyrs being tortured and killed for refusing to eat pork.)

his point is that when God becomes king, he provides a cure for uncleanness of heart.

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.

the modern world divides into those who are obsessed with demonic powers and those who mock them as outdated rubbish.

It is, once again, fatally easy to misunderstand, to draw the lines wrong, to see “our present system” as automatically good, so that anyone who disturbs it—as Jesus was disturbing the system of the scribes and Pharisees—must be “satanic,” must be from the dark side.

And he has thereby redefined his own vocation, which he takes to be the true vocation of Israel’s king:

Somehow, in a way most modern people find extraordinary to the point of being almost unbelievable, the Temple was not only the center of the world. It was the place where heaven and earth met.

Jesus was, as it were, a walking Temple. A living, breathing place-where-Israel’s-God-was-living.

Jesus talked about God, but he talked about God precisely in order to explain the things that he himself was doing.

The sabbath was the day when human time and God’s time met,

the sabbath was the regular signpost pointing forward to God’s promised future,

putting an end to the fantasy of human sovereignty, of being the master of one’s own fate and the captain of one’s own soul, of humans organizing the world as though they were responsible to nobody but themselves.

This is when what happens to space in the Temple and to time on the sabbath happens, within the life of Jesus,

was about giving up the ordinary kind of revolution, in which violent change produces violent regimes, which are eventually toppled by further violent change, and discovering an entirely different way instead.

Israel had had, in the past, a bad habit of allowing national expectation and aspiration to get out of line with the divine purpose;

Somehow, the servant is a kind of true Israel figure, doing Israel’s job on behalf of the Israel that has failed. And doing God’s job on behalf of God himself.

the start of the second section of the final servant poem, it appears that the servant is himself “the arm of YHWH,”

The return of YHWH to Zion, on the one hand, and the suffering of the servant, on the other, turn out to be—almost unbelievably, as the prophet realizes—two ways of saying the same thing.

The great river of messiahship, of Israel’s long and checkered history of monarchy, comes crashing together with the dark flow of the servant, and both together are swept up in the longer, darker, and still more powerful current of the belief that Israel’s God would return at last to his people.

Jesus behaves from the start both with the sovereign authority of one who knows himself charged with the responsibility to inaugurate God’s kingdom and with the recognition that this task will only be completed through his suffering and death.

My contention is that this modernist tour de force does no justice to the texts or the contexts and places on the earliest church a burden of invention it was totally unequipped to bear.

Jesus, as the servant, turned the other cheek; Jesus, carrying his cross, went the extra mile at the behest of his Roman executioners; Jesus, finally, ended up enthroned, set on a hill, unable to be hidden, the light of the world shining out at the darkest moment in history.

a kingdom not from this world, but emphatically, through the work of Jesus, for this world.

Jesus’s own mind, heart, and body would be the battlefield on which the final victory would be won, as they were also the Temple in which the powerful, loving presence of Israel’s returning God had made his home.

But the stories of the risen Jesus have a different quality altogether. They seem to be about a person who is equally at home “on earth” and “in heaven.”

With him, the irony works the other way around. Jesus’s death and his followers’ suffering are the means by which his peace, freedom, and justice come to birth on earth as in heaven.

Luke tells the story of how Jesus becomes king in Acts in a way that matches exactly the message of how Jesus became king in his own public career.

God intended to rule the world through human beings. Jesus picks up this principle, rescues it, and transforms it.

And Jesus’s kingdom project is nothing if not the rescue and renewal of God’s creation project.