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

by N.T. Wright

In particular, the question was raised: would YHWH actually appear, visibly and in person, to take charge? If so, what could people expect to see? How would it happen? Or, if not, would he act through chosen representatives—perhaps specially inspired prophets? (There was no shortage of people in the first century claiming prophetic inspiration, speaking urgent words from YHWH to his suffering and anxious people, sometimes promising them immediate and spectacular supernatural deliverance.) And if YHWH did choose to act in that way—acting in one sense all by himself, but in another through particular representatives—how would those people be equipped for the task?

For Isaiah and Ezekiel, then, not only would Israel return to its land, but YHWH would return to the Temple. That is at the heart of the vision of King YHWH in Isaiah 52. And that, we may suppose, is what devout Jews hoped and prayed for as they sang all those psalms about YHWH becoming king, taking charge at last, rescuing his people, and bringing justice to the world.

the third great storm, the hurricane from the southeast—and the final type of “king” that people in Jesus’s day were eager to see. The people who were longing for God alone to be their king were clinging to the hope set out in scripture: the hope that, after all these years, Israel’s God would return to be with his people, to rescue them, to restore them, to condemn their oppressors, to take charge, to do justice, to sort things out, to rule over them like a good king should, but unlike any actual human king they had ever known.

Third element of Perfect storm: Israel and the jews expectations on a Jesus like figure, a God on earth

Nobody in the two hundred years before Jesus and nobody in the hundred years of continuing struggle after his time seems to have put all this together and suggested that Israel’s God might come in the form and person of the Davidic king. Or, if they did, we have no record of it.

But of course the prime example of a movement that held together the themes of God’s kingdom, on the one hand, and a messianic kingdom, on the other, was indeed that of Jesus himself.

Once we get inside the world of Jesus’s day and begin to understand what he might have meant by the word “God,” we begin to understand too the breathtaking claim that Jesus was, himself, now in charge. He was the one who had “an everlasting dominion” (Dan. 7:14), a kingship that would never be destroyed. This claim can never be, in our sense or indeed in the ancient sense, merely “religious.” It involves everything, from power and politics to culture and family. It catches up the “religious” meanings, including personal spirituality and transformation, and the philosophical ones, including ethics and worldview. But it places them all within a larger vision that can be stated quite simply: God is now in charge, and he is in charge in and through Jesus. That is the vision that explains what Jesus did and said, what happened to Jesus, and what his followers subsequently did and said. And what happened to them too.

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? Why, indeed, did Jesus end up being crucified with the words “King of the Jews” above his head? 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? Those are the questions that will now occupy us in the rest of this book.

Two questions frame the rest of the book

But, from the moment Jesus of Nazareth launched his public career, he seems to have been determined to invoke the third part of the great storm as well. He spoke continually about the hurricane of which the psalmists had sung and the prophets had preached. He spoke about God himself becoming king. And he went about doing things that, he said, demonstrated what that meant and would mean. He took upon himself (this is one of the most secure starting points for historical investigation of Jesus) the role of a prophet, in other words, of a man sent from God to reaffirm God’s intention of overthrowing the might of pagan empire, but also to warn Israel that its present way of going about things was dangerously ill-conceived and leading to disaster. And with that, the sea is lashed into a frenzy;

Jesus himself strides out into the middle of it all, into the very eye of the storm, announcing that the time is fulfilled, that God’s kingdom is now 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.

First, Jesus attracted large crowds. A thousand little features of the stories put this beyond doubt.

Second, we find reports at various points of opponents accusing Jesus of being in league with the devil—with the “Shame Lord” (Beelzebul) or something similar.

Third, as we shall see, the explanation Jesus gave for what was going on was that something new was happening—something powerful, dramatic, different.

Fourth, it may be time to be skeptical about skepticism itself. 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.

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.”

Since Jesus himself seems to have deliberately chosen the Exodus story, the Passover story, as the setting for the carefully staged climax to his own public career, it’s important that we think for a moment about the seven great features of this story, which all first-century Jews would have known in their bones.

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,

Second,

Third,

Fourth,

Fifth,

Sixth,

Seventh,

But this was the story that sustained the Israelites for the next thousand years and more, up to the time of Jesus—and, of course, sustains the Jewish people to this day. This was the story Jesus knew from boyhood. 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.

public proclamation, that Israel’s God was at last becoming king. “The time is fulfilled!” he said. “God’s kingdom is arriving! Turn back, and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15). “If it’s by God’s finger that I cast out demons,” he declared, “then God’s kingdom has come upon you” (Luke 11:20).

Herod Antipas, one of the many sons of Herod the Great. Herod Antipas wasn’t particularly powerful, but, though the Romans hadn’t allowed him to keep his father’s title of “king of the Jews,” he was the nearest equivalent at the time. Indeed, it was he who had been rebuilding Sepphoris as his capital.

So when Jesus went around saying that God was now in charge, he wasn’t walking (as it were) into virgin territory. He wasn’t making his announcement in a vacuum.

But what had the curing of dozens, perhaps thousands, of people to do with the hopes and aspirations we studied earlier, the dream of a new Exodus, a victorious battle against the old tyrant, the rebuilding of the Temple, the creation of justice and peace?

But it wasn’t just healings. It was also parties—celebrations. Jesus, to be sure, often spent long times alone in prayer. But he was also deeply at home where there was a party, a kingdom party, a celebration of the fact that God was at last taking charge. And, as is well enough known but not always fully understood, he seems to have specialized in celebrating God’s kingdom with all the wrong people. Tax-collectors (always disliked; doubly so when they were working for Herod or the Romans or both) were a breed apart, and Jesus went out of his way to meet them, to eat and party with them, to call one of them to be part of his inner team.

Jesus, aware as ever of the long stories of God’s people and the ways in which those stories were expected to come true, knew as well as any trained teacher of the law that one of the great things Israel had to do so that God would launch his great renewal movement, his new Exodus, was “to turn,” to repent, to turn back from the evil ways of the heart, and to turn instead to God in penitence and faith. That’s what Moses himself had said in Deuteronomy 30. Jeremiah and Ezekiel had made the same point. This was how it would have to be: when the Israelites had hit rock bottom, then they would turn back to God with all their heart and soul, and God would turn back to them, restoring them and making them his people indeed.

Jesus was fulfilling the Exodus story, especially by requiring repentance among all, incl the lowly tax-collectors. The angels celebrated while the chief priests and scribes lookes down thwir noses.

This introduces us to another theme that is closely connected with the themes of healing and celebrating. Jesus spoke frequently of people being forgiven. Forgiveness, indeed, is a sort of healing. It removes a burden that can crush and cripple you. It allows you to stand up straight without pretending. It spreads out into whole communities.

Think of Desmond Tutu, chairing that harrowing Commission for Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. “No Future Without Forgiveness” was the slogan, which became the title of Tutu’s book. Forgiveness has a claim to be the most powerful thing in the world. It transforms like nothing else.

A new dimension of the God-in-charge proclamation is being unveiled. “You want to know,” Jesus declares to the assembled company, “that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins?” He turns to the paralyzed man: “I tell you,” he says, “Get up, take your stretcher, and go home.” The man obeys. And the crowd in the house, which wouldn’t part to let the sick man in, now parts, like the Red Sea, to let the healed man out.

Forgiveness and healing! The two go so closely together, personally and socially. Whole societies can be crippled by ancient grudges that turn into feuds and then into forms of civil war. Families can be torn apart by a single incident or one person’s behavior that is never faced and so never forgiven.

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.

This is the passage often referred to as Jesus’s “Nazareth Manifesto”: He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. On the sabbath, as was his regular practice, he went into the synagogue and stood up to read. They gave him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me Because he has anointed me To tell the poor the good news. He has sent me to announce release to the prisoners And sight to the blind, To set the wounded victims free, To announce the year of God’s special favor.” He rolled up the scroll, gave it to the attendant, and sat down. All eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him. “Today,” he began, “this scripture is fulfilled in your own hearing.” (Luke 4:16–21) This is the message of forgiveness, all right,

American readers in particular ought to know this theme well, because part of Leviticus 25 (v. 10, in italics below) is inscribed on the famous Liberty Bell in Philadelphia:

And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.

Jesus’s message seems to be that they are being fulfilled—but not in the way people had imagined. Yes, God is taking charge. Yes, the great jubilee year is dawning, the time of release, of forgiveness. But it won’t work out the way they had expected. In a shocking reversal, amounting almost to a slap in the face to his hearers (including, we assume, his own family), Jesus declares that the people who will benefit from this great act of God will not, after all, be the people of Israel as they stand.

This is what he says next to his hearers in the synagogue that day: Everyone remarked at him; they were astonished at the words coming out of his mouth—words of sheer grace. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they said. “I know what you’re going to say,” Jesus said. “You’re going to tell me the old riddle: ‘Heal yourself, doctor!’ ‘We heard of great happenings in Capernaum; do things like that here, in your own country!’ “Let me tell you the truth,” he went on. “Prophets never get accepted in their own country. This is the solemn truth: there were plenty of widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a great famine over all the land. Elijah was sent to none of them, only to a widow in the Sidonian town of Zarephath. “And there were plenty of people with virulent skin diseases in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was healed—only Naaman, the Syrian.” When they heard this, everyone in the synagogue flew into a rage. (Luke 4:22–28)

Naaman the Syrian, to whom Jesus refers as the one man who was healed by the prophet Elisha, was the commander of the army that, in the old story, had been attacking the Israelites (2 Kings 5). Startling though this is, it fits with everything else we know about Jesus’s public teaching. “Love your enemies,” he told his followers (Matt. 5:44), and he elaborated the point from a dozen different angles. Forgiveness was at the heart of his message.

By contrast, both Jesus himself and the first martyr, Stephen, prayed for God’s mercy on their killers: “Father,” said Jesus, “forgive them! They don’t know what they’re doing!” (Luke 23:34) Then Stephen knelt down and shouted at the top of his voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Once he had said this, he fell asleep. (Acts 7:60)

Jesus, as usual, tells a story to explain what he is doing. This time it’s about a man who had two debtors, one owing him a huge sum and the other a small sum. Neither could pay, so he forgave them both. So, he asks his host, which of the two will love him the more? Clearly, comes the answer, the one for whom he forgave the greater debt. Precisely so, says Jesus, explaining that this is why this woman had poured out love so richly upon him—unlike the host, who hadn’t even begun to show Jesus any love at all. In other words, Jesus is saying, you can tell that this woman has been forgiven, has indeed been forgiven a great deal. She knows, deep inside herself, that she’s been forgiven. That’s why there’s so much love coming out of her. And if she’s a forgiveness person, perhaps that shows that she is already enjoying the fact that God is becoming king, whereas people who aren’t forgiveness people don’t believe it.

Antipas was married to a foreign princess, but then fell in love with his own niece, Herodias, who was at the time married to Antipas’s half brother Philip. (Anyone who wants to understand the Herodian family tree should be prepared to take a long weekend, a very large sheet of paper, and an ice pack.) The foreign princess was sent back home, and Antipas and Herodias became husband and wife. John the Baptist publicly denounced this arrangement. I don’t think he was simply concerned with Antipas’s immoral behavior, 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. John pointed this out. Not surprisingly, then, John ended up in one of Antipas’s dungeons.

Jesus, however, makes the connection. When he tells John’s messengers that the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, and so forth, he is quoting directly from Isaiah’s vision of a “return from exile” that would also be nothing short of a new creation: Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. (Isa. 35:5–6)

Interestingly, similar language also shows up in a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, showing that other Jews of roughly the same period were reading the Isaiah passage as a prediction of what the Messiah was to do: “For the heavens and the earth shall listen to his Messiah . . . for he will honor the devout on the throne of his everlasting kingdom, setting the prisoners free, opening the eyes of the blind, raising up those who are brought low . . . and the Lord shall do wonderful deeds which have not been done, as he said. For he shall heal those who are badly wounded, and raise up the dead, and send good news to the afflicted.” (4Q521, col. 2; my translation)

What’s going on? Why does he say it like that? Because the campaign is already under way, and if John is the “preliminary messenger” of Malachi 3–4, this can only mean one thing. John had sent messengers to Jesus to ask if he was indeed “the one who is to come,” and the answer, given cryptically but plainly enough for those with ears to hear, is an emphatic yes. 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 one in whose presence, work, and teaching Israel’s God was indeed becoming king.

But some of the prophets had spoken of the day when all the tribes would be gathered again. Jesus’s choice of the twelve seems to indicate, symbolically, that this is how he wanted his work to be seen. 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. But before we can explore all this further, we must examine in more detail the stories Jesus was telling. What are they about? How do they explain this strange new announcement that God is in charge? How do they help the campaign move forward?

Many of Jesus’s stories pick up Israel’s stories from long before, stories about God and Israel, the Exodus, the creation itself, the trials and tribulations of God and God’s people, and—not least—the horrible exile in Babylon and God’s repeated promises to restore his people’s fortunes at last. This, in particular, is the reason why some of Jesus’s key parables were about seeds being sown. The idea of a farmer sowing a seed—to be sure, one of the most natural and common sights in an agricultural economy—had been used centuries before by the prophets to promise that Israel’s God, having plucked up the plant that was Israel, would come back and sow once more the seeds that would bear fruit, fruit that this time would last (see, e.g., Isa. 1:9; 6:13; 37:31–2; Jer. 31:27; Ezra 9:2). Here is Matthew’s parable of the sower (parallels are in Mark 4:1–20 and Luke 8:4–15):

The parables, in fact, are told as kingdom explanations for Jesus’s kingdom actions. They are saying: “Don’t be surprised, but this is what it looks like when God’s in charge.” They are not “abstract teaching,” and indeed if we approach them like that, we won’t understand them at all. Specialists who have studied the way in which Jesus’s language works describe a “speech-act” effect, whereby telling a story creates a new situation, a new whole world. That was indeed what Jesus was aiming to do, and by all accounts he was succeeding.