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

by N.T. Wright

Frequently, indeed, the main thrust of a parable must be left unsaid. The parable of the prodigal son, which we have already mentioned, is a case in point. The story ends without resolution, with the father remonstrating with the older son. We want to know what happens next, and presumably Jesus wanted his hearers to think it out and to apply what they were thinking to their own situation. Like a good advertisement, a parable may be much more powerful in what it doesn’t say than in what it does.

The dreams or visions in Daniel follow exactly the pattern we have in Matthew 13 and parallels. First, a strange story; then a question about how to interpret it, about what it means; then, a point-by-point interpretation.

The content too does not then disappoint. Here is a sower sowing seed. The wise first-century Jew, hearing this, may suspect that this is about God sowing Israel again after the time of tragedy, the sorrow of the exile. Yes, says Jesus, but see what heaven’s perspective on this is going to be. Israel is indeed to be sown again. But there will be many who look and look, but never see, who hear and hear, but never understand. Many seeds will fall on the path, on rocky ground, and among thorns. Israel is not to be reaffirmed as it stands. John the Baptist got it right: you can’t just say “Abraham is our father,” because the axe is laid to the roots of the tree (another scriptural metaphor for the judgment of Israel), and God can now raise up children for Abraham from these stones (Matt. 3:9–10).

Jesus’s parables, never mind for the moment anything else about him, tell us in their form alone, but also in their repeated and increasingly direct content, that the purposes of heaven are indeed coming true on earth, but that the people who in theory have been longing for that to happen are turning their backs on it now that it is actually knocking on their door:

Even the story of the great wedding party to which all and sundry are invited carries within it a dark note of warning: don’t think you can come into God’s party without putting on the proper clothes. Even the great story of spectacular forgiveness is turned back against itself when the servant who had been forgiven a huge sum refused to forgive his fellow servant a tiny sum. If this is what it looks like when God’s kingdom comes on earth as in heaven—if this is what it looks like when God’s in charge—then there must have been more wrong with “earth” than anyone had supposed.

The idea of Herod Antipas, the debauched and degenerate son of a warlord father, as the true shepherd of Israel is laughable. The same could be said for the fake “aristocracy” in Jerusalem, the “chief priests” and “Sadducees,” who were kept in power by the Romans because they were rich and successful (the Romans preferred to rule through existing “elites”) rather than because they really represented or taught the true, ancient traditions of Israel. Jesus was up against it. If God was to become king it would be—it could only be—by some kind of a confrontation with these forces, or rather with the forces that stood behind them.

In two remarkable passages, Mark 7:1–23 and 10:1–12 (with parallels in Matt. 15:1–20 and 19:1–12), Jesus picks up another of the themes of Israel’s ancient promises. What will it look like when God becomes king? Hearts will be transformed.

“Don’t you see that whatever goes into someone from outside can’t make them unclean? It doesn’t go into the heart; it only goes into the stomach, and then carries on, out down the drain.” (Result: all foods are clean.) “What makes someone unclean,” he went on, “is what comes out of them. Evil intentions come from inside, out of people’s hearts—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, treachery, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, stupidity. These evil things all come from inside. They are what make someone unclean.” (Mark 7:1–23)

That isn’t just cryptic. (What is he talking about? Excrement?) It’s positively subversive. That’s why it’s only when Jesus and his followers go back into the house, away from the crowds, that he explains what he means. The purity rules on which Judaism thrived then and, for the most part, thrives still today are (he says) irrelevant. (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.) What goes into you from the outside merely passes through and out the other end. The real uncleanness comes from the heart. That’s where thoughts leading to all kinds of evil—murder, adultery, immorality, theft, lying, slander—are lurking. That’s the source from which they come bubbling out, unbidden, into actual deeds and words. That’s the thing that really makes you “unclean,” not eating with unwashed hands or indeed eating “unclean” food.

No, his point is that when God becomes king, he provides a cure for uncleanness of heart. Again and again it comes, in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), on the edge of one remark after another. 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.

What Jesus is claiming is that when God becomes king creation itself is renewed, so that the rule within the kingdom is the rule of what creation was meant to be. And that includes lifelong, faithful monogamous marriage.

When God becomes king, on earth as in heaven, he will provide a cure for hardness of heart. The healing that Jesus offered for sick bodies was to penetrate to the very depths of one’s being. Transformed lives, healed from the inside out, are to be the order of the day when God becomes king.

the many-sided transformation Jesus seems to have believed would happen when people followed him and discovered what it meant for God to become king. This was, it seems, a major part of Jesus’s whole program.

So how can the kingdom be both present and future? What was Jesus trying to say? How does this affect our view of the “campaign” we have seen him carrying on to this point?

The resistance was led by one family, whose figurehead, Judah the Hammer, waged a three-year guerrilla campaign, at the end of which he cleansed the Temple of pagan elements. This is the event still commemorated annually in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Judah and his family celebrated their success by parading about singing hymns and, significantly for our story, carrying palm branches.

Judah’s victory,

sharpened up the ancient story line: the wicked tyrant oppressing God’s people, the noble and heroic leader risking all, fighting the key battle, cleansing the Temple, and setting Israel free to follow God and his law once more. This was the story of Moses, Egypt, and the Exodus. It was the story of David, Solomon, the Philistines, and the Temple. It was the story of Babylon overthrown, of return from exile.

In particular, the book of Daniel sets up its own cryptic puzzle. How long, asks the prophet, will the exile last? How long will we have to wait before God performs the final great rescue operation? Will it be seventy years (as others had foretold)? No, comes the answer, it will be seventy times seven—that is, 490 years (Dan. 9:24).

We turn from Judah the Hammer to Simon the Star. Or rather, Simon Son-of-the-Star. The year is AD 132, almost exactly a hundred years after the public career of Jesus of Nazareth and hence almost exactly three hundred years after Judah the Hammer.

Later Jewish writings sometimes speak of Simon not as bar-Kochba, “son of the Star,” or by his proper name, bar-Kosiba, “son of Kosiba,” but by a different pun: bar-Koziba, “son of the lie.” He was, they believed, a false messiah. Indeed, many then drew the conclusion that it was false to expect a messiah at all. There were, in any case, no more Jewish uprisings. From then on, the Jews were content to live out their obedience to their God and his law in private and to let other people run the world if they so wished. Some Jewish teachers had been advocating this policy for quite a while. Now it was adopted without further question.

But the Roman world was about to be plunged into chaos. Pompey was killed in 48 BC. Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44, bringing on the civil wars from which, as we saw, Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian, would emerge as the first actual Roman emperor. Meanwhile Rome’s old enemy, Parthia (corresponding roughly to modern Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan), seized the moment to invade Roman possessions in the Middle East, including Jerusalem. Long Jewish memories of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Syria meant that Parthia was bound to be seen by the Jews as the new wicked kingdom. And Herod the Great, the most effective military leader of the moment, already recognized by Rome as “king of the Jews” on purely pragmatic grounds, defeated the Parthians and recaptured Jerusalem—on behalf of Rome. He knew which side his bread was buttered on.

Herod the Great had no family tree to back up this claim. He wasn’t descended from David. He wasn’t even fully Jewish, being half Idumaean. But he married into the (then) royal family, taking as one of his many wives Mariamne, a princess from the Hasmonean house. And he maintained his rule—no mean feat in itself—for over thirty years. Judah the Hammer managed seven years; Simon the Star, only three.

The other failed king was Simon bar-Giora. He appeared at yet another time of social and political chaos, near the start of the great revolt against Roman rule that lasted from AD 66 to 70 and that ended with total catastrophe and the Temple’s destruction.

Simon gained popular support, and then actual power, by announcing freedom for slaves. That was always a good move, not only in itself, but because the ancient memory of being set free from slavery in Egypt has always been central to Jewish self-understanding. Faced with other warlords and troublemakers, many of the leading men in Jerusalem were happy to give Simon power and to line up behind him. He instituted martial law, executing and imprisoning people he suspected might be traitors. Anyone who has tried to make sense of what was going on in Jerusalem in those years knows that it was a highly confusing period, and if that is so for us as historians, it must have been even more so for the people there at the time. Simon’s agenda, clearly, would have been the usual one: defeat the enemy, cleanse the Temple, and establish his own kingdom.

Once again, the gale overcame the high-pressure system. Titus, and all Rome with him, celebrated this victory over the “king of the Jews.” Once again, the Jewish people, crushed and dismayed, wondered what had happened to the divine hurricane that was supposed to come to their aid. It takes little imagination to see that Jesus of Nazareth, nailed to a Roman cross with the words “king of the Jews” over his head, must have been seen by many in exactly the same way as Simon bar-Giora. Here is a would-be rebel king, and this is what the Romans always do to such people. Subsequent Jewish tradition came to regard Jesus too as a liar who had deceived God’s people, leading them astray with false hopes.

First, there was a well-recognized set of expectations for a “king of the Jews,” with roots extending all the way back to the Exodus. The recitation of expectations has become almost monotonous with repetition; victory over the pagans and cleansing or rebuilding the Temple were high on the list. Second, it was to be expected that any such campaign would have (at least) two key “moments”: first, the time when the flag was raised, the initial proclamation was made, and the movement was launched, and then the moment when the final battle was won and the Temple rebuilt. Such movements would expect to live between these two moments, between an initial announcement and a final victory.

So what were Jesus’s aims for the future? What was he hoping to achieve? What would be, for him, the equivalent of the battle to be fought and the cleansing or rebuilding of the Temple? To what extent did he share the aspirations of the kings and would-be kings before and after his day?

To see how all this works in practice, we need to explore some more themes. All four of the fascinating characters we have looked at in this chapter had 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?

The Bible is never very precise about the identity of the figure known as “the satan.” The Hebrew word means “the accuser,” and at times the satan seems to be a member of YHWH’s heavenly council, with special responsibility as director of prosecutions (1 Chron. 21:1; Job 1–2; Zech. 3:1–2.). However, the term becomes identified variously with the serpent of the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:1–15) and with the rebellious daystar cast out of heaven (Isa. 14:12–13) and was seen by many Jews as the quasi-personal source of evil standing behind both human wickedness and large-scale injustice, sometimes operating through semi-independent “demons.” By Jesus’s time various words were used to denote this figure, including Beelzebul/b (lit., “Lord of the Flies”) and simply “the evil one”; Jesus warned his followers against the deceits this figure could perpetrate.

The battle Jesus was fighting was against the satan. Whatever we think of this theme, it was clearly centrally important for all the gospel writers, and we have every reason to suppose it was central for Jesus as well:

As C. S. Lewis points out in the introduction to his famous Screwtape Letters, the modern world divides into those who are obsessed with demonic powers and those who mock them as outdated rubbish. Neither approach, Lewis insists, does justice to the reality. I’m with Lewis on this. Despite the caricatures, the obsessions, and the sheer muddle that people often get themselves into on this subject, there is such a thing as a dark force that seems to take over people, movements, and sometimes whole countries, a force or (as it sometimes seems) a set of forces that can make people do things they would never normally do.

This is precisely the kind of redefinition that was going on in Jesus’s Nazareth Manifesto. Traditional enemies were suddenly brought, at least in principle, within the reach of the blessing of God’s great jubilee. And traditional friends—those who might have thought that they were automatically on the right side—had to be looked at again. Perhaps one can no longer simply identify “our people” as on the side of the angels and “those people” as agents of the satan. That’s why Jesus was run out of town and nearly killed. He had suggested that foes could become friends and by implication was warning that the “good people”—Israel as the people of God—might become enemies. Ironically, his own townsfolk proceeded to prove the point by their reaction.

Jesus will have none of it. First, it makes no sense to imagine the satan working against himself. Jesus is casting out demons, but why would the satan want to do that, destroying his own power base? Second, there are only two options at this point: if it isn’t the power of the satan that Jesus is drawing on to do what he’s doing, he must be doing it through the power of God. But that means that God’s kingdom, God’s sovereign and saving rule, really is breaking in, on earth as in heaven. Third, however, the victories Jesus is winning here and now, up close and personal, are signs that an initial victory has already been won. The “strong man” has already been “tied up,” which is why Jesus can now plunder his house (Matt. 12:29; Luke 11:21–22). Jesus declares that he has already seen the satan falling like lightning from heaven (Luke 10:18). These strands within Jesus’s teaching are all over the place. If we want to understand what he thought he was up to, we have to take them seriously and see the role they play in the whole picture.

But if there had been an earlier “victory,” when did it take place? Matthew, Mark, and Luke all supply the answer: at the beginning of Jesus’s public career, during his forty-day fast in the desert, when the satan tried to distract him, to persuade him to grasp the right goal by the wrong means, and so to bring him over to his side (Matt. 4:1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13). Jesus won that battle, which was why he could then announce that God’s kingdom was now beginning to happen.

Jesus' initial victory was over satan during 40 days in the desert

And the dark powers that put Jesus on the cross continued to the last with their mocking questions: “Save yourself, if you’re God’s son! Come down from the cross!” (Matt. 27:40), echoing the same voice in the desert, “If you really are God’s son, tell these stones to become bread!” (Matt. 4:3). Somehow it appears that Jesus’s battle with the satan, which was the battle for God’s kingdom to be established on earth as in heaven, reached its climax in his death. This is a strange, dark, and powerful theme to which we shall return. For the moment the point is clear: Jesus is indeed fighting what he takes to be the battle against the real enemies of the people of God, but it is not the battle his followers or the wider group of onlookers was expecting him to fight. Jesus has redefined the royal task around his own vision of where the real problem lies. And he has thereby redefined his own vocation, which he takes to be the true vocation of Israel’s king: to fight and win the key battle, the battle that will set his people free and establish God’s sovereign and saving rule, through his own suffering and death.

those who saw Jesus ride into Jerusalem that day, as the city prepared for Passover, were in the position of the experienced commander. Jesus’s action, the prophecy it evoked, the multiple themes of Passover (victory over the tyrant, freeing of slaves, sacrifice, the presence of God) would without difficulty form a single, coherent, though deeply challenging whole. What we, unschooled in their worldview, their controlling narrative, are bound (at least to begin with) to see as separate elements would have appeared to people in Jerusalem at the time as a single rich, dense event. They would have taken it in at a glance, meanings and all. So what was its “meaning”? For a start, this was an emphatically royal action, a claim to be Israel’s true king.