People sometimes try to read the early days of Jesus’s public career as successful, popular, carrying all before him, but then posit a change, a decline in popularity, and the embracing of a Plan B that included suffering. The texts know nothing of such a mid-course change. Danger, threat, and challenge are there from the beginning. 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.
