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

by N.T. Wright

Jesus saw his own work, his own public career, his own very person, as the reality to which Temple, sabbath, and creation itself were pointing. That is, or ought to be, a clear indication that, in terms of the “God” of first-century Jews, Jesus understood himself to be embodying this God, doing things whose best explanation was that this was what God was doing, and so on. My problem with “proofs of divinity” is that all too often, when people have spoken or written like that, it isn’t entirely clear that they have the right “God” in mind. What seems to be being “proved” is a 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.

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.

The gospels are not about “how Jesus turned out to be God.” They are about how God became king on earth as in heaven.

It 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. But that is what the stories in the Bible are all about. That’s what the story of Jesus was, and is, all about. That is the real challenge, and skeptics aren’t the only ones who find clever ways to avoid it.

It is indeed by a river, Israel’s principal river, that we glimpse the first of these moments of triple vocation. John, Jesus’s cousin, was baptizing people in the river Jordan, the place (it cannot have been accidental) where the Exodus story reached its goal and the people their inheritance.

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.

This was how, when the perfect storm had done its worst, Israel’s God would establish a new community, a people in whom the promises would be fulfilled, in whom the living God would come to dwell as in the Temple, revealing his glory to the world.

Perhaps the most terrifying thing in the whole gospel story is the realization that Jesus’s solemn warnings about the judgment that was to come upon Jerusalem and the Temple within a generation were drawn from biblical prophecies not simply of the destruction of Jerusalem, but of the destruction of Babylon.

When he wanted fully to explain what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory. He didn’t even give them a set of scriptural texts. He gave them a meal.

But John’s readers and Mark’s readers know by now that it is because he is Son of God that Jesus must go to the cross, that he must stay there, that he must drink the cup to the dregs. And he must do so not in order to rescue people from this world for a faraway heaven, but in order that God’s kingdom may be established on earth as in heaven.

Jesus, in other words, has taken the accusations that were outstanding against the world and against the whole human race and has borne them in himself.

If the Christian faith is true—if, in other words, Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead three days later to launch God’s new creation and, by his Spirit, to reenergize his followers to be its active agents—then the moment of Jesus’s death is, like Jerusalem on those ancient maps, the central point of the world.

Suppose, in other words, that the ancient Israelite scriptures were right, and that heaven and earth were after all the twin halves of God’s created reality, designed eventually to come together. Suppose that what has kept them apart all this time is that the human creatures who were put in charge of the “earthly” part of this creation had rebelled, and that their rebellion had generated a sufficient head of steam for “earth” to declare, as it were, independence, the desire to rule itself.

If we think of Jesus during his lifetime in the way we have throughout this book and then ask about the meaning of Easter, the answer is obvious. This is the real beginning of the kingdom. Jesus’s risen person—body, mind, heart, and soul—is the prototype of the new creation. We have already seen him as the Temple in person, as the jubilee in person. Now we see him as the new creation in person.

So for Jesus “going to heaven” isn’t a matter of disappearing into the far distance. Jesus is like somebody who has two homes. The homes are right next door to each other, and there is a connecting door. One day the partition wall will be knocked down and there will be one, glorious, heaven-and-earth mixture.

The world is out of joint, and God’s “judgment” will perform a great act of new creation through which it will be restored to the way God always intended it to be.

Who is the true God? Where is he now living? And, above all, who is now in charge? For the early Christians, the answer was, “Jesus.” “They’re saying,” said their accusers in Thessalonica, “that there is another king, Jesus!” (17:7). Well, precisely. That’s what the whole story has been about.

We see the same picture when we look at the other books of the New Testament. Whether it’s Paul’s letters or the ones ascribed to Peter, whether it’s Hebrews or that spectacular set piece of apocalyptic imagery we call Revelation, the message is the same. Jesus is the Lord, but it’s the crucified Jesus who is Lord—precisely because it’s his crucifixion that has won the victory over all the other powers that think of themselves as in charge of the world.

The Spirit and suffering. Great joy and great cost. Those who follow Jesus and claim him (and proclaim him) as Lord learn both of them. It’s as simple as that.

The crucial factor in Jesus’s kingdom project picks up the crucial factor in God’s creation project. God intended to rule the world through human beings. Jesus picks up this principle, rescues it, and transforms it.

Jesus rescues human beings in order that through them he may rule his world in the new way he always intended.

It has been all too easy for us to suppose that, if Jesus really was king of the world, he would, as it were, do the whole thing all by himself. But that was never his way—because it was never God’s way. It wasn’t how creation itself was supposed to work. And Jesus’s kingdom project is nothing if not the rescue and renewal of God’s creation project.

Modern Christians use the word “witness” to mean “tell someone else about your faith.” The way Luke seems to be using it is, “tell someone else that Jesus is the world’s true Lord.”

We therefore have to reread the book of Acts with a relentless determination not to be drawn down into the usual categories, into stories of spiritual experiences, remarkable healings, strange divine promptings and leadings, conversions, and so on. All of these matter. They matter very much indeed. But they are the modus operandi of the thing that really matters, the fact that through Jesus’s followers God is establishing his kingdom and the rule of Jesus himself on earth as in heaven.

All kingdom work is rooted in worship. Or, to put it the other way around, worshipping the God we see at work in Jesus is the most politically charged act we can ever perform. Christian worship declares that Jesus is Lord and that therefore, by strong implication, nobody else is.

Ideally, then—I shall come to the problems with this in a moment—the church, the community that hails Jesus as Lord and king, and feasts at his table celebrating his victorious death and resurrection, is constituted as the “body of the Messiah.” This famous Pauline image is not a random “illustration.” It expresses Paul’s conviction that this is the way in which Jesus now exercises his rule in the world—through the church, which is his Body. Paul, rooted as he was in the ancient scriptures, knew well that the creator’s plan was to look after his creation through obedient humankind. For Paul, Jesus himself is the Obedient Man who is now therefore in charge of the world; and the church is “his body, the fullness of the one who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23). It is this vocation that gives the church courage to stand up in the face of the bullying self-appointed masters of the world, to resist them when they are forcing their communities to go in the wrong way, while at the same time demonstrating, in its own life, that there is a different way of being human, a way pioneered and now made possible by Jesus himself. “God’s wisdom, in all its rich variety,” is to be “made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places—through the church!” (Eph. 3:10).

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 Beatitudes are the agenda for kingdom people. They are not simply about how to behave, so that God will do something nice to you. They are about the way in which Jesus wants to rule the world. He wants to do it through this sort of people—people, actually, just like himself (read the Beatitudes again and see). 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. This is how to be the people through whom the victory of Jesus over the powers of sin and death is to be implemented in the wider world.

Acts begins by saying that in the first book (i.e., the gospel of Luke) the writer described “everything Jesus began to do and teach” (Acts 1:1). The implication is clear. The story of Acts, even after Jesus’s ascension, is about what Jesus continued to do and teach. And the way he did it and taught it was—through his followers.

But Paul is clear that we do not have to wait until the second coming to say that Jesus is already reigning. In fact, Paul in that passage says something we might not otherwise have guessed: the reign of Jesus, in its present mode, is strictly temporary. God the father has installed Jesus in power, to act on his behalf; but when his task is complete, “the son himself will be placed in proper order” under God the father, “so that God may be all in all.”