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

by N.T. Wright

They told the thousand-year story of Rome as a long and winding narrative that had reached its great climax at last; the golden age had begun with the birth of the new child through whom peace and prosperity would spread to the whole world. The whole world is now being renewed, sang Virgil in a passage4 that some later Christians saw as a pagan prophecy of the Messiah.

For reasons surprisingly similar to those of today’s Western powers. Rome needed the Middle East for urgent supplies of necessary raw materials. Today it’s oil; then it was grain.

As far back as we can trace their ancient scriptures, the Jewish people had believed that their story was going somewhere, that it had a goal in mind. Despite many setbacks and disappointments, their God would make sure they reached the goal at last. This is the story within which many Jews of Jesus’s day believed, passionately, that they themselves were living.

After all, they were taught that their God was the one true God of all the world. He wasn’t simply one more god among many.

Their theme came to its fullest flowering in the great story of the Exodus,

the desert to the promised land. The Jews lived on the hope that it would happen again. The tyrants would do their worst, and God would deliver the people.

The God who brought order out of chaos and who brought his enslaved people out of Egypt would do it again.

These two themes—the great evil empire and the coming royal deliverer—look back partly to the Exodus

And there grew up a sense that a new Exodus, a real “return from exile,” was still to be awaited, had not yet happened. It would come when the last great world empire had done its worst. Indeed, it would result in the overthrow of that dark power.

This always was the highly unpredictable element within the Jewish story itself. God remained free and sovereign.

He believed, it seems—the stories he told at the time bear this out quite strikingly—that as he came to Jerusalem he was embodying, incarnating, the return of Israel’s God to his people in power and glory.

Jerusalem itself was going to be thrown down, stone by stone.

itself, the central symbol of national identity and the building that made Jerusalem what it was, because Jerusalem and its leaders had not recognized the moment when God was visiting them, was coming back to them in person (Luke 20:44).

Here, then, is the third element in the first-century perfect storm: the strange, unpredictable, and highly dangerous divine element. The wind of God.

This was where the hurricane of divine love met the cold might of empire and the overheated aspiration of Israel.

death. Only then might we begin to understand how it is that the true Son of God, the true High Priest, has indeed become king of the world.

their robust beliefs that their God was the one and only God, their anguish was the pain of the world, and the agony of their own people was at the heart of that world. Jerusalem, as ever, stood at the point where the tectonic plates of the world crashed together. It was, it seemed, the appropriate place of prayer for a world in pain.

The point is this. At exactly the time when Jesus was growing up, there was a movement—call it a political movement, a religious movement, or (as Josephus calls it) a “philosophy”—that said that it was time for God alone to be king.

In between the long years of hope and the even longer years of crushing sorrow, this movement emerged saying that God, only God, could and would be king. God would come back and would rule his people.

will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom.

There is a sense in which it isn’t an either/or choice, either God or David. Somehow it seems to be both.

Israel’s God is celebrated as king especially in Jerusalem, in his home in the Temple. Second, when Israel’s God is enthroned as “king,” the nations are brought under his rule. Israel rejoices, but all the other nations will be included as well—

Third, when God is king, the result is proper justice, real equity, the removal of all corruption and oppression.

This could hardly be clearer. The human “shepherds” have been a dismal failure; only YHWH himself will now do.

I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd.

He who sits in the heavens laughs; YHWH has them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, “I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.”

Here we have it. YHWH is in charge and will establish his own rule over the rest of the world from his throne in Zion. But he will do this through his “anointed,” through the one he calls “my son.”

There was, after all, no obvious model for what it might look like, how it might happen,

The notion of YHWH himself as Israel’s true king thus became closely bound up with the idea of his powerful return.

Ezekiel saw the glory depart because of the people’s wickedness (chaps. 10–11).

But then, toward the end of his majestic book, he was given another vision of YHWH’s glory returning to the newly rebuilt Temple (43:1–5).

returned from Babylon to Judaea. Yes, they had rebuilt the Temple. But YHWH had not returned to fill the house once more with his glory.

Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

We notice the echoes of promises made to David in Psalm 2 and elsewhere: when the true king of Israel arrives, he will be king not only of Israel, but of the whole world.

God’s welcoming of them into a kind of extended holy people). When God acts as Israel believes he will, it will be not only to rescue his people, but to establish his sovereign rule over the whole world.

not just as a great teacher and healer, not just as a great spiritual leader and holy man, but as a strange combination: both the Davidic king and the returning God.

In Jesus, they believed, God himself had indeed become king. Jesus had come to take charge, and he was now on the throne of the whole world.

First, why would anyone say this of Jesus, who had not done the things people expected a victorious king to do?

Second, what on earth might it mean today to speak of Jesus being “king” or being “in charge,”

He spoke about God himself becoming king. And he went about doing things that, he said, demonstrated what that meant and would mean.

And with that, the sea is lashed into a frenzy; the wind makes the waves dance like wild things; and 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.

Already we are back again in the eye of our own, modern historical storm. Skeptics have always scoffed at these stories.

But then others say, no, “miracles” are what you’d expect if there’s a “supernatural” God and if Jesus is his son.

And then a third element asks: what do we actually know about these things within first-century history anyway?

Let him be a rescuer, snatching people away from this world to “heaven.” But don’t let him tell us about a God who actually does things in the world.

We might have to take that God seriously, just when we’re discovering how to run the world our own way. Skepticism is no more “neutral” or “objective” than faith.

Jesus was going about sorting out the near-at-hand stuff. But he was talking, the whole time, about God being in charge on a larger scale as well.

We treat our political leaders as heroes and demigods; they carry our dreams, our fantasies of how things should be.

They didn’t understand, any more than we do, why a world made by a good God would somehow go wrong, but clearly that had happened.

systems, broken countries. The whole thing needed fixing, needed mending, needed to be put right. And the Jewish people believed that they, the family of Abraham, were part of the answer, part of the mending operation, part of the putting-right plan.