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

by N.T. Wright

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.

It is that the sheep are in danger of being totally lost, since they appear to have no shepherd at all.

“Listen to me, all of you,” he said, “and get this straight. What goes into you from outside can’t make you unclean.

What makes you unclean is what comes out from inside.”

“What makes someone unclean,” he went on, “is what comes out of them.

The purity rules on which Judaism thrived then and, for the most part, thrives still today are (he says) irrelevant.

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.

No, his point is that when God becomes king, he provides a cure for uncleanness of heart.

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.

fulfilled. It was the story that was in the heads and the hearts of those who first heard Jesus of Nazareth speaking about God finally becoming king. It was the story that they turned into song as he rode into Jerusalem.

what it might have meant for someone at the time to be “king of the Jews.” It meant victory; it meant Temple; it meant establishing the Jewish people in peace and prosperity.

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.

Once we learn to think the way Jews of the time thought and indeed take into consideration the real political situation (rather than just a set of religious ideas or beliefs), the idea of a kingdom that is both emphatically present and emphatically future is not a problem. It is just what we should expect.

To what extent did he share the aspirations of the kings and would-be kings before and after his day?

Indeed, as the Sermon on the Mount seems to indicate, fighting itself, in the normal physical sense, was precisely what he was not going to do. There was a different kind of battle in the offing, a battle that had already begun.

Jesus warned his followers against the deceits this figure could perpetrate. His opponents accused him of being in league with the satan, but the early Christians believed that Jesus in fact defeated it

Final victory over this ultimate enemy is thus assured (Rev. 20), though the struggle can still be fierce for Christians (Eph. 6:10–20).

It is, of course, difficult for most people in the modern Western world to know what to make of it at all; that’s one of the points on which the strong wind of modern skepticism has done its work well,

We turn ourselves into angels and “the other lot” into demons; we “demonize” our opponents. This is a convenient tool for avoiding having to think, but it is disastrous for both our thinking and our behavior.

You can no longer assume that “that lot” are simply agents of the devil and “this lot”—us and our friends—are automatically on God’s side.

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.

Tragically, even the people of God themselves, focused on the Temple in Jerusalem, are to be seen now as children of the devil (John 8:44).

“The only reason this fellow can cast out demons,” they said, “is because he’s in league with Beelzebul, the prince of demons!” Jesus knew their thoughts. “Suppose a kingdom is split down the middle,” he said to them. “It’ll go to rack and ruin! If a city or a household is split down the middle, it’s doomed! And if the satan drives out the satan, he’s split down the middle—so how can his kingdom stay standing?

If you’re not with me, you’re against me. Unless you’re gathering the flock with me, you’re scattering it.

It’s a clash of kingdoms: the satan has his kingdom, God has his, and sooner or later the battle

between them will be joined.

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.

What is the final battle that Jesus envisages?

It is the battle against the satan himself.

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.

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.

In each case, of course, building the Temple was associated with the larger story of victory over enemies, liberation for the people, and so on. It was the Exodus narrative, in other words, the Passover narrative, all over again; and we shouldn’t forget that a key element in the Passover narrative was always the presence of Israel’s God himself with his people,

Passover implies Presence.

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.

But Zechariah’s prophecy also makes it clear that this king will come as a man of peace. As

The result will be the establishment of God’s covenant with his people, a covenant sealed in blood and resulting (think once more of Egypt, of the Exodus, of Passover) in prisoners being set free.

Like many others, I have become convinced that Jesus’s dramatic action was a way of declaring that the Temple was under God’s judgment and would, before too long, be destroyed forever.

Jesus was in some sense or other pronouncing God’s judgment on the Temple itself—and, by implication, on the present regime that was running

If the Temple isn’t the center of everything, the place where heaven and earth meet, the building in which God and his people come together, then what is?

In the same way, we have in my generation watched the erosion of special time.

It wasn’t, as sacred buildings have been in some other traditions, a retreat from the world. It was a bridgehead into the world. It was the sign that the creator God was claiming the whole world, claiming it back for himself, establishing his domain in the middle of it.

Jesus, as we have already seen, had been going about saying that this God, Israel’s God, was right now becoming king, was taking charge, was establishing his long-awaited saving and healing rule on earth as in heaven. Heaven and earth were being joined up—but no longer in the Temple in Jerusalem.

the joining place, the overlapping circle, was taking place where Jesus was and in what he was doing.

David had wanted to build a house for God, and God had replied that he would build David a “house.” David’s coming son is the ultimate reality;

But it isn’t just that the signpost had become redundant with the arrival of the reality.

The Temple had come to symbolize the nationalist movement that had led many Jews to revolt against pagan oppression in the past and would lead them to do so once more.

It had become a symbol of Israel’s violent ambition,

Time is moving forward in a linear fashion, with a beginning, a middle, and an end—unlike some other visions of time, in which everything is cyclical,