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

by N.T. Wright

Creation was itself a temple, the Temple, the heaven-and-earth structure built for God to live in.

there would be a moment of ultimate completion, a moment when the work would finally be done, and God, with his people, would take his rest, would enjoy what he had accomplished.

If the Temple was the space in which God’s sphere and the human sphere met, the sabbath was the time when God’s time and human time coincided. Sabbath was to time what Temple was to space.

Exodus. The jubilee was, as it were, the once-in-a-lifetime “exodus” that everyone could experience.

by arranging Jesus’s genealogy in three groups of fourteen generations (that is, six sevens), so that Jesus appears at the start of the sabbath-of-sabbaths moment.

Now, and only now, do we see what Jesus meant when he said the time is fulfilled.

Rather, the sabbath was the regular signpost pointing forward to God’s promised future, and Jesus was announcing that the future to which the signpost had been pointing had now arrived in the present.

Jesus came to Nazareth and announced the jubilee. This was the time—the time!—when all the sevens, all the sabbaths, would rush together.

The theme of new creation that bubbles up from these stories emerges in our third category: matter. Reality. The physical world in all its complexity and glory.

Again and again the prophets and psalms hint at what we might conceivably have guessed from the story of creation itself: the material world was made to be filled with God’s glory.

We can see the material world itself being transformed by the presence and power of Israel’s God, the creator.

But at least see what is being claimed. These “miracles” make little or no sense within the present world of creation, where matter is finite, humans do not walk on water, and storms do what storms will do, no matter who, Canute-like, tries to tell them not to.

of God’s space and human space coming together at last, of God’s time and human time meeting and merging for a short, intense period, and of God’s new creation and the present creation somehow knocking unexpected sparks off one another.

The transfiguration, as we call it, is the central moment. This is when what happens to space in the Temple and to time on the sabbath happens, within the life of Jesus, to the material world itself or rather, more specifically, to Jesus’s physical body itself.

Within Jesus’s world, the word “heaven” could be a reverent way of saying “God”; and in any case, part of the point of “heaven” is that it wasn’t detached, wasn’t a long way off, but was always the place from which “earth” was to be run.

He warned at one point that, if God’s kingdom was breaking into the world, the men of violence were trying to muscle their way into the act (Matt. 11:12; Luke 16:16). He just wasn’t the sort of freedom fighter we have come to know rather well in the last hundred years or so.

It was about giving up the ordinary kind of revolution, in which violent change produces violent regimes, which are eventually toppled by further violent change, and discovering an entirely different way instead.

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.

Israel had had, in the past, a bad habit of allowing national expectation and aspiration to get out of line with the divine purpose;

Jesus spoke for a divine hurricane that was approaching from quite a different angle to both the Roman gale and the Jewish high-pressure system.

Somehow, the servant is a kind of true Israel figure, doing Israel’s job on behalf of the Israel that has failed.

He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.

And the overall point, we remind ourselves, is that this is where the power of pagan Babylon and the failure of God’s people Israel are met with the sovereign, saving, kingdom-establishing rule of YHWH himself.

There are at least two thrones; the Ancient One sits on one of them, and it seems as though the “one like a son of man” is to sit on the other one.

This will be the great moment of renewal, when, as in Ezekiel, living waters will flow out from Jerusalem, this time not only down to the Dead Sea, but also westward to the Mediterranean (14:8). And then, the climax of it all: And YHWH will become king over all the earth; on that day YHWH will be one and his name one. (14:9)

the main thing to notice here is that Zechariah, like Isaiah and Daniel, envisages the same three lines all converging: the wicked pagan nations who fight against God and his people; the failed Jewish leadership; and God himself coming to do what nobody else can do.

And climactically: Are you the king of the Jews? What is truth? Where are you from? Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One?

And priests also went up to Jerusalem to serve their turn in the Temple. Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, but, as we have seen, his deeds and words indicated that he was going to upstage the Temple, to do something that would make it redundant and leave it to its fate.

Prophets characteristically pointed away from themselves to God and what God was doing and would do, but Jesus, as we have seen, spoke about God in order to explain what he himself was doing and was about to do.

we find three strands meeting up, not now like the elements of a perfect storm, but more like three great rivers that had been traveling in separate valleys and now come together,

of messiahship, of

servant, and

the belief that Israel’s God would return at last to his people.

the Messiah, who will rule the nations from his throne in Jerusalem (Ps. 2), and the servant (Isa. 42–53), who will bring God’s justice to the nations through his own obedient suffering.

like Israel’s kings long ago, for this task. Israel’s God was acting through him, in him, as him.

Up to this point, though, the three themes had been separate.

When he submitted to John’s baptism, expressing the repentance necessary before the great coming restoration and symbolically

reenacting the crossing of the Jordan and the entry into the promised land,

This double strand of meaning (sorrow for sin, on the one hand, launching the kingdom, on the other)

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.

Luke suggests

the subject of their conversation was “his departure, which he was going to fulfill in Jerusalem” (9:31; the word for “departure” is “exodus,”

This dovetails with Luke’s consistent emphasis on the divine plan that “must” be fulfilled, the plan that would send Jesus not to a throne, but to a cross—or, rather, as all four gospel wri...

The disciples wanted a kingdom without a cross. Many would-be “orthodox” or “conservative” Christians in our world have wanted a cross without a kingdom, an abstract “atonement” that would have nothing to do with this world except to provide the means of escaping it.

Death, like a great ugly giant, would do its worst, and pour out its full weight upon him. And the creator God would overcome it, showing it up as a defeated enemy.

Jesus had come to his own, and his own had not received him; he had come to the place where God had promised to put his name, and the place had rejected him.

so as to make a way through, a way in which God’s people could be renewed, could rediscover their vocation to be a light to the nations, could be rescued from their continuing slavery and exile.

He cannot launch God’s kingdom of justice, truth, and peace unless injustice, lies, and violence do their worst and, like a hurricane, blow themselves out, exhausting their force on this one spot.

Instead of Passover pointing backward to the great sacrifice by which God had rescued his people from slavery in Egypt, this meal pointed forward to the great sacrifice by which God was to rescue his people from their ultimate slavery, from death itself and all that contributed to it (evil, corruption, and sin).