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

by N.T. Wright

Jesus has taken Israel’s destiny upon himself and will now take Israel’s fate upon himself, so that Israel’s vocation can be accomplished.

But it is a different sort of kingdom from anything that Pilate has heard of or imagined: a kingdom without violence (18:36), a kingdom not from this world, but emphatically, through the work of Jesus, for this world.

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.

The point was not to rescue people from creation, but to rescue creation itself.

In Jesus’s own understanding of the battle he was fighting, Rome was not the real enemy.

but the real enemy, to be met head-on by the power and love of God, was the anti-creation power, the power of death and destruction, the force of accusation, the Accuser who lays a charge against the whole human race and the world itself that all are corrupt and decaying, that all humans have contributed to this by their own idolatry and sin.

Jesus did indeed represent his people. The life of the nation is bound up in the king.

Having loved his own who were in the world, wrote John, he loved them to the end. To the uttermost.

They seem to be about a person who is equally at home “on earth” and “in heaven.” And that is, in fact, exactly what they are.

That’s because we are Platonists at heart, supposing that if there is a “heaven,” it must be nonphysical, beyond the reach of space, time, and matter. But suppose Plato was wrong?

What we are witnessing in the resurrection stories—

world—is the birth of new creation. The power that has tyrannized the old creation has been broken, defeated, overthrown.

A new power is let loose in the world, the power to remake what was broken, to heal what was diseased, to restore what was lost.

Now there is a completely different way to live, a way of love and reconciliation and healing and hope.

Heaven permeates earth. If Jesus is now in “heaven,” he is present to every place on earth.

The ascension enables him to be present everywhere.

He was born to be king of the world, the king who would upstage Caesar himself; he was baptized as Israel’s Messiah, who in Psalm 2 would rule the nations; and now he is enthroned, installed officially as what he already was in theory.

Luke certainly intends us to be thinking of Daniel 7 in all its political significance. This is the moment at which Israel’s representative is installed as the true world ruler, with all the warring pagan nations made subject to him.

Better to stick with this third point about ascension, that it is the fulfillment of Daniel 7.

Jesus is radically upstaging Caesar. Actually, if we think of the story as the opening frame of the book of Acts, we get the point, because the closing frame is Paul in Rome, under Caesar’s nose, announcing God as king and Jesus as Lord “with all boldness, and with no one stopping him.”

Jesus’s death and his followers’ suffering are the means by which his peace, freedom, and justice come to birth on earth as in heaven.

Believing in the second coming itself is anything but arrogant. The whole point of it is to insist, over against not only the wider pagan world, but against all self-delusion or pretension within the church, that Jesus remains sovereign and will return at last to put everything right.

will be the central feature of the much greater event that the New Testament writers promise, based on Jesus’s resurrection itself: heaven and earth will one day come together and be present and transparent to each other.

He comes, of course, as the one who died for us; there is no doubting his love. But his love is the love that wants the very best for us and from us, not the sentimental kind that doesn’t want to make a fuss

The only proper Christian way to think of the second coming is, as I said, with humility and patience.

It is about the church living as a new community, giving allegiance to Jesus as Lord rather than to the kings and chief priests who rule the Jewish world or the emperor or magistrates who rule the non-Jewish world.

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.

What does the lordship of Jesus look like in practice in the world where we bail out the big banks when they suddenly run out of cash, but don’t lift a finger to help the poorest of the poor who are paying the banks interest so the banks can get rich again?

For Chris, God is at work in the world, and our task is to see what he’s doing and to join in, to do it with him.

The ancient Epicureans believed that the gods, having set the world in motion, had left it to its own devices and that they seldom if ever stepped in to redirect traffic, to perform strange “interventions” or “miracles.”

Either God and the world collapse into one another, or they are divided by a great gulf.

What does it mean, today, to say that Jesus is already ruling the world?

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.

And Jesus’s kingdom project is nothing if not the rescue and renewal of God’s creation project.

One name for this something is Love.

In God’s kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king. That is how Jesus goes to work in the present time. Exactly as he always did.

Jesus, we remember, redefined “space” around himself, so that the “holy place” of the Temple in Jerusalem was upstaged by his own work, by his own person.

Where they are, heaven and earth are joined together. Jesus is with them, his life is at work in and through them, and, whether in Jerusalem or out in the wider world, they are the place where the living God, the God who is reclaiming the world for his own,

Acts 17,

Somehow, if we are to speak wisely of God as king and Jesus as Lord, we have to speak of something radically new and the refreshment of something radically ancient, something fundamental in the way the world is.

Acclaiming Jesus as Lord plants a flag that supersedes the flags of the nations, however “free” or “democratic” they may be. It challenges both the tyrants who think they are, in effect, divine and the “secular democracies” that have effectively become, if not divine, at least ecclesial,

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).

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).

In the New Testament, “good works” are what Christians are supposed to be doing in and for the wider community. That is how the sovereignty of Jesus is put into effect.

The church is not supposed to be a society of perfect people doing great work. It’s a society of forgiven sinners repaying their unpayable debt of love by working for Jesus’s kingdom in every way they can, knowing themselves to be unworthy of the task.

the moment any of us imagine that we are automatically special or above the dangers and temptations that afflict ordinary mortals—that is the moment when we are in gravest danger.

we must give full weight to the difficult but important biblical vision of God’s sovereignty over the nations and his determination to shape their fortunes to serve his larger purposes.

God wants the world to be ordered, not chaotic. He

Second, even when the rulers are wild or wicked, God can bend their imaginings to serve his purpose.