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

by N.T. Wright

Modern western culture, especially in America, has done its best to keep these two figures, the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith, from ever meeting. I have done my best to resist this trend, despite the howls of protest from both sides.

As I always say to such people, the question may be simple, but the answer may well not be. In fact, if we try to give a “simple” answer, we may well oversimplify matters and end up just being quizzical. (When someone asked Augustine what God was doing before creation, he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions.) Simplicity is a great virtue, but oversimplification can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness.

I often point out to students that they come to a university not to learn the answers, but to discover the right questions.

Jesus—the Jesus we might discover if we really looked!—is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we—than the church!—had ever imagined.

We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself.

They were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but he was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within quite a new framework. They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer, bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music. He was the king, all right, but he had come to redefine kingship itself around his own work, his own mission, his own fate.

We want a “religious” leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus’s contemporaries did. But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

Throughout his short public career Jesus spoke and acted as if he was in charge.

And it wasn’t very long before his closest followers told him that they thought he really was in charge, or ought to be. He was the king they’d all been waiting for. If we look for a parallel in today’s world, we won’t find it so much in the rise of a new “religious” teacher or leader as in the emergence of a charismatic, dynamic politician whose friends are encouraging him to run for president—

You might have thought, and people certainly did at the time, that Jesus’s untimely death dashed all those hopes once and for all. But not long after his death his associates started to claim that he was now in charge, for real.

What would happen if we took the risk of going back into his world, into his vision of God, and asking, “Suppose it really is true?” What would it look like, in other words, if Jesus not only was in charge then, but is in charge today as well?

And even when the hope didn’t turn into action, it smoldered on in private dreams and prayers. Theocracy! Yes, that’s what they wanted—as long as it was the right God doing the ruling. As Bob Dylan once said, “‘I am the Lord thy God’ is a fine saying, as long as it’s the right person who’s saying it.”

So when Jesus went around saying that God was now in charge, he wasn’t walking (as it were) into virgin territory. He wasn’t making his announcement in a vacuum. Imagine what it would be like, in Britain or the United States today, if, without an election or any other official mechanism for changing the government, someone were to go on national radio and television and announce that there was now a new prime minister or president. “From today onward,” says the announcer, “we have a new ruler! We’re under new government! It’s all going to be different!” That’s not only exciting talk. It’s fighting talk. It’s treason! It’s sedition! By what right is this man saying this?

Yes, God is taking charge. Yes, the great jubilee year is dawning, the time of release, of forgiveness. But it won’t work out the way they had expected. In a shocking reversal, amounting almost to a slap in the face to his hearers (including, we assume, his own family), Jesus declares that the people who will benefit from this great act of God will not, after all, be the people of Israel as they stand.

The book of Daniel was designed to be subversive, to act as “resistance literature” to help the Jews as they faced persecution.

Apocalyptic visions are not simply special divine revelations for their own sake. Nor, on the other hand, are they about the “end of the world.” Apocalyptic visions of this sort are about the coming of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. The point of “apocalyptic” is that the seer, the visionary—Daniel, Jesus—is able to glimpse what is actually going on in heaven and, by means of this storytelling technique, the strange-story-plus-interpretation, is able to unveil, and therefore actually to set forward, the purposes of heaven on earth. The very form of the parable thus embodies the content it is trying to communicate: heaven appearing on earth.

Jesus’s parables, never mind for the moment anything else about him, tell us in their form alone, but also in their repeated and increasingly direct content, that the purposes of heaven are indeed coming true on earth, but that the people who in theory have been longing for that to happen are turning their backs on it now that it is actually knocking on their door:

Memories are stirred. That was where John had been baptizing. That was where John had denounced Herod Antipas for taking his brother’s wife. To ask the question about divorce in that setting was no mere theoretical enquiry. It was inviting Jesus to incriminate himself, to say something that might lead Antipas to do to Jesus what he’d done to John. Jesus sticks to scripture, which they can hardly fault. But in doing so he demonstrates that he is speaking from a world in which God, becoming king on earth as in heaven, is transforming the very hearts of human beings as part of his project of new creation. Jesus’s hearers, thinking from within a world where the legislation for the hard-hearted still applies, cannot even recognize the kingdom when it is breaking in right there in their midst.

the victories Jesus is winning here and now, up close and personal, are signs that an initial victory has already been won. The “strong man” has already been “tied up,” which is why Jesus can now plunder his house (Matt. 12:29; Luke 11:21–22). Jesus declares that he has already seen the satan falling like lightning from heaven (Luke 10:18).

But if there had been an earlier “victory,” when did it take place? Matthew, Mark, and Luke all supply the answer: at the beginning of Jesus’s public career, during his forty-day fast in the desert, when the satan tried to distract him, to persuade him to grasp the right goal by the wrong means, and so to bring him over to his side (Matt. 4:1–11; Mark 1:12–13; Luke 4:1–13). Jesus won that battle, which was why he could then announce that God’s kingdom was now beginning to happen.

As we have just seen, Jesus redefined the great coming battle, so that it would no longer be a military battle of “us” against “them,” of the forces of light fighting with literal weapons against the forces of darkness. Nevertheless, the arrival of this peaceable king will mean the establishment of his worldwide rule; as in the Psalms and Isaiah, Israel’s true king will be the king of the whole world, “from sea to sea.”

So when Jesus came into the Temple and performed another dramatic action, driving out the money changers and the dealers selling animals for sacrifice, this too would have been seen within a web of prophetic allusion and symbolism. Jeremiah, after all, had famously smashed a pot at the same place (Jer. 19), symbolizing the coming judgment. But what was Jesus intending to communicate? What did he mean by his action? 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. That is certainly how the gospel writers saw it. Matthew, Mark, and Luke follow the incident with a string of discussions that all turn on the question of whether Jesus has the right to do this kind of thing, what he means by it, what sort of a revolution he has in mind, and so on, all of which lead readers into the long discourse in which Jesus solemnly declares that the Temple is to be destroyed within a generation (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21). John, who describes Jesus’s action in the Temple much earlier in his gospel, has Jesus saying something cryptic about the Temple being destroyed and then rebuilt in three days—a saying that then turns up in the other gospels, in garbled form, when Jesus is on trial before the chief priests (John 2:19; Matt. 26:61; 27:40).

Notice how this theme then ties in with others we have already observed. If the sabbath now has a purpose, it won’t be for rest from the work of creation, but rather for celebrating God’s victory over the satan: “And isn’t it right,” asks Jesus, “that this daughter of Abraham, tied up by the satan for these eighteen years, should be untied from her chains on the sabbath day?” (Luke 13:16). Victory in the real battle is closely connected with the healings that reveal that God is in charge.

Nor does that mean, of course—in the light of the first point we have just made—that Jesus was saying, “Forget revolution. Go to heaven instead.” 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. “Don’t resist evil,” he said, and the words he used didn’t mean, “Lie down and let people walk all over you.” They meant, “Don’t join the normal ‘resistance’ movements.” The Marxist or quasi-Marxist option simply has too many elements of the story running against it. Clearly, Jesus was not apolitical—how could he be, talking about God becoming king in first-century Palestine?—but his “politics” don’t seem to fit the molds into which many have tried to squash him.

The figure who is seen, in the original vision, as “one like a son of man”—one, in other words, like a human being—is to be interpreted as a symbol for the whole faithful people of God, the people who will be rescued and vindicated.

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.

Many too have wanted a “divine” Jesus as a kind of “superman” figure, a heavenly hero come to rescue them, but not to act as Israel’s Messiah, establishing God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven.

The terrifying warnings are sustained through the great discourse we know as Mark 13, Matthew 24, or Luke 21, using end-of-the-world language to demonstrate that with the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple a world is indeed coming to an end, because a new world is being born. 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. He therefore invoked the language of the book of Daniel—against the very city and Temple for which Daniel had been so concerned.

He cannot establish the new creation without allowing the poison in the old to have its full effect. 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. He cannot begin the work of healing the world unless he provides the antidote to the infection that would otherwise destroy the project from within.

The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven. It was the ultimate Exodus event through which the tyrant was defeated, God’s people were set free and given their fresh vocation, and God’s presence was established in their midst in a completely new way for which the Temple itself was just an advance pointer. That is why, in John’s gospel, the “glory of God”—with all the echoes of the anticipated return of YHWH to Zion—is revealed in and through Jesus, throughout his public career, in the “signs” he performed, but fully and finally as he is “lifted up” on the cross.

If Easter is about Jesus as the prototype of the new creation, his ascension is about his enthronement as the one who is now in charge. Easter tells us that Jesus is himself the first part of new creation; his ascension tells us that he is now running it.

don’t believe everything you read about the Rapture. In fact, don’t believe most of what you read about the Rapture. Many Christians, particularly in North America, have been taught for the last century and a half that when Jesus returns he will come down from “heaven” and that his faithful people (i.e., Christians) will then fly upward into the sky to meet him and be taken to heaven with him forever. Books, movies, a million radio and TV shows, and tens of millions of sermons have drilled this picture into the popular imagination. Indeed, for some people today the Rapture is more or less the center of their faith. But it’s a complete misunderstanding. It’s based on a misreading of what Paul says about the return of Jesus in 1 Thessalonians 4:14–17, just four verses, with the idea of a “rapture” in only one, as the basis for a complete theory of everything:

We do not have God’s kingdom in our pockets, to dispense at will. But what Billy doesn’t realize is that we may be called, nonetheless, to build for God’s kingdom. What we do in the present, as Paul insists, is not wasted (1 Cor. 15:58). It will all be part of the eventual structure, even though at the moment we have no idea how.

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.

when Jesus announced his intention to launch God’s kingdom at last, he did it in a way that involved and included other human beings. God works through Jesus; Jesus works through his followers. This is not accidental.

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, that is, communities that are trying to do and be what the church was supposed to do and be, but without recourse to the one who sustains the church’s life. Worship creates—or should create, if it is allowed to be truly itself—a community that marches to a different beat, that keeps in step with a different Lord.

The work of the kingdom, in fact, is summed up pretty well in those Beatitudes. When God wants to change the world, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the mourners, those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice, the peacemakers, and so on. Just as God’s whole style, his chosen way of operating, reflects his generous love, sharing his rule with his human creatures, so the way in which those humans then have to behave if they are to be agents of Jesus’s lordship reflects in its turn the same sense of vulnerable, gentle, but powerful self-giving love. It is because of this that the world has been changed by people like William Wilberforce, campaigning tirelessly to abolish slavery; by Desmond Tutu, working and praying not just to end apartheid, but to end it in such a way as to produce a reconciled, forgiving South Africa; by Cicely Saunders, starting a hospice for terminally ill patients ignored by the medical profession and launching a movement that has, within a generation, spread right around the globe.

Jesus rules the world through those who launch new initiatives that radically challenge the accepted ways of doing things: jubilee projects to remit ridiculous and unpayable debt, housing trusts that provide accommodation for low-income families or homeless people, local and sustainable agricultural projects that care for creation instead of destroying it in the hope of quick profit, and so on. We have domesticated the Christian idea of “good works,” so that it has simply become “the keeping of ethical commands.” 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.

We can see the same thing going on in the second century, when bishops like Polycarp and apologists like Justin showed proper respect for the authorities, even though those authorities were obviously bent on killing them.

We can sum it all up like this. We live in the period of Jesus’s sovereign rule over the world—a reign that has not yet been completed, since, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:20–28, he must reign until “he has put all his enemies under his feet,” including death itself. But Paul is clear that we do not have to wait until the second coming to say that Jesus is already reigning.

But I stress this point in 1 Corinthians because it makes it very clear that the present age is indeed the age of the reign of Jesus the Messiah.

Where does Jesus come into all this? From his own perspective, he was himself both upstaging the power structures of his day and also calling them to account, then and there. That’s what his action in the Temple was all about. But his death, resurrection, and ascension were the demonstration that he was Lord and they were not. The calling to account has, in other words, already begun—and will be completed at the second coming. And the church’s work of speaking the truth to power means what it means because it is based on the first of these and anticipates the second. What the church does, in the power of the Spirit, is rooted in the achievement of Jesus and looks ahead to the final completion of his work. This is how Jesus is running the world in the present.