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March 27 - April 11, 2020
Jesus’s entire mission turns on the central theme of the kingdom of God.
It is surprising that two thousand years after this startling announcement, many Christians who sincerely want to follow Jesus know so little of the kingdom that was at the heart of his ministry.
Living as we do in modern Western democracies, the whole notion of kingdom is alien to our everyday experience.
In the previous chapter we surveyed four well-known answers to these questions: the Zealots espoused revolution, the Sadducees promoted compromise with the Roman authorities, the Pharisees taught strict cultural and religious separation, and the Essenes advocated complete withdrawal.
And then comes Jesus, who refuses to walk in any of these paths. His way is startlingly different: it is the way of love and of suffering, “love of enemies instead of their destruction; unconditional forgiveness instead of retaliation; readiness to suffer instead of using force; blessing for peacemakers instead of hymns of hate and revenge.”
The birth of Jesus is the incarnation of God in human history.
These words of the Father affirm that Jesus is Israel’s anointed king, here to inaugurate the kingdom of God.
Jesus announces the good news that God’s power to save his creation has arrived.
God has entered human history in love and power to liberate, heal, and renew the whole world.
“God is returning to rule!”
The lives of those who choose to hear and follow Jesus are to center not on the Torah but on Jesus himself.
“Follow me”—few images express more vividly the total commitment and absolute loyalty Jesus demands: loyalty to God’s kingdom is expressed in loyalty to Jesus.
Jesus carries out his mission in intimate communion with God, addressing him as Abba, “Father”
Jesus maintains intimate communion with the Father in prayer, and this unleashes the Spirit’s power to heal and renew.
What he does reject is what these things have come to represent in his own day: separation, hatred, and a thirst for vengeance.
Naturally, since (in the Pharisees’ view) Jesus’s gift of forgiveness competes with God’s own forgiveness, this draws their charge of blasphemy.
When Jesus touches the blind, the deaf, the leprous, and the lame, he not only heals their bodies and liberates them from oppression but also restores them to full membership in the kingdom.
Jesus’s followers were not to walk in the way of hatred, revenge, and violence that characterized their contemporaries in Israel, but to walk the way of mercy and love.
It is just this kind of confusion that Jesus addresses in the parables.
It certainly doesn’t look like what they expect. Throughout the Gospels it is clear that the disciples just don’t “get” it.
The parables help those who receive Jesus’s word in faith to understand the nature of the kingdom as it appears in Jesus. At the same time the parables veil the truth from those who refuse to believe
Jesus tells many parables—at least forty—and we have looked at only a sampling. Yet in these few, the main themes of Jesus’s teaching are evident: the parables reveal what the kingdom is really like, in contrast to the misunderstandings of Jesus’s hearers.
Twelve represents the tribes of Israel, and so the sending of the Twelve suggests symbolically that the message of the kingdom is for all Israel. Similarly, when Jesus sends the seventy-two this symbolically represents the gentile nations.
Separation is everything to the Pharisees.
This—the identity of Jesus—is the heart of the matter. Peter’s confession is a turning point in the gospel that we must understand.
All the people of Israel, and particularly Israel’s kings (as the nation’s representatives before the Lord), were designated God’s sons
As Jesus continues to teach his disciples, two themes now dominate: (1) the necessity of suffering and (2) the cost of being a disciple.
“Whoever wants to be my disciple,” Jesus says, “must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me”
To follow him means to participate in his mission
This is the final and most important of the three symbolic actions Jesus performs in Jerusalem: in this meal he dramatizes the climactic event of his kingdom mission.
By “the blood of the covenant” the exile would end and God’s kingdom would come.
The men of the Jewish Sanhedrin know full well that blasphemy is not a capital crime under Roman law. Instead, they charge Jesus with treason and sedition, claiming that he has been subverting Israel by opposing the payment of taxes to Caesar and by claiming to be a king
But when we follow the story of God’s works in history and arrive at the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we see the most awesome of all God’s works of redemption. It is at the cross that God delivers the deathblow to human sin and rebellion and accomplishes the salvation of his world. Yet the crucifixion hardly seems like a victory for God, especially not when we see this event in the context of first-century Roman culture.
At the same moment, something strange happens back in the city, a long way from Golgotha, deep within the Jerusalem temple itself. There, the heavy curtain that separates the holy of holies from the outer chambers, veiling the place of God’s presence from the people, is torn from top to bottom, but not by human hands (Mark 15:38). The death of Jesus has opened a way into the very presence of God
The Romans were not alone in this opinion. The sheer horror and degradation of death by crucifixion made it impossible also for Jews to accept this as an event that might reveal the hand of their God.
The New Testament is unique in ancient literature in interpreting the crucifixion in a positive way, as the greatest of God’s actions in history.
Seen in one way, the cross is a token of foolishness, weakness, humiliation, defeat, absurdity. Seen in another way, by those who know that Jesus is alive again from the dead, the cross is full of God’s wisdom, power, glory, victory, and purpose.
Yet God’s purposes move beyond the salvation of individuals. In the death of Jesus, God acts to accomplish the salvation of the entire creation: Jesus dies for the world.
The goal of God’s redemptive work is to restore his creation from the effects of sin on it.
This in-between time, after Jesus’s first coming and before he comes again, is a time of mission for the exalted Christ, the Spirit, and the church.
His answer is significant: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.
These two signs of the Spirit’s presence—wind and fire—are significant.
In the next section of his book, Luke describes the life of this early community. This is not merely a history lesson but also a blueprint for what the newly constituted people of God ought to be in every age.
The first is devotion:
The church is thus known by convincing signs of God’s saving power within it (v. 43), by justice and mercy in its communal relations (vv. 44–45), by joyful conviviality (vv. 46), and by worship
They do not become believers as a result of missionary activity; rather, the fascination emitted by the people of God draws them close.”
In Luke’s account this witness by the actions as well as the words of the believers begins with Peter and John visiting the temple.
Mere human opposition cannot stop the spread of the gospel because the growth of the church and the coming of the kingdom are the work of God.
Thus begins a tradition of caring for bodily needs within the church, a practice that will continue to be a powerful witness to the compassion, mercy, and justice of the gospel—attracting even priests.
As the book of Acts tells the story, the spread of the gospel might seem to be mostly the work of the apostles as they are directed and guided by the Spirit. Yet here and there are reports showing that the lion’s share of evangelism was the work of ordinary believers, the “informal missionaries” of the early church: “The great mission in Christianity was in reality accomplished by means of informal missionaries.”
