Simply Good News: Why The Gospel Is News And What Makes It Good

by Tom Wright

all-embracing energy, which swept people off their feet in the first century and ...

The Power ...

never about God simply having a bit more power than humans, so that he could manage to beat them at their own game.

people step back from the big claims in the Bible and turn the radical good news into something they find more believable. Something about ‘me and my relationship to God’ or about ‘going to heaven’. Something more like advice than news.

Let’s be clear. The relationship each of us has with God is hugely important. It is also vital to insist that God will indeed look after his people following their deaths, all the way to his final new creation. But these are not the centre of the good news.

The good news is about the living God overcoming all the powers of the world to establish his rule of justice and peace, on earth as in heaven. Not in heaven, later on. And that victory is won not by superior power of the same kind but by a different sort of power altogether.

We know what the power of the world looks like. When push comes to shove, as it often does, it is the power of violence, using the threat of pain and death. It is, yes, the power of tanks and bombs, and also of guns and knives and whips and prisons and barbed wire and bulldozers.

The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love. That is the good news.

Jesus of Nazareth went to his death

believing that this would be the ultimate good-news moment. This was when the Creator’s plan to rescue Israel, humans, and the whole world would come at last to its strange, dark conclusion. That was the climax of the good news Jesus came to announce and embody. Jesus on the cross was the ultimate good news in person.

All these images speak of the strange victory of the new king over the powers of evil. This is the moment of the messianic victory. As the four Gospels indicate, it comes down in the last analysis to a battle between Jesus, as the pioneer of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven, and the accuser, the satan, the dark quasi-personal force bent on destroying God’s work, God’s kingdom, God’s world. And now God’s son. The satan does its worst, piling up false accusations, betrayals, and unjust judgments against Jesus. Evil, in this quasi-personal sense, grows at last to its full height. It reveals its true self, in all its horror. And at that moment, the divine sentence of condemnation is pronounced upon it. Upon evil itself.

It isn’t just that Jesus somehow survives, lives (as it were) to fight another day. The resurrection doesn’t simply

mean, ‘Well, he took it all and somehow came through unscathed.’ Jesus was not unscathed. He didn’t ‘survive’. He really suffered. He really bled and died. The resurrection doesn’t mean that the death didn’t matter or wasn’t real. What the resurrection reveals – apart from new creation, obviou...

What looked like a judicial punishment meted out upon Jesus was in fact a judicial punishment – an actual sentence of death – meted out upon evil itself.

Sin has been condemned; punishment has been meted out. Therefore sinners who are now ‘in the Messiah’ can be confident that there is ‘no condemnation’ for them.

though Paul very clearly sees Jesus’s death here as both penal (this was a judicial sentence) and substitutionary (Jesus dies, therefore we do not die), he does not say that God punished Jesus. That would be an oversimplification, and it lends itself to distortion. Stick with the big picture. On the cross, God passed the sentence of death on evil itself.

What was holding back the kingdom was the dark power, the force of evil itself. On the cross, that force, that power was defeated. All it can now do is shout and scream and flail about in its death throes. True, that can still be terrible and destructive. We all know this, in our own lives and in the wider world. But the early Christians – who themselves knew only too well that the world had not turned into Utopia overnight and that they still faced suffering, prison, and death – firmly believed that what had happened on the cross was the Messianic victory.

When we say today that ‘the Messiah died for our sins’, this is close to the heart of what we should mean.

Without Easter – that is, without Jesus being raised from the dead into a new bodily life – nobody would ever have imagined that God’s saving plan had been fulfilled.

one more martyr wouldn’t mean that the kingdom of God had come. It would mean that it hadn’t. Israel, and the world, would still be waiting.

even if the advice was good, it would still mean that people were waiting for the great day to dawn, not that they were celebrating its arrival.

resurrection meant. That word was not a fancy way for talking about life after death. It always referred to a new bodily life after a period of being bodily dead.

Jews were the only people in the ancient world who believed that God would eventually raise the dead – that is, bring them back to some new sort of bodily life as part of his promise to renew the whole creation.

Though this belief was unique to Jews, however, not all Jews shared it. The conservative elite who ran the Temple, always wary of dangerous innovations, rejected the idea of resurrection;

But in the time of Jesus, bodily resurrection was the mainstream popular belief. It’s reflected in the burial customs of the period, a telling sign.

But – and this is one of the most important points – this resurrection was to be something that would happen to everybody, at the very end of everything. Nobody envisaged that it mi...

the whole point of the resurrection was that it would be for ever.

Jesus’s followers did neither. They declared that he was Israel’s Messiah and the world’s rightful

Lord. You can’t explain that unless you say they really did believe that the unimaginable had happened – that he had been bodily raised from the dead.

For the Jews, as for the early Christians, belief in resurrection drew together two other foundational beliefs. First, God was the creator of all things who had made a world full of beauty and power. Second, God intended to sort out the mess into which the world had fallen. He would judge it – that is, he would get rid of everything that corrupted and defaced it, in order to renew it and make it, even more gloriously, what it was supposed to be. Creation and judgement thu...

the story they tell involves two things that are closely intertwined. First, the tomb was empty. Second, Jesus appeared to his followers and talked and ate with them.

There is a story in the book of Acts about Peter escaping certain death and turning up at the house where the church was praying for his release. Hearing his voice, they say, ‘It must be his angel!’ – in other words, he must have been killed, and this is a ghostly visitation, as it were, coming to say goodbye. This did not mean he had been raised from the dead. It was clear confirmation that he hadn’t been.

without the resurrection of Jesus there is no good news. Without the resurrection, there is nothing to say that the crucifixion itself accomplished any of the things we discussed in the preceding chapters.

But the resurrection of Jesus – without

which it is straightforwardly impossible to explain the rise of early Christianity at all – must then be seen in a particular light. Here again, as with the cross, it is possible to set it, as a fragment, within the wrong narrative. It is possible to reconstruct the scene so that the resurrection, though firmly believed, means something quite different from what it means in the New Testament. We need a different framework for the whole story.

The main point of the resurrection is that it is the beginning of God’s new world.

The point is that today, as in Paul’s day, when people announce that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and raised from the dead, that he was and is Israel’s Messiah and the world’s rightful Lord, then things happen.

The good news is that the one true God has now taken charge of the world, in and through Jesus and his death and resurrection. The ancient hopes have indeed been fulfilled, but in a way nobody imagined. God’s plan to put the world right has finally been launched. He has grasped the world in a new way, to sort it out and fill

it with his glory and justice, as he always promised. But he has done so in a way beyond the wildest dreams of prophecy. The ancient sickness that had crippled the whole world, and humans with it, has been cured at last, so that new life can rise up in its place. Life has come to life and is pouring out like a mighty river into the world, in the form of a new power, the power of love. The good news was, and is, that all this has happened in and through Jesus; that one day it will happen, completely and utterly, to all creation; and that we humans, every single one of us, whoever we are, can be caught up in that transformation here and now. This is the Christian gospel. Do not allow yourself to be fobbed off with anything less.

In this chapter I want to try to answer these and similar objections. In particular, I want to suggest that part of the problem lies in the way well-meaning Christian teachers, over many generations, have put the emphasis in the wrong place. Subtle distortions have crept in.

What people say they can’t believe is quite often not exactly what classic Christianity ought to be affirming.

Can we trust the Gospels?

That isn’t to say that we can ‘prove’ everything in them. Of course we can’t. Hardly anything in history works like that. The demand for proof often comes from people who have scientific proof in mind. But that’s not how history works.

History necessarily studies things that cannot be repeated. It works from evidence and looks for high probability about what caused that evidence.

Like science, however, history works by hypothesis and verification. That is to say, you look at the evidence, come up with a larger picture within which the event might make sense, and then test that larger picture once more against the evidence a...

like most things in life that really matter – love, beauty, justice – you can’t prove things in history the way you can prove Pythagoras’s theorem. But there are lots of things you can be certain of nonetheless.

Jesus’s life, his announcement of God’s kingdom, his radical redefinition of that kingdom, and his death on a Roman cross – we can be certain

all that. Few serious historians of any background or belief wou...

Jesus’s resurrection falls into a different category. Not because it wasn’t a historical event in the sense of something that actually happened in history. But because if it did happen, it set a new s...

Lots of events do that in smaller ways. Splitting the atom. Space travel. The discovery of America. Everything looks different once those have happened. After them, you can’t fit new discoveries into your previous picture of the way the worl...