Simply Jesus Quotes

“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.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Here, then, is the message of Easter, or at least the beginning of that message. The resurrection of Jesus doesn’t mean, “It’s all right. We’re going to heaven now.” No, the life of heaven has been born on this earth. It doesn’t mean, “So there is a life after death.” Well, there is, but Easter says much, much more than that. It speaks of a life that is neither ghostly nor unreal, but solid and definite and practical. The Easter stories come at the end of the four gospels, but they are not about an “end.” They are about a beginning. The beginning of God’s new world. The beginning of the kingdom. God is now in charge, on earth as in heaven. And God’s “being-in-charge” is focused on Jesus himself being king and Lord. The title on the cross was true after all. The resurrection proves it.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“People even talk of being “on the wrong side of history,” as though they knew not only what the last twenty years had produced, but what the next twenty years were going to produce as well. The idolization of “progress,” of “moving with the times,” is part of the same movement. “Now that we live in the twenty-first century . . .” people begin, as though it were obvious that one’s ethics or theology ought to change with the calendar. All this is a form of creeping pantheism, of looking at certain trends in the wider world and deducing that they are what “God” is doing. (It’s also very selective; it cheerfully screens out all the inventions of modernism, such as guillotines and gas chambers, which do not exactly fit the picture of an upward journey into light.)”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“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.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Whatever we say about Jesus, there can be no doubt that his actions and his teaching raised these questions wherever he went. And Jesus had his own questions. Who do you say I am? Do you believe in the Son of Man? Can you drink the cup I’m going to drink? How do the scribes say that the Messiah is David’s son? Couldn’t you keep watch with me for a single hour? And finally and horribly: My God, my God, why did you abandon me? The answers come too in more or less equal profusion. But, like all the best answers to the hardest questions, they come themselves as a set of sparkling puzzles, as though to remind people both ancient and modern that the questions are questions precisely because something is going on that demands a collapse of categories, a breaking of boundaries, a widening of worldview to the point where the new thing, whatever it is, will make the sense it does. The reason there were so many questions, in both directions, was that—as historians have concluded for many years now—Jesus fitted no ready-made categories.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Jesus is a walking, living, breathing Temple, he is also the walking, celebrating, victorious sabbath.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“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). This would be the real Exodus, the real “return from exile.” This would be the establishment of the “new covenant” spoken of by Jeremiah (31:31). This would be the means by which “sins would be forgiven”—in other words, the means by which God would deal with the sin that had caused Israel’s exile and shame and, beyond that, the sin because of which the whole world was under the power of death.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Layer upon layer it comes, dense and rich within the texts, echo upon echo, allusion and resonance tumbling over one another, so that for those with ears to hear it becomes un-missable, a crescendo of questions to which in the end there can be only one answer. Why are you speaking like this? Are you the one who is to come? Can anything good come out of Nazareth? What sign can you show us? Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners? Where did this man get all this wisdom? How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Who are you? Why do you not follow the traditions? Do the authorities think he’s the Messiah? Can the Messiah come from Galilee? Why are you behaving unlawfully? Who then is this? Aren’t we right to say that you’re a Samaritan and have a demon? What do you say about him? By what right are you doing these things? Who is this Son of Man? Should we pay tribute to Caesar? 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? Then finally, too late for answers, but not too late for irony: Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us! If you’re the Messiah, why don’t you come down from that cross?
…
And Jesus had his own questions. Who do you say I am? Do you believe in the Son of Man? Can you drink the cup I’m going to drink? How do the scribes say that the Messiah is David’s son? Couldn’t you keep watch with me for a single hour? And finally and horribly: My God, my God, why did you abandon me?
…
The reason there were so many questions, in both directions, was that–as historians have concluded for many years now–Jesus fitted no ready-made categories”
― n.t. wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters – An Exploration of the Disturbing, Urgent, and Breathtaking Message of Christ

“The day the church can no longer say, “We must obey God rather than human beings” (Acts 5:29), it ceases to be the church.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“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.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Blessings on the poor in spirit! The kingdom of heaven is yours” (Matt. 5:3) doesn’t mean, “You will go to heaven when you die.” It means you will be one of those through whom God’s kingdom, heaven’s rule, begins to appear on earth as in heaven. The Beatitudes are the agenda for kingdom people. They are not simply about how to behave, so that God will do something nice to you. They are about the way in which Jesus wants to rule the world.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“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.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Jesus, to be sure, often spent long times alone in prayer. But he was also deeply at home where there was a party, a kingdom party, a celebration of the fact that God was at last taking charge.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“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. This putting right (the biblical word for it is “justice”) is the sort of sigh-of-relief event that the whole world, at its best and at many other times too, longs for most deeply. All sorts of things are out of joint, both on a large and a small scale, in the world; and God the creator will put them straight. All sorts of things are still going wrong, corrupting the lives of human beings and the larger life of the environment, the planet itself; God the creator will put them right. All sorts of things are still wrong with us, Jesus’s followers; Jesus, when he comes, will put us right as well. That may not be comfortable, but it’s what we need.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Without the perspective that sees evil as a dark force that stands behind human reality, the issue of “good” and “bad” in our world is easy to decipher. It is fatally easy, and I mean fatally easy, to typecast “people like us” as basically good and “people like them” as basically evil. This is a danger we in our day should be aware of, after the disastrous attempts by some Western leaders to speak about an “axis of evil” and then to go to war to obliterate it. We turn ourselves into angels and “the other lot” into demons; we “demonize” our opponents. This is a convenient tool for avoiding having to think, but it is disastrous for both our thinking and our behavior.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn’t.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“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.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Whatever else the ancient Israelites believed about their God, he was not a tame God.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“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.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“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.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“(When someone asked Augustine what God was doing before creation, he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions.)”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Perhaps even “his own people”—this time not the Jewish people of the first century, but the would-be Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. 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.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“It is, once again, fatally easy to misunderstand, to draw the lines wrong, to see “our present system” as automatically good, so that anyone who disturbs it—as Jesus was disturbing the system of the scribes and Pharisees—must be “satanic,” must be from the dark side. That road leads to the “war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness,” as at Qumran: the overbright light of an overrealized eschatology, enabling “us” to see ourselves as “children of light,” casting a surreal, overdramatized shadow over “them,” the “children of darkness.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Here we have it. YHWH is in charge and will establish his own rule over the rest of the world from his throne in Zion. But he will do this through his “anointed,” through the one he calls “my son.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“(The fathers of the American Constitution borrowed a key phrase from this poem, novus ordo seclorum, “a new order of the ages,” not only for the Great Seal of the United States, but also for the dollar bill. They were thereby making the striking claim that history turned its vital corner not with Augustus Caesar, nor even with Jesus of Nazareth, but with the birth and Constitution of the United States.)”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“In fact, I increasingly suspect that a good deal of the “methods” developed within professional biblical scholarship over the last two hundred years have been, themselves, the product of a worldview that may not have been truly open to discovering the real Jesus.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“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?”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“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.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“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.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters