A few days ago I wrote about beginning to read Tom Wright’s Simply Jesus. I’ve continued reading since then, and quite honestly, it’s just too good not to blog about. So you can probably expect a good few more posts based on and inspired by the book as I work my way through it.
In my previous post, I highlighted Wright’s point that the ancient Jewish people had all kinds of expectations as to what kind of Messiah they wanted, and that Jesus pretty much sidestepped them all. In chapter 2, Wright points out certain “puzzles” that make it hard for us, from our twenty-first century, Western vantage point, to understand just who Jesus thought he was and what he thought he came to do. The following excerpts should give you a good flavour:
Throughout his short public career Jesus spoke and acted as if he was in charge.
Jesus did things people didn’t think you were allowed to do, and he explained them by saying he had the right to do them. He wasn’t after all, merely a teacher, though of course he was that too — in fact, one of the greatest teachers the world has ever known. He spoke and acted as more than a teacher. He behaved as if he had the right, and even the duty, to take over, to sort things out, to make his country and perhaps even the wider world a different place. He behaved suspiciously like someone trying to start a political party or a revolutionary movement. He called together a tight and symbolically charged group of associates (in his world, the number twelve meant only one thing: the new Israel, the new people of God). And it wasn’t long before his 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.
I think the point Wright is trying to make here is that Jesus really was quite radical – not in the sense that the word has come to have in the modern evangelical church, which, it seems to me, is more about having an appearance of passion (i.e. obvious and fervent enthusiasm) and engaging in certain church- and mission-related activities. No, Jesus was radical in the sense that he publicly and unashamedly advocated and agitated for a “new world order” at a time when there was already a very dominant world order in place that no one who valued their life would dare mess with (Rome). And not only did he talk about it, he embodied it too.
Which prompts the question, what is the dominant world order against which Jesus’ kingdom is competing today? I guess it depends where in the world you live. From my vantage point in a (mostly) peaceful and free democracy, the dominant power is not so much an earthly government or empire as a prevailing and highly pervasive worldview. The gods of the age are consumerism, materialism, greed and individualism. These are the powers against which God’s kingdom stands.
Wright goes on (emphasis added):
You might have thought, and people certainly did at the time, that Jesus’ 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. And they started to act as if it was true. This isn’t about ‘religion’ in the sense the Western world has imagined for over two hundred years. This is about everything: life, art, the universe, justice, death, money. It’s about politics, philosophy, culture and being human. It’s about a God who is so much bigger than the ‘God’ of ordinary modern ‘religion’ that it’s hardly possible to think of the two in the same breath. The really striking, and really puzzling, thing about Jesus — then and now — is that he seems not only to have been talking about this much bigger God, but actually launching the transformative new project this God had planned all along. And his followers really believed it had happened.
Jesus emphatically did not come to start a church or a religion. To think he did is to completely misunderstand the man and his message. And yet this is what we have so often reduced him to: the leader of a religion, or, at best, the manager of the “spiritual” compartment of our lives, which is nicely separated off from all the other compartments — our finances, our careers, our families, our politics, and so on. I’m reminded of a famous quote by Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper:
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, “Mine!”
In a culture in which self-determination is everything, Jesus’ message is unashamedly and radically countercultural. And so, as we read and seek to understand that message, we have a choice: will we water it down so that we can continue to serve the gods of selfish gain and fulfilment while maintaining an appearance of being radical; or will we fully embrace it, which will mean allowing the very foundations of our Western worldview to be shaken to the core?
