Jesus of Nazareth Page 6
We can only do justice to the New Testament if we insist that God spoke himself fully in Jesus. Jesus is the definitive presence of God in the world. Who sees him, sees the Father (John 14:9). He is “the Son” in a sense that cannot be said of any human being. Ultimately the unconditional “today” Jesus proclaims is grounded in his unrestricted participation in the eternal “today” of God.
Those who subtract from Jesus’ present eschatology are therefore in great danger of minimizing the mystery of Jesus’ person. It is no accident that it is John’s gospel, which contains the statement “I and the Father are one” (10:30)—note: it does not say “I and the Father are identical,” but “I and the Father are one”—that represents the clearest and most unconditional present eschatology in the New Testament. Thus the “not yet” of the reign of God is brought about not by God’s hesitation but by the hesitance of human beings to turn their lives around. People prefer not to let God get too close. They would rather dance at their own weddings than at the one to which God is inviting them.
Honorable Excuses
So Jesus had to tell in a parable (Luke 14:15-24) how a man prepared a banquet, taking care to provide a fine meal and doing everything to make his guests happy. Finally it was ready—and the guests did not come, even though they had long since been invited. Instead, one excuse after another arrived: I have bought a farm, please excuse me. I have bought five yoke of oxen, please excuse me. I have just gotten married; alas, I cannot come.
The parable is neither about the salvation of individuals nor about joy beyond this world. It is about God’s feast with his people, which is to happen now, in the hour of Jesus’ appearing. That feast is as much in question today as it was then. Those invited continue to find new excuses to shield themselves from the God who is near and from the gathering of the people of God.
For the most part the excuses are honorable. They almost always end with: “I would like to. But at the moment it is not possible!” But Jesus’ “today” says: you have no more time, because the world is burning down. You have to act now, for you have encountered God’s cause. You have to put your whole existence in play, right now—now, because you have received God’s invitation.
Not a Kantian Ethics of Duty
But—when we put it this way, we see immediately that this “you must!” cannot stand in isolation, or it will fall short of Jesus’ proclamation. In such a case Jesus would be nothing but the holiest of all moralists. Jesus’ aim, with his “today,” is not primarily duty, the imperative, the moral “must,” but the jubilee over the feast that is offered, the joy at the treasure and the pearl we can find already.
The parable of the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price (Matt 13:44-46) will be treated at length later in this book (cf. chap. 14). Here I want only to point out the uncompromising present eschatology of the parable. It does not say: “It is with the reign of God as with a treasure someone found. He buried it again, went home rejoicing, and lived afterward with the happy thought that the treasure existed and at some time in the future he would hold it in his hand.” No, the parable tells how the man obtains the treasure, on the spot: “in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matt 13:44).
So the hidden treasure of the reign of God is already dug up, and the pearl of great value has already been acquired. The feast is ready to begin, and everything depends now only on whether those invited will come.
Theological Avoidance Maneuvers
This chapter has been about Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God. The focus was quite clearly on the present aspect of the reign of God as proclaimed by Jesus. There is a reason for that: it is just this present aspect in Jesus’ preaching that is repeatedly softened, both in theology and in teaching and preaching.
It is true that biblical scholars constantly emphasize that in the interpretation of the reign-of-God texts surrounding Jesus the tension between present and future, or between “already” and “not yet,” cannot be resolved in favor of either pole. But this insight, correct in itself, is then for the most part not maintained. The principle has scarcely been established when the present character of the reign of God is soft-pedaled again. This means, for example, that the reign of God is only present in Jesus’ own person, or it is only present in Jesus’ symbolic actions, or it is only present in Jesus’ words, or it is dynamic, proleptic, anticipative, punctually-situationally present, or—here the analysis is highly refined—it is present in the mode of its expression. I can’t help it: the real result of such restrictions after the fact is that the reign of God is forced farther into the future. One need have no respect for such linguistic artistry; we can simply regard it as a set of classic avoidance maneuvers.
Not only Protestant theology but Roman Catholic as well has been laden with such evasive maneuvering for centuries now. Neoscholasticism made of Jesus’ eschatology a tract on “the last things.” Paul’s theology of the Spirit suffered a similar fate. In Paul’s writing, Jesus’ present eschatology is contained in the theology of the Holy Spirit, who has taken up residence in the baptized and is changing the world through them. But what has happened to Paul’s talk about the presence of the Spirit? All this is why it is the present aspect of Jesus’ proclamation that has to be kept in the foreground if we want to speak adequately about his idea of the reign of God.
The Humble Form of the Reign of God
Certainly this chapter has omitted another aspect of Jesus’ appearance that must be included here; otherwise all that he said about the reign of God in his preaching would have been one-sided and even distorted. Everyone who reads the gospels and lets them affect him or her has the impression that a marvelous glow lay on the beginning of Jesus’ work, a kind of bright morning light. Think, for example, of the Baptizer’s question in Matthew 11, the one Jesus answered with the jubilant cry: “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Matt 11:5). Or consider the wedding at Cana, which the Fourth Evangelist concludes with the statement: “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (John 2:11).
Jesus must have received an amazing amount of attention in Israel. People ran after him. They brought their sick. They came with their cares and concerns. They hoped for the messianic turning of events. They sensed the new thing, something enormous, something that would surpass everything else. They said: “A new teaching out of sovereign power!” (Mark 1:27).7
Jesus found disciples who followed him. They, too, were fascinated by his message and awaited the great overturning of things. Some biblical scholars speak of this as Jesus’ “Galilean springtime.”
There was much that was right in the way people in Israel reacted to Jesus, and much that was false. Jesus did, in fact, proclaim an overturning, a revolution. He spoke of an action of God that changed everything. But he did not have a political revolution in mind, one that would drive the Romans from the land, nor was he thinking of a messianic fairytale time in which roasted doves flew onto people’s plates. The turning of which he spoke was something different. It presupposed faith, joy in God, becoming his followers, discipleship, a radical understanding of Torah, a new community, new family. Still more, the turning of which he spoke presupposed surrender to the will of God, unto death.
The whole of Mark’s gospel has a substructure whose purpose is to show this “other,” strange, alienating, resistant aspect of Jesus’ message. In Mark the corresponding instructions to the disciples are, in fact, central—and, of course, so are the misunderstandings on the part of the disciples that precede each of them. The whole of Mark’s gospel progresses with a terrible goal-directedness toward Jesus’ passion. And it is not very different in the other gospels.
“Galilean springtime”—if that expression is at all justified, it has a heavy counterweight in the gospels: the disciples’ lack of understanding, the h
atred shown by Jesus’ enemies from the very beginning (Mark 3:6), and at the end his helpless, horrible hanging on the cross. We cannot separate Jesus’ end from his message about the reign of God. We must not think that the proclamation of the basileia and the cross are two completely different things that have nothing to do with one another.
Jesus’ death on the cross again modifies his message about the reign of God. Whether it did so for Jesus is something we can leave open at this point. But in any case it did so for the hearers of the Gospel after Good Friday. It was only in Jesus’ death that this message achieved its proper profundity.
Jesus’ death did not revoke his proclamation of the reign of God; it did not put paid to the good news of the beginning. Instead, it demonstrated the reality contained in that proclamation. It definitively revealed the hidden and humbled8 shape of the reign of God. What does that mean? It means that the reign of God does not come without persecution, without sacrifice. Indeed, it does not come without daily dying. It cannot come any other way.
What was contained in Jesus’ preaching from the very beginning was fully illuminated by his death: the reign of God demands a change of rulership that human beings must carry out. It demands letting go and self-surrender. The reign of God does not come without pure receiving, and that receiving is also always an acceptance of suffering. In his passion Jesus was by no means far from the reign of God; instead, the reign of God comes precisely in the “hour” in which Jesus himself can do no more but hands himself over and surrenders to God’s truth. This is the basic thread of John’s gospel. The “hour” of deepest “humiliation” is the hour of his “glorification,” the hour in which the glory of God encompasses Jesus’ whole “work.”
So Jesus’ announcement of the reign of God achieves in his death, once again, a final precision and focus: the concept “reign of God” cannot be used from here on unless at the same time one speaks of Jesus’ surrender even unto death. For Jesus’ disciples this means that they cannot live in the realm where God reigns without obedience to what this reign of God brings with it. And that, in the midst of a resistant society and resistant church, does not happen without suffering, without sacrifice, without passion stories.
Ultimately, Jesus’ death lays bare all human self-glorification and thereby also every superficial and presumptuous notion of the reign of God. God’s realm can happen only where human beings collide with their own limits, where they do not know how to go on, where they hand themselves over and give space to God alone so that God can act. Only there, in the zone of constant dying and rising, the reign of God begins.
Chapter 3
The Reign of God and the People of God
The preceding chapter showed that for Jesus the coming of the reign of God was no longer something in the distant or near future but something that was happening already, now, in the present hour. Rescue, liberation, salvation—for Jesus it had all irrevocably begun. “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the reign of God has come to you” (Luke 11:20). But at the same time Jesus’ disciples are supposed to pray daily: “your kingdom come” (Luke 11:2). For the reign of God has not come everywhere, not by a long sight, because it has not yet been accepted everywhere—not even by the disciples themselves, who according to the gospels were still dreaming about their own reign (Mark 9:34).
We have seen that in today’s biblical scholarship this tension between the “already” and the “not yet” of the reign of God is much emphasized, though with the greatest variety of nuances. There are scarcely any exegetes left who see the reign of God as beginning in an utterly distant future.
But in contrast, another aspect of Jesus’ proclamation is not yet clear in exegesis in general. The explosive power of the reign of God is not only defused by pushing it into the distant future or into a time beyond time. It can also be handed over to impotence by being made homeless. For Jesus the reign of God not only has its own time, it also has its own place in which to be made visible and tangible. That place is the people of God.
To say the same thing in two Greek words: as the reign of God has its kairos, its proper time, it also has its own topos, its place. It is not a u-topia, which means “no place, nowhere.” The island of Utopia invented by the brilliant English Lord Chancellor and humanist Thomas More (1478–1535) to illustrate his critique of society did not exist and he did not mean for it to do so (cf. chap. 21). In contrast, for Jesus the reign of God is, despite all opposition and persecution, an event whose realization begins in history. Therefore it can be grasped and seen: first in Jesus himself but then necessarily also in the eschatological Israel that Jesus is gathering around himself.
So we must not talk only about the time of the reign of God; we must apply the same intensity and clarity to the search for its relationship to the people of God. Is that being adequately pursued? That is the subject of this chapter. Despite a number of brief excursions into the history of theology, this will not lead us away from Jesus but will bring us closer to him.
Is It Addressed to “Humanity”?
In professional exegetical literature there are long chapters and treatments of Jesus’ idea of the reign of God in which the question of time is shoved back and forth. But the explicit question of its place, that is, of the relationship between the reign of God and the people of God, is lacking in many cases, or else it appears only indirectly. This is demonstrated in almost exemplary fashion by Andreas Lindemann in a long article, “Herrschaft Gottes/Reich Gottes” [“Reign of God/Kingdom of God”] in the Theologische Realenzyklopädie.1 Obviously much of what Lindemann writes is quite correct, but nowhere does he reflect on the theological relationship between Jesus’ preaching of the reign of God and Israel. Instead, he speaks emphatically and repeatedly of “human beings” or “people” in general. God pursues the human being. A person’s sins are forgiven. The reign of God has consequences for human behavior; God’s forgiveness must be matched by human forgiveness. Human beings must be responsible before God. God makes demands on people. The inbreaking reign of God establishes new and definitive standards for human action.
A reader cannot entirely avoid the impression that Jesus apparently had nothing to say to Israel in his preaching. Instead, as a citizen of the world, he wanted to address all humanity. His message about the reign of God was directed to all people of good will throughout the world. The fact that it had its beginning and crucial situation in Israel was probably just an accident.
All this is the more strange in that Erich Zenger, in the Old Testament section of the same article, insistently emphasizes the connection between the sovereign rule of God and the people of God, Israel.2 Apparently the connection is still not sufficiently present in New Testament exegesis. Therefore, it seems good at this point to consider at least one Old Testament passage at greater length. Many such texts could be used, but in some of them the dimension of the reign of God is especially prominent.
The Beasts and the Son of Man (the Human One)
My choice is the great apocalyptic vision in the seventh chapter of Daniel.3 It not only has the advantage of speaking explicitly about the connection between the reign of God and the people of God; as regards the time of its composition, the book of Daniel, as one of the last books in the Hebrew Bible—it was created in the second century BCE—comes relatively close to the time of Jesus. Here is the vision in Daniel 7, slightly shortened:
I, Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings.… Another beast appeared, a second one, that looked like a bear. It was raised up on one side, had three tusks in its mouth among its teeth and was told, “Arise, devour many bodies!” After this, as I watched, another appeared, like a leopard. The beast had four wings of a bird on its back and four heads; and dominion was given to it.
After this I saw in the visions by night a fourth beast, terrifying and dread
ful and exceedingly strong. It had great iron teeth and was devouring, breaking in pieces, and stamping what was left with its feet. It was different from all the beasts that preceded it, and it had ten horns. I was considering the horns, when another horn appeared, a little one coming up among them; to make room for it, three of the earlier horns were plucked up by the roots. There were eyes like human eyes in this horn, and a mouth speaking arrogantly.
As I watched,
thrones were set in place,
and an Ancient One took his throne,
his clothing was white as snow,
and the hair of his head like pure wool;
his throne was fiery flames,
and its wheels were burning fire.
A stream of fire issued
and flowed out from his presence.
A thousand thousands served him,
and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him.
The court sat in judgment,
and the books were opened.
I watched then because of the noise of the arrogant words that the horn was speaking. And as I watched, the beast was put to death, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire. As for the rest of the beasts, their dominion was taken away.…
As I watched in the night visions,
I saw one like a human being [lit.: son of man]
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
and was presented before him.
To him was given dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one