Simply Jesus - Chapter 10a "Battle and Temple"

Chapter 9 ended with Wright's observation that the four Jewish leaders whose story he recounted all had two major parts to their kingdom agenda, and those were "battle" and "Temple". Jesus too had these great themes in His understanding of God's kingdom, so "what did Jesus do with those great interlocking themes of the battle and the victory, on one hand, and the building or cleansing of the Temple (the place of God's presence), on the other?" Chapter 10 attempts to answer this question; I will cover this chapter with two posts, one about the "battle" and one about the "Temple."

"...wherever we look, it appears that Jesus was aware of a great battle in which he was already involved and that would, before too long, reach some kind of climax." However, the battle that Jesus was involved in wasn't what His contemporaries were expecting him to fight. It was different because the enemy was a different kind of enemy.

Temptation in the Wilderness

The author proceeds to talk about "the satan", which means in Hebrew "the accuser." By the time Jesus appeared, the words being used for this source of evil were words such as "Beelzebul/b", "the evil one". The early followers of Jesus believed that He defeated "the satan" in His personal wilderness temptation, in His exorcisms of demons, and in His death. Revelation 20 assures us that there will be final victory over this enemy but meanwhile, there are still fierce struggles for Christians.

The battle that Jesus waged was against this spiritual power. The influence of modern skepticism has made western people confused over the existence of such evil; on the other hand, as Wright warns, "the shrill retort from 'traditionalists', insisting on seeing everything in terms of 'supernatural' issues, hardly helps either...Despite the caricatures, the obsessions, and the sheer muddle that people often get themselves into on this subject, there is such a thing as a dark force that seems to take over people, movements, and sometimes whole countries, a force or a set of forces that can make people do things they would never normally do."

Wright goes out of his way to emphasize that without the understanding that evil is a dark force behind human reality, then the issue of "good" and "bad" becomes "fatally easy"; in other words, if we don't understand that there are real and dark forces behind institutions and groups and nations, we naively fall into categorizing and typecasting people like "us" as the basically good people and people like "them" as basically evil.

We must understand that there are non-human forces capable of using "us" as well as using "them" in the service of evil. This makes things more complicated but also more realistic and no longer allows us to be simplistic about who is being used by these forces..."If there is an enemy at work," says Wright, "it is a subtle, cunning enemy, much too clever to allow itself to be identified simply with one person, one group, or one nation..."  (This is one of the great dangers in aligning oneself strongly with a political party since all political groups have dark forces at work behind them.)

In this spiritual battle Jesus was redefining who the enemies were and who the friends were. "Traditional enemies were suddenly brought, at least in principle, within the reach of the blessing of God's great jubilee. And traditional friends - those who might have thought that they were automatically on the right side - had to be looked at again. Perhaps one can no longer simply identify 'our people' as on the side of the angels and 'those people' as agents of the satan. That's why Jesus was run out of town and nearly killed. He had suggested that foes could become friends and by implications was warning that the 'good people' might become enemies..."

Jesus' battle was with the root problem - not people but "the satan," the dark force that works and uses "us" and "them". The early victory was won in the wilderness temptation when the satan failed to get Jesus to grasp the right goal by using the wrong means, thereby bringing Jesus over to his side (Matt. 4; Mark 1; Luke 4). This victory made possible Jesus' announcement that God's kingdom was beginning, and it "created a space in which God's kingdom can now make inroads, much as the early victory of Judah the Hammer created space for the Temple to be cleansed...But this kingdom, God's kingdom, can only finally be established through the final battle. The enemy troops will mass again, close in, and do their worst to repair the earlier damage."

The final battle was Jesus' confrontation with "the satan" on the cross where victory was won by allowing darkness to do its worst. Jesus didn't allow Himself to be distracted from the real battle by identifying the satan with the humans involved (Rome, Herod, the chief priests). 

"Jesus has redefined the royal task around his own vision of where the real problem lies. And he has thereby redefined his own vocation, which he takes to be the true vocation of Israel's king: to fight and win the key battle, the battle that will set his people free and establish God's sovereignty and saving rule, through his own suffering and death."

The chapter finishes with a section on the Temple, the second major theme of the kingdom agenda that Jewish leaders understood to be imperative. More on that in a day or two...

God's Confidants...

I posted this quote by George MacDonald last year. It's from the book, "Discovering the Character of God":

"Terribly has the gospel of Jesus suffered in the mouths of the wise and prudent! How would it be faring now had its first messages been committed to persons of great repute, instead of those simple fishermen? From the first we would have had a system founded on a human interpretation of the divine gospel, instead of the gospel itself. As it is, we have had one dull miserable human system after another usurping its place. But thank God, the gospel remains!

"Had the wise and prudent been the confidants of God, the letter would at once have usurped the place of the spirit, and a system of religion with its rickety, malodorous plan of salvation, would have been put in place of a living Christ. The great Brother, the human God, the eternal Son, the living One, would have been utterly hidden from the tearful eyes and aching hearts of the weary and heavy laden.

"But the Father revealed his things to babes, because the babes were his own little ones, uncorrupted by the wisdom or the care of this world, and therefore able to receive them. The babes are near enough whence they come to understand a little how things go in the presence of their Father in heaven, and thereby to interpret the words of the Son. Quickly will the Father seal the old bond when the Son himself, the first of the babes, the one perfect Babe of God, comes to lead the children out of the lovely 'shadows of eternity' into the land of the 'white celestial thought.' As God is the one, only, real Father, so is it only to God that anyone can be a perfect child. Only in His garden can childhood blossom."

Simply Jesus - Chapter 9 "The Kingdom Present and Future"

Wright begins the chapter in this way: "When Jesus healed people, when he celebrated parties with all and sundry, when he offered forgiveness freely to people as if he were replacing the Temple itself with his own work - in all these ways it was clear...that this wasn't just a foretaste of a future reality. This was reality itself. This was what it looked like when God was in charge...But there are constant hints...that the coming of the kingdom would depend on future events yet to be realized. He speaks again and again of a coming cataclysm - a great disaster, a judgment, terrible events that would turn the world upside down...
So how can the kingdom be both present and future? What was Jesus trying to say?..."

The rest of the chapter is a study of four men (two of them who lived before Jesus and two who lived after Jesus). By looking at the careers of these four leaders of Israel, Wright is showing how this present-and-future tension was a common reality. The four men are:

Judah Maccabeus, "The Hammer"

1.  Judas Maccabeus ("Judah the Hammer") who rose to prominence during the 160's BC crisis, almost exactly 200 years before Jesus' public ministry.
2.  Simon bar-Kosiba ("Simon the Star") who rose to leadership in AD 132, just about 100 years after Jesus' public career.
3.  Herod Antipas ("Herod the Great") who was placed in power as the "King of the Jews" by Rome in 40 BC.
4.  Simon bar-Giora who appeared at another time of social and political chaos when the great revolt against Rome's rule started in AD 66, ending in the Temple's destruction in AD 70.

For the sake of brevity, I will look only at the first of these leaders, Judah the Hammer, as an example of the "present-and-future" tension commonly at work in these leaders. (Wright's study of the other three is very interesting and is further support for the point he is making about Jesus' kingdom.)

The crucial period of Judah's career was a 3-year campaign that ended in a triumphant entry into Jerusalem and a cleansing of the Temple. It was Syria that was the enemy; Syria's king, Antiochus Epiphanes, had desecrated the Temple by rededicating it to the god Zeus; he attempted to crush the resistant spirit of the Jews by forcing them to eat pork, thereby breaking their sacred law. Judas was the figurehead leader of the Hasmonean family which led the resistance movement. He waged a 3-year guerrilla war at the end of which he purged the Temple of the pagan elements. (It is this victory that the Jews celebrate each year in the festival of Hanukkah.)

Judah's victory "sharpened up the ancient story line: the wicked tyrant oppressing God's people, the noble and heroic leader risking all, fighting the key battle, cleansing the Temple, and setting Israel free to follow God and his law once more. This was the story of Moses, Egypt, and the Exodus. It was the story of David, Solomon, the Philistines and the Temple. It was the story of Babylon overthrown, of return from exile...Some people believed it had all come true in and through Judah and his brothers..."

However, with the passing of time, the reality that prophecies had not been fulfilled and utopia had not arrived with Judah's victory began to dawn on the people. The fact was that the Hasmonean family were themselves far from perfect as rulers of the Jews. And so pressure groups, most famously the Pharisees, arose to try to force the issue. The Pharisees were deeply loyal to their understanding of ancient traditions and fervently expected God to act once more. So once again, when Jesus of Nazareth appeared on the scene about 200 years later, the hopes and prayers of the people had all the elements of Israel's dream: the wicked rulers, the people's suffering, the hero, the battle, the victory, the rule over surrounding nations, the establishment of God's dwelling.

The author's point in exploring the careers of leaders on both sides of Jesus historically is to clarify two things about Jesus' public career: first, that there was always a "well-recognized set of expectations for a 'king of the Jews,' with roots extending all the way back to the Exodus...victory over the pagans and cleansing or rebuilding the Temple were high on the list" of the expectations.

Model of Temple built by Herod the Great

The second thing clarified by examining these leaders is it was expected that any such campaign would have at least two "'key moments': first, the time when the flag was raised, and then the moment when the final battle was won and the Temple was rebuilt. Such movements would expect to live between these two moments, between an initial announcement and a final victory."

David exemplifies this in his being anointed as king long before he was finally enthroned..."Once we learn to think the way Jews of the time thought and indeed take into consideration the real political situation (rather than just a set of religious ideas or beliefs), the idea of a kingdom that is both emphatically present and emphatically future is not a problem..."

All of the 4 characters in this chapter had two major parts to their kingdom agenda: the battle(s) they fought or hoped to fight, and the Temple they cleansed or rebuilt or hoped to rebuild. "What did Jesus do with those great interlocking themes of the battle and the victory on the one hand, and the building or cleansing of the Temple (the place of God's presence) on the other?"

Chapter 10 answers this question about these great themes of battle and the Temple.