Simply Jesus - Chapter 8 "Stories that Explain and a Message that Transforms"

In chapter 7 N.T. Wright talks about Jesus starting the "campaign" of God becoming King through His announcements of the coming of the kingdom of God and through His actions that reflected what the Jews would have known to expect of God's Messiah (the healings and miracles and parties and the choosing of twelve disciples). All of this was compelling to the Jews who knew in their bones from their history what all of this signified.

In this chapter Wright deals with Jesus' stories which He told as part of His campaign. It was His main way of explaining what was going on. "They were stories designed to tease, to clothe the shocking and revolutionary message of God's kingdom in garb that left the hearers wondering, trying to think it out, never quite able (until near the end) to pin Jesus down. They were stories that, eventually, caused some to decode his deep, rich message in such a way as to frame a charge against him, either of blasphemy, sedition, or 'leading the people astray.'"

Jesus' stories were echoes of the ancient scriptural promises and they reminded people of Israel's future hopes and implied that those hopes were now being fulfilled even if in a different way than they expected. The parables  are stories that give kingdom explanations for Jesus' kingdom actions and are saying, "This is what it looks like when God is in charge."

This chapter of the book is rich with examples of different types of stories that Jesus used, such as:
1.  Heavenly stories ("other-worldly goings-on") with clear earthly meanings to convey the message about things that ought to be happening now on earth, not just in heaven. (Example: Luke 16:19-31)

2.  Many of His stories pick up Israel's story from the past - the Exodus, the creation, God and Israel, the Exile... (Ex: Matthew's parable about the sower, also told in Mark 4:1-20 and Luke 8:4-15).

3.  Stories that include apocalyptic vision, and the book of Daniel plays an important role in understanding Jesus' use of apocalyptic vision in His stories. Daniel's visions are about the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world, which is what Jesus was talking about too! "The book of Daniel was designed to be subversive, to act as 'resistance literature' to help the Jews as they faced persecution. Jesus seems to have designed his parables a bit like that too - though now to help his followers understand the deeper and stranger point, namely, that he was calling into being a renewed 'Israel' over against not only the might of pagan empire, but the official structures of Judaism itself (Herod, the chief priest, and so on)... Apocalyptic visions of this sort are about the coming of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven. The point of 'apocalyptic' is that the seer, the visionary - Daniel, Jesus - is able to glimpse what is actually going on in heaven and, by means of this storytelling technique, the strange-story-plus-interpretation, is able to unveil, and therefore actually to set forward, the purposes of heaven on earth. The very form of the parable thus embodies the content it is trying to communicate: heaven on earth."  (Ex: the parable of the sower in Matthew 13 includes this dimension.

4.  Pithy sayings and extended metaphors. (Ex: Matthew 9:14-17)

5.  Stories that show Israel's lack of interest in Jesus' kingdom. (Ex: Matthew 21:33-46)

Jesus' stories all contribute toward the wider narrative of His public life: the long-desired kingdom of God is coming  on earth as in heaven but the very "children of the kingdom" are missing it! Any idea that Jesus' teachings were simply moral/religious teachings about a new pattern of spirituality is a way of domesticating Jesus and His message. His stories were highly offensive to both the religious and the political powers of His day (and are the same today). "...If God was to become king it would be - it could only be - by some kind of a confrontation with these forces...Jesus' campaign was never going to be a smooth, easy ride to power...Jesus had grasped that, if God was to become king on earth as in heaven, something deeper than outward reformation would be required. It wouldn't do simply to tighten up existing laws and regulations and enforce them more strictly. That's what the Pharisees wanted to do; they were a popular pressure group urging a moral reformation as part of their own vision of how God might become king..."

Chapter 7 concludes with a section on transformed hearts and shows how Jesus' point in dealing with such issues as divorce and adultery (as in Mark 10:1-12) is not primarily a discussion on family ethics but (against the backdrop of Herod Antipas' adultery and consequent murder of John Baptist) to point out the hardness of heart that was behind Moses' granting permission for divorce and that when God becomes king, "he will provide a cure for hardness of heart." There is no "chance of this teaching collapsing into a private piety...To ask the question about divorce in that setting is no mere theoretical enquiry. It was inviting Jesus to incriminate himself, to say something that might lead Antipas to do to Jesus what he'd done to John..."

And so we're seeing that Jesus' campaign for the kingdom has included the elements of healings, celebrations, forgiveness, the renewed heart (and more). Now comes the question about what Jesus thought related to whether the kingdom was already here or yet to come...or might it be both in some respects??  Chapter nine will deal with this question...