Simply Jesus - Chapter 14 "Under New Management - Easter and Beyond"

Chapter 14 covers the resurrection, the ascension and enthronement, and the return of Jesus. As are all of the chapters of this book, this one is rich! (Wright bases all that he is saying here on the belief that Jesus did rise from the dead, so in this book he's not trying to present an argument for His rising.)

A New World
Wright says that the most important thing to know about the meaning of Jesus' resurrection is that "he rose as the beginning of the new world that Israel's God had always intended to make." The author points out that because of the western Platonic worldview, we western believers think of heaven as far away whereas in Scripture, "heaven" and "earth" overlap and interlock – the way ancient Jews believed that the Temple was where heaven and earth met. In the resurrection stories told by those who encountered Him, we're seeing the birth of a new creation in Jesus. "Jesus's risen person – body, mind, heart and soul – is the prototype of the new creation…we see him as the new creation in person."

Rembrandt's painting of the Resurrection

The message of the resurrection is NOT, "We're going to heaven now", or "There is life after death." No, the message of Easter is much bigger – it is what the placard on the cross said: Jesus is the King; and now God's new world, God's kingdom has begun in Him.

Ascension and Enthronement
The ascension of Jesus is about His enthronement as the One who is now in charge. (Again Wright urges the reader to push away the idea that heaven is distant and disconnected from earth.)
Wright underscores four things about the ascension (which I will briefly mention here):
1)  When Jesus ascended He did not disappear into a far distance (keeping in mind the Biblical worldview of heaven and earth overlapping).
2)  Heaven is the place from which the world is run.
3)  The ascension is the fulfillment of Daniel 7. Wright warns that we shouldn't expect to be able to put a story like this into "easy contemporary categories", and so he suggests that Luke's description in Acts 1:9 of the ascension is very likely intended "primarily to evoke that famous passage in Daniel 7:1."
4)  The ascension was Jesus radically upstaging Caesar and was now the new emperor; (the Roman world with its tradition about Julius Caesar's soul ascending to heaven and Augustus then becoming "the son of god" would have understood that Jesus was upstaging Caesar).

The Return of Jesus
The story of Jesus' resurrection and ascension was just the beginning of something new; none of the followers of Jesus in the early church supposed that this was fully accomplished. Where we presently are in God's big story is not the end. There will be a "royal appearing", like Caesar when he would return to Rome after visiting the colonies. His loyal citizens would go out to meet him and escort him in triumph back to the capital city.  (Wright warns about the popular idea in North American Christianity of a rapture in which Jesus will come down from "heaven" and His followers will fly up into the sky to be taken to heaven forever. Again this has platonic thinking behind it.)

"…to think of Jesus 'returning' is actually, as both Paul and John say…, to think of him presently invisible, but one day reappearing. It won't be the case that Jesus will simply reappear within the world the way it presently is. His return...will be the central feature of the much greater event itself: heaven and earth will one day come together and be present and transparent to each other. That's what they were made for, and that's what God will accomplish one day. It has, in fact, already been accomplished in the person of Jesus himself; and what God has done in Jesus, bringing heaven and earth together at immense cost and with immense joy, will be achieved in and for the whole cosmos at last…Eph. 1:10."

Jesus Today
The chapter concludes with a section about Pentecost. Between Jesus' ascension and His return/reappearing He has sent His own Spirit into the lives of His followers to be present in and with them, to direct them, and above all to enable them to make known who the world's true King and Lord is through witness and demonstration of kingdom realities.

Wright places the events of Pentecost in their larger story. "…the story line is not about the church discovering these gifts and simply enjoying them for their own sake. It is about the church living as a new community, giving allegiance to Jesus as Lord rather than to the kings and chief priests who rule the Jewish world or the emperor or magistrates who rule the non-Jewish world. 'We must obey God,' declares Peter, 'not human beings!' (Acts 5:29)

"The underlying issues in Acts - provoked by the Spirit - are about the things that come together in the Temple, namely, God and power. Who is the true God? Where is he now living? And, above all, who is now in charge? For the early Christians, the answer was, 'Jesus.'  'They're saying,' said their accusers in Thessalonica, 'that there is another king, Jesus!' (Acts 17:7) Well, precisely. That's what the whole story has been about.

"...Jesus is the Lord, but it's the crucified Jesus who is Lord - precisely because it's his crucifixion that has won the victory over all the other powers that think of themselves as in charge of the world...Jesus's death and his followers' suffering are the means by which his peace, freedom, and justice come to birth on earth as in heaven. Jesus's kingdom must come, then, by the means that correspond to the message. It's no good announcing love and peace if you make angry, violent war to achieve it!"

The sending of His Spirit to His followers is the power needed to live and walk out His victory in His way, the way of crucifixion (suffering, weakness, misunderstanding, persecution...)

Next week we will cover the final chapter, "Jesus: the Ruler of the World", in which Wright attempts to answer the question, "How does all this work out today?"

Rowboat or Sailboat...?

Some years ago, the Lord spoke Galatians 3:1-3 clearly to me as a watchword and loving warning when I was helping to begin a new ministry in prayer within a "Christian organization". ("Organized Christian ministry" is a topic in and of itself that I have changed my thinking on radically, but for the purposes of this short blog post, I won't touch that and simply say that the Lord humbly speaks and meets us where we are and somehow leads us in spite of our misunderstandings of His ways for which I am very, very grateful! Having said that, I now see why it matters to align our mindsets with His way of doing His work so am also grateful that He keeps leading me into fuller understanding of His ways.)

The Holy Spirit's faithful reminder to me of this word through the following years in this particular "ministry", served us well. In fact, it was a large part of what gave us clarity to continually change the way we did things and gave me clarity when the day came that I sensed I was to step away entirely from it.

The Message expresses this portion of Galatians 3 as follows:
"Let me put this question to you: How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding to God's message to you? Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren't smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it? Did you go through this whole painful learning process for nothing?"

I was blessed this week to read a blog post that applies this idea to the spiritual disciplines and wanted to share it with you in case it brings some life and liberty to your walk with God:

"One of the things that I’m discovering about spiritual disciplines is that I often take that which is relational in its very nature and turn it into something mechanical. Sometimes I find myself thinking: If I carve out time to engage in lectio divina, then God will reveal Christ to me in a way that almost feels tangible. The problem with this approach is it assumes an A + B = C sort of spirituality. If I read the Bible and pray, the formula will yield intimacy with the Spirit of Christ. So, all week long as I fail to create space for my personal holiness mechanism, I begin to use words that contaminate any spiritual vocabulary. The words – fail, success, must, accomplish, achieve, or should – usually demonstrate that one’s faith journey has moved from relational to mechanical approaches to God. When we get to this point we’re basically taking a “should” on our lives as kingdom people."  (Kurt Willems)

Further down in his short post Kurt recommends that we see our walk with God more like being in a sailboat, discerning and catching the ever-changing direction of God's wind and going with Him, rather than as a rowboat in which we are trying to get somewhere or make something happen through hard effort. I agree. In our fallenness, we humans are strongly bent towards mechanizing that which begins organically, and I'm convinced that only the power of the resurrected life of Jesus can enable us to continue in the same spirit as we began (be that in our personal journey with God or in our collective walk and ministry).

It's a great little article that I recommend if this topic is pertinent to you now: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thepangeablog/2012/07/23/should-spiritual-lives/.

Simply Jesus - Chapter 13b "Why Did the Messiah Have to Die?"

Chapter 13 continues by looking at how Jesus would redraw the messianic themes of battle and Temple into an entirely different configuration around Himself. His body, mind and heart would become the battleground, and He was the living Temple where God's presence dwelt and where God's glory was revealed to the world. This was the "new Exodus" with the seven Exodus themes (see chapter 6) playing out:
1 - The wicked tyrant - not the Jewish leaders nor Rome, but all of the powers of the Accuser (including death itself) that are behind the religious and political systems.
2 - The appointed leader - Jesus Himself.
3 - The sacrifice - Jesus Himself.
4 - The victory of God - Jesus' disarming of the powers and His enthronement in His death.
5 - The new vocation - the lifestyle given in the Sermon on the Mount (going the 2nd mile and turning the other cheek, loving enemies, etc.)
6 - The promised inheritance - the entire earth, rather than the restored holy land.
7 - The presence of God - the presence of Jesus Himself.

Stepping into the Storm/The Crucifixion
Jesus' predictions about the destruction of the Temple and the city "are matched, stride for stride, by his own vocation..." He was "wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquity. He cannot establish the new creation without allowing the poison in the old to have its full effect...He cannot begin the work of healing the world unless he provides the antidote to the infection that would otherwise destroy the project from within..."

Many times Jesus tried to explain to those closest to Him what was coming; eventually when He fully unveiled what His coming death was about, He didn't speak theoretically but He gave them a meal, a Passover meal...The Passover meal with His disciples anticipated the fulfillment of the Exodus themes once again, and the battle was to be won (the Red Sea crossed) not by force but by a greater power that the apostle John accurately named: self-giving love! (John 13:1)

John's gospel (much more than a "spiritual" or "evangelistic" tract to help people into a personal spirituality with hopes of an "otherworldly salvation") clearly shows the convergence of the three storms into the perfect storm: the north wind of Jewish religion and the western wind of Roman power were at their highest strength. "The Pharisees are looking for an intensification of law keeping in the hope that this will speed up the coming restoration of Israel. The chief priests are anxious to keep their own shaky power intact and are prepared to do whatever it takes to prevent the Romans from coming and destroying their city (11:48)...Meanwhile, the great gale of  Roman imperial power is gathering its full force; a crisis in the Middle East is the last thing Rome wants, and it will take all the steps it needs to crush anything that looks like a rebel movement."

In John 18-19 we see the confrontation between Jesus representing the kingdom of God, and Pilate representing the kingdoms of this world, and the chief priests who cave in to the Roman way; this confrontation is what "lies at the heart of both the political and theological meaning of the kingdom of God." Ironically, Jesus is crucified as the "King of the Jews", and in His drinking the cup of suffering to the dregs, He established God's kingdom on earth.

Wright asks the question: "How then can we interpret Jesus's death? What models, what metphors, what constructions can we find to do justice to it?" We can and often do belittle His death theologically by reducing it down to one of the following three constructs:
1) By seeing it only as the ultimate expression of love;  2) by making Jesus the representative model who goes through death to new life so that we can do the same "in Him"; or 3) by imagining a straightforward transaction in which God, wanting to punish sinful people, contented Himself with punishing His innocent Son instead (which begs the question about how such a punishment is just or loving).

Wright proposes that all these constructions need to be seen within a larger construction, one which the Gospels present and which is in line with Jesus' own aims and motivations. "Somehow, Jesus's death was seen by Jesus himself...as the ultimate means by which God's kingdom was established. The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven...

"In Jesus's own understanding of the battle he was fighting, Rome as not the real enemy...the real enemy, to be met head-on by the power and love of God, was the anti-creation power...the force of accusation, the Accuser who lays a charge against the whole human race and the world itself that all are corrupt and decaying, that all humans have contributed to this by their own idolatry and sin...At this level the Accuser is absolutely right. 

"But the Accuser is wrong to imagine that this is the creator's last word." What we see throughout Jesus' public career is that he himself is being accused by his own family, his followers, the demons, the power brokers, the high priest himself. "Accusations come rushing together from all sides...and Pilate finally does what all the accusations throughout the gospels have been demanding and has him crucified. Jesus, in other words, has taken the accusations that were outstanding against the world and against the whole human race and has borne them in  himself...

"Rome and rebel Israel are the unwitting tools of the Satan, the Accuser, the great force of anti- creation...The only way, he believed, by which this great anti-creation power could be stopped and defeated would be for him, anointed with God's Spirit to fight the real battle against the real enemy, to take the full power of evil and accusation upon himself, to let it do its worst to him, so that it would thereby be exhausted, its main force spent...Jesus's own mind, heart, and body would be the battlefield on which the final victory would be won, as they were also the Temple in which the powerful, loving presence of Israel's returning God had made his home."

The chapter ends with the author saying that if the Christian faith is true, in other words, if Jesus of Nazareth really did rise from the dead to launch the new creation and to reenergize His followers by His Spirit thereby making them the new creation's active agents, then the moment of Jesus' death is certainly the central point of the world. In chapter 14 Wright deals with the what the resurrection of Jesus was all about.