Simply Jesus - Chapter 11 "Space, Time, and Matter"

In chapter 11 N.T. Wright tackles the issue of how different the first-century Jewish view of space, time, and matter is from the modern western view. He contends that if we approach the stories about Jesus with our modern worldview, we will not be able to understand what He was about.
(There is too much in this chapter for me to do justice to this topic in this review, and so once again, I recommend your reading the entire book to get fuller understanding:  http://www.amazon.com/Simply-Jesus-Vision-What-Matters/dp/0062084399/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341501372&sr=8-1&keywords=simply+jesus+n.t.+wright)

Redefining Where God Dwells (Space)
In this section of the chapter the author goes into detail about the Temple and what it signified for the first-century Jew related to "sacred space". It was the place where heaven and earth joined together, the holiest place on earth. Judaism regarded the Temple as the "incarnational" symbol. Jesus was walking around acting as though He were the Temple, in person. "Heaven and earth were being joined up - but no longer in the Temple in Jerusalem. The joining place was visible where the healings were taking place, where the party was going on..., where forgiveness was happening...Jesus was, as it were, a walking Temple. A living, breathing place-where-Israel's-God-was-living."

The Temple (which over time had come to represent commercial oppression, corrupt banking system, and nationalism) had been a great signpost pointing forward to another reality; now that the reality is here in Jesus, the signpost was no longer needed. 

Time Fulfilled (Time)
Here Wright deals with the Sabbath and how the Jews would have thought of time. They understood time to be moving forward in a linear fashion, not cyclical. They see time in light of God's good creation for which He has a certain purpose being worked out in time. The meaning of God resting on the seventh day wasn't that He took a day off work but that He had made the world (heaven and earth together) for His own dwelling place, and, like a builder of a house, He had finished the job and moved in to take up residence to enjoy what He had built. So the seventh day of rest was a signpost pointing forward to say that a day was coming when His purposes for creation would be accomplished and God, along with His people, would rest and enjoy what He had accomplished.

The whole idea of a year of agricultural rest every 7 years and the Jubilee year every 50th year was wrapped up in the Jewish worldview of time and God purposes. When Jesus came on the scene, He said things like, "...the time is fulfilled" (Mark 1:15). Our modern idea that Jesus' behavior of breaking the Sabbath rules was simply because the Sabbath had become legalistic is trivial. The main thinking behind His actions was that "the sabbath was the regular signpost pointing forward to God's promised future, and Jesus was announcing that the future to which the signpost had been pointing had now arrived in the present...This was the time - the time! - when all the sevens, all the sabbaths, would rush together...If the sabbath now has a purpose, it won't be for rest from the work of creation, but rather for celebrating God's victory over the satan... If Jesus is a walking, living, breathing Temple, he is also the walking, celebrating, victorious sabbath."

A New Creation (Matter)
In this section Wright handles the Jewish worldview about matter, the physical world in all it complexity and glory. Their worldview differs dramatically from our modern worldview which has as a bedrock principle that the material world is "relentlessly and reductively subject to the laws of physics, chemistry, and...sciences of astronomy, biology, zoology, botany, and the rest."

Jesus' Transfiguration

The Jewish worldview sees the world of matter as much part of God's good creation as the world of space and time and a vessel for His glory. When Jesus came healing the sick and raising the dead and feeding many with a few fish and commanding the raging storm to settle down and walking on a lake, "something new is happening, and it's happening to the material world itself." These acts that affect the material creation are ways in which God is showing that He is present in this material world and not far away in a distant heaven as Deism teaches.

The most striking example of transformations within the material world is Jesus' transfiguration (Matt. 17:1-8)..."...the strangest moment of all when the glory of God comes down not to the Temple in Jerusalem, not to the top of Mount Sinai, but onto and into Jesus himself, shining in splendor, talking with Moses and Elijah, drawing the Law and the Prophets together into the time of fulfillment. The transfiguration...is the central moment. This is when what happens to space in the Temple and to time on the sabbath happens, within the life of Jesus, to the material world itself or rather, more specifically, to Jesus's physical body itself."

For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, this event is meant to demonstrate that "just as Jesus seems to be the place where God's world and ours meet, where God's time and ours meet, so he is also the place where, so to speak, God's matter - God's new creation - intersects with ours."

The chapter ends with Wright addressing the error in western Christianity's view that Jesus came to teach us how to "get to heaven." Rather, the point of Jesus' public ministry was to show that God was taking charge right here on earth and that His works were signs of that happening...

Chapter 12 returns to the metaphor of the "perfect storm" and examines the key places in scriptures where the perfect storm was anticipated and predicted.