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

There is no way I will be able to do justice to this powerful and lengthy chapter 13 about Jesus' crucifixion. I hope you can read it for yourself...

In it Wright draws all the strands together of the winds that were blowing (political forces - Rome, and religious forces - the Jews, and then God's force which didn't back up either of the other forces), and he shows, at least in part (it would take a world of books to tell it fully), why the Messiah had to die in order for God to become King.

I'm skipping over wonderful parts of this chapter about the many questions swirling around Jesus during His public ministry and death, and about the questions Jesus Himself asked. For sure, Jesus fit no "ready-made categories." Who was He??? According to Wright, He was "like three great rivers that had been traveling in separate valleys and now come together...a gigantic and powerful confluence. The great river of messiahship, of Israel's long and checkered history of monarchy, comes crashing together with the dark flow of the servant, and both together are swept up in the longer, darker, and still more powerful current of the belief that Israel's God would return at last to his people..."

There's a powerful section in this chapter about Jesus' baptism and its significance in the story. In His baptism (the voice of the Father and the act of being baptized) we see three ideas come together, which up till now had been separate in the minds of God's people:
1) a royal figure - Jesus' baptism was His anointing as King and the launching of His kingdom;
2) the servant - His humility in submitting to baptism and therein identifying with His people in repentance and sorrow for sin;
3) God Himself - the Father's affirmation of Him as His son: "You are my son! You are the one I love! You make me very glad!" (Mark 1:11)

After His anointing in baptism, Jesus was tested in the wilderness as to what kind of Messiah He would be and showed that God's way as King is unlike anything people expected. Jesus embodied the return of Israel's God as promised but in a way that no one was prepared for. He combined Psalm 2 with Isaiah 42, and even more specifically Isaiah 52:7-12 with Isaiah 52:13-53:12. "Jesus's vocation to be Israel's Messiah and his vocation to suffer and die belong intimately together..." All four gospel writers insist that Jesus is enthroned on a cross..."The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven."

"The disciples wanted a kingdom without a cross. Many would-be 'orthodox' or 'conservative' Christians in our world have wanted a cross without a kingdom...Many too have wanted a 'divine' Jesus as a kind of 'superman' figure, a heavenly hero come to rescue them, but not to act as Israel's Messiah, establishing God's kingdom on earth as in heaven. Jesus' shocking combination of scriptural models into a single vocation makes excellent historical sense...But as we shall see, it remains as challenging in our world, and indeed in our churches, as it was in Jesus' own day."

I'll complete chapter 13 in the next day or so...