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.