Wright, in dealing with Jesus” work as work that brings forgiveness of sins, looks to the narratives of the Deuteronomic history, picked up by Isaiah and others, that sin entails exile, and forgiveness of sins entails restoration. It is this dynamic of “the curse of the law” that he picks up on again and again to explain Jesus” work, and Jesus” own death. The curse of the law is that Israel will be exiled: away from the land, away from the temple, decimated in number–exile is the anti-covenant, the undoing of God”s covenant promises.

Isaiah picks up on this, and sees the exile itself as potentially redemptive, and thus 2nd Isaiah begins:

“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. 2Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” (Isa 40:1f.)

Exile is the penalty for covenant breaking, it pays the debt, and allows Israel to be restored. But the narrative of 2d/3d Isaiah itself, and the narrative of Israel as well, is much more ambiguous than this. The restoration is not full and immediate and glorious. The people return but without owning the land, without renewed hearts. They bore the curse of the law but it did not lead to the promised restoration, from the inside out, envisioned in Deut 28-32, Jer 31, etc.

The law was supposed to be the helper which would usher Israel through its curse and back into heart-renewed obedience after the exile. Moreover, with this restoration of Israel, the nations were to be reordered in their worship of YHWH as well–the world-wide vision of 2d/3d Isaiah is that Israel”s restoration would restore YHWH to glory in the sight of all. The would come streaming to Zion as Zion moved through the covenant curses into the covenant blessings of restoration.

But it didn”t happen.

In this context, the place of Jesus becoming the curse of the law, bearing the judgment of death, dying for the nation and thereby dying for the world has a place. Jesus is living out the calling of one born under the law, one who, in solidarity with his people is judged and condemned by the law–but in the resurrection the judgment of the law is undone as God blesses and restores the cursed one, ushering in new creation (eschatologized vision of the promise of land to Abraham, and thus an eschatologized vision of restoration from exile), making Jesus Lord and Messiah (hence fulfilling the covenant promise to David), giving him an innumerable multitude of brothers and sisters (hence fulfilling the promise of seed), drawing all people to himself (fulfilling the good news of a people of many nations).

In the plot line of Israel”s story and Israel”s law there is a place for penal restoration: that place is exile. In the plot line of Jesus” embodiment of Israel”s story, he represents humanity by representing Israel in not only obedience unto death but also bearing the penalty of disobedience through the cursed death on the cross.

It”s because he bears the penalty of Israel in particular that he can determine the destiny of humanity in general.

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Another pretty good summary of what N.T. Wright says about the meaning of the cross. From Sibboleth blog.

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NT Wright Jesus and the Victory of God , p 172

But we may catch something of the real flavor if we say that Jesus was more like a politician on the campaign trail than a schoolmaster; more like a composer/conductor than a violin teacher; more like a subversive playwright than an actor. He was a herald, the bringer of an urgent message that could not wait, could not become the stuff of academic debate. He was issuing a public announcement, like someone. ing through a town with a loudhailer. He was issuing a public warning.1like a man with a red flag heading off an imminent railway disaster. He was issuing a public invitation, like someone setting up a new political party and summoning all and sundry to sign up and help create a new world. He was, in short, in some respects though not all, quite similar to the other ”leadership’ prophets of the first century. The fact that he was not arrested sooner due to his itinerant style, and to his concentration on villages rather than major cities, not to anything bland or unprovocative about the content of his message.

For this reason (among others), the old picture of Jesus as the teacher of timeless truths, or even the announcer of the essentially timeless call for decision, will simply have to go. His announcement of the kingdom was a warning of imminent catastrophe, a summons to an immediate change of heart and direction of life, an invitation to a new way of being Israel. Jesus announced that the reign of Israel”s god, so long awaited, was now beginning; but, in the announcement and inauguration itself, he drastically but consistently redefined the concept of the reign of god itself. In the light of the Jewish background sketched in NTPG Part III, this cannot but have been heard as the announcement that the exile was at last drawing to a close, that Israel was about to be vindicated against her enemies, that her god was returning at last to deal. with evil, to right wrongs, to bring justice to those who were thirsting for it like dying people in a desert. We are bound to say, I thin, that: j could not have used the phrase ”the reign of god” if he were not in some sense or other claiming to fulfill, or at least to announce the fulfillment of, those deeply rooted Jewish aspirations.

This is a pretty good summary of N.T. Wright”s writings about Jesus that caused me to realize that Jesus is way more intersting than I had been hearing.

Especially the part about Jesus as the teacher of ”timeless truths.”

I like the way Wright depicts Jesus as having sort of an agenda and plan, not just kind of randomly wandering around as Wright says, ”until it is time to go to Jerusalem and die for the sins of the world.” It makes a lot of what he does and says much more understandable.

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I was listening to one of N.T. Wright’s series on Jesus (it is available on the N. T. Wright website) and he said that the typical view of Jesus is that he just randomly wanders around for 3 years ‘until it is time to die for the sins of the world.’ That was how I had always viewed Jesus – reading the gospels, you get that sense that he just drifts around, bumping into people, doing a miracle here, teaching the crowd there. Then at a certain point, it’s time to set his face toward Jerusalem.

N.T. Wright described Jesus’ ministry in a way that blew my mind. I also read a few articles and books by him on the same subject (The Challenge of Jesus and the longer multi-volume series Christian Origins and the Question of God, of which the first volume is The New Testament and the People of God). He put Jesus’ actions in a context that formed a coherent whole and depicted Jesus’ teachings in the context of what he was actually up to as the Jewish messiah. It made amazing sense. The parables, for example, instead of being obscure ways of teaching fairly trite moral lessons, became powerful polemics aimed at his contemporaries.

Another factor at this period was a comment made in a sermon that I heard, in which the speaker started out talking about where people might get advice for life’s problems – Oprah, Ann Landers, Dr. Ruth, or other so-called experts. But, he said, the teachings of Jesus are like no other. Jesus, his point was, is the ultimate teacher with good advice for living. In one of the cases that were quite common in that period, I went away with the opposite conclusion from that which the speaker desired. “No,” I thought to myself, “Jesus’ teachings about how to live are really quite obscure and have little to do with how you might address the troubles of life. In reality Ann Landers might be superior if you just need to know how to handle your in-laws or arrange your napkins.”

Wright’s description of Jesus’ teachings as in the context of his Jewish and Roman audience in the times in which he lived, made way more sense. Incidentally he might address certain ethical concerns, but those certainly did not seem to be the central focus of his output.

At the time we were going through an interminable series on one of the Gospels, where a tiny slice of the book is examined each week – an atomistic approach that totally loses any sense of the thread of the book. The approach taken was the mining of Jesus’ words for helpful hints on how to live, or you might call it principles for successful living, as the speaker had claimed. The particular mission that Jesus was on as the Jewish messiah seemed not to be a concern. In a desire for relevance to today’s world, perhaps, the goal became to make Jesus speak to our needs in the 21st Century.

This is the origin of my conclusion that preaching of this type, devoid of any theological framework, resembles classic liberalism. Jesus becomes a teacher and an example. The only difference might be that evangelicals might pay lip service to an ‘energizing’ effect of the relationship with Christ whereas Ritschl describes it with a different vocabulary. But they are quite similar in that Jesus is viewed as our model. As was claimed in a sample of this approach, God ‘energizes’ us for what is still our task to imitate the biblical model. The transformation that takes place in a relationship with him seems to be missing from this type of approach.

It seemed to me that the cross seems to be missing. Some essential and critical element that was at the heart of the gospel had been lost.