9/27/09

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.

 = NT Wright Jesus and the Victory of God , p 172