Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

It is true that biblical scholars constantly emphasize that in the interpretation of the reign-of-God texts surrounding Jesus the tension between present and future, or between “already” and “not yet,” cannot be resolved in favor of either pole. But this insight, correct in itself, is then for the most part not maintained. The principle has scarcely been established when the present character of the reign of God is soft-pedaled again. This means, for example, that the reign of God is only present in Jesus’ own person, or it is only present in Jesus’ symbolic actions, or it is only present in Jesus’ words, or it is dynamic, proleptic, anticipative, punctually-situationally present, or—here the analysis is highly refined—it is present in the mode of its expression. I can’t help it: the real result of such restrictions after the fact is that the reign of God is forced farther into the future. One need have no respect for such linguistic artistry; we can simply regard it as a set of classic avoidance maneuvers.

Not only Protestant theology but Roman Catholic as well has been laden with such evasive maneuvering for centuries now. Neoscholasticism made of Jesus’ eschatology a tract on “the last things.” Paul’s theology of the Spirit suffered a similar fate. In Paul’s writing, Jesus’ present eschatology is contained in the theology of the Holy Spirit, who has taken up residence in the baptized and is changing the world through them. But what has happened to Paul’s talk about the presence of the Spirit? All this is why it is the present aspect of Jesus’ proclamation that has to be kept in the foreground if we want to speak adequately about his idea of the reign of God.

The Humble Form of the Reign of God

Certainly this chapter has omitted another aspect of Jesus’ appearance that must be included here; otherwise all that he said about the reign of God in his preaching would have been one-sided and even distorted. Everyone who reads the gospels and lets them affect him or her has the impression that a marvelous glow lay on the beginning of Jesus’ work, a kind of bright morning light. Think, for example, of the Baptizer’s question in Matthew 11, the one Jesus answered with the jubilant cry: “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Matt 11:5). Or consider the wedding at Cana, which the Fourth Evangelist concludes with the statement: “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (John 2:11).

Jesus must have received an amazing amount of attention in Israel. People ran after him. They brought their sick. They came with their cares and concerns. They hoped for the messianic turning of events. They sensed the new thing, something enormous, something that would surpass everything else. They said: “A new teaching out of sovereign power!” (Mark 1:27).⁷

Jesus found disciples who followed him. They, too, were fascinated by his message and awaited the great overturning of things. Some biblical scholars speak of this as Jesus’ “Galilean springtime.”

There was much that was right in the way people in Israel reacted to Jesus, and much that was false. Jesus did, in fact, proclaim an overturning, a revolution. He spoke of an action of God that changed everything. But he did not have a political revolution in mind, one that would drive the Romans from the land, nor was he thinking of a messianic fairytale time in which roasted doves flew onto people’s plates. The turning of which he spoke was something different. It presupposed faith, joy in God, becoming his followers, discipleship, a radical understanding of Torah, a new community, new family. Still more, the turning of which he spoke presupposed surrender to the will of God, unto death.

The whole of Mark’s gospel has a substructure whose purpose is to show this “other,” strange, alienating, resistant aspect of Jesus’ message. In Mark the corresponding instructions to the disciples are, in fact, central—and, of course, so are the misunderstandings on the part of the disciples that precede each of them. The whole of Mark’s gospel progresses with a terrible goal-directedness toward Jesus’ passion. And it is not very different in the other gospels.

“Galilean springtime”—if that expression is at all justified, it has a heavy counterweight in the gospels: the disciples’ lack of understanding, the hatred shown by Jesus’ enemies from the very beginning (Mark 3:6), and at the end his helpless, horrible hanging on the cross. We cannot separate Jesus’ end from his message about the reign of God. We must not think that the proclamation of the basileia and the cross are two completely different things that have nothing to do with one another.