Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Jesus’ death on the cross again modifies his message about the reign of God. Whether it did so for Jesus is something we can leave open at this point. But in any case it did so for the hearers of the Gospel after Good Friday. It was only in Jesus’ death that this message achieved its proper profundity.

Jesus’ death did not revoke his proclamation of the reign of God; it did not put paid to the good news of the beginning. Instead, it demonstrated the reality contained in that proclamation. It definitively revealed the hidden and humbled⁸ shape of the reign of God. What does that mean? It means that the reign of God does not come without persecution, without sacrifice. Indeed, it does not come without daily dying. It cannot come any other way.

What was contained in Jesus’ preaching from the very beginning was fully illuminated by his death: the reign of God demands a change of rulership that human beings must carry out. It demands letting go and self-surrender. The reign of God does not come without pure receiving, and that receiving is also always an acceptance of suffering. In his passion Jesus was by no means far from the reign of God; instead, the reign of God comes precisely in the “hour” in which Jesus himself can do no more but hands himself over and surrenders to God’s truth. This is the basic thread of John’s gospel. The “hour” of deepest “humiliation” is the hour of his “glorification,” the hour in which the glory of God encompasses Jesus’ whole “work.”

So Jesus’ announcement of the reign of God achieves in his death, once again, a final precision and focus: the concept “reign of God” cannot be used from here on unless at the same time one speaks of Jesus’ surrender even unto death. For Jesus’ disciples this means that they cannot live in the realm where God reigns without obedience to what this reign of God brings with it. And that, in the midst of a resistant society and resistant church, does not happen without suffering, without sacrifice, without passion stories.

Ultimately, Jesus’ death lays bare all human self-glorification and thereby also every superficial and presumptuous notion of the reign of God. God’s realm can happen only where human beings collide with their own limits, where they do not know how to go on, where they hand themselves over and give space to God alone so that God can act. Only there, in the zone of constant dying and rising, the reign of God begins.

Chapter 3

The Reign of God and the People of God

The preceding chapter showed that for Jesus the coming of the reign of God was no longer something in the distant or near future but something that was happening already, now, in the present hour. Rescue, liberation, salvation—for Jesus it had all irrevocably begun. “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the reign of God has come to you” (Luke 11:20). But at the same time Jesus’ disciples are supposed to pray daily: “your kingdom come” (Luke 11:2). For the reign of God has not come everywhere, not by a long sight, because it has not yet been accepted everywhere—not even by the disciples themselves, who according to the gospels were still dreaming about their own reign (Mark 9:34).

We have seen that in today’s biblical scholarship this tension between the “already” and the “not yet” of the reign of God is much emphasized, though with the greatest variety of nuances. There are scarcely any exegetes left who see the reign of God as beginning in an utterly distant future.

But in contrast, another aspect of Jesus’ proclamation is not yet clear in exegesis in general. The explosive power of the reign of God is not only defused by pushing it into the distant future or into a time beyond time. It can also be handed over to impotence by being made homeless. For Jesus the reign of God not only has its own time, it also has its own place in which to be made visible and tangible. That place is the people of God.

To say the same thing in two Greek words: as the reign of God has its kairos, its proper time, it also has its own topos, its place. It is not a u-topia, which means “no place, nowhere.” The island of Utopia invented by the brilliant English Lord Chancellor and humanist Thomas More (1478–1535) to illustrate his critique of society did not exist and he did not mean for it to do so (cf. chap. 21). In contrast, for Jesus the reign of God is, despite all opposition and persecution, an event whose realization begins in history. Therefore it can be grasped and seen: first in Jesus himself but then necessarily also in the eschatological Israel that Jesus is gathering around himself.