Study for the week ending on Sunday, March 12, 2017
What Did Jesus Do and Teach?
From The Meaning of Jesus by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright
Opening prayer (in unison- John 3:16 – The Message)
This is how much God loved the world:
He gave his Son, his one and only Son.
And this is why:
so that no one need be destroyed;
by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.
God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger,
telling the world how bad it was.
He came to help, to put the world right again.
The Mission and Message of Jesus (N.T. Wright)
Jesus’ critique of his contemporaries was critique from within; his summons was not to
abandon Judaism and try something else, but to become the true, returned-from-exile
people of the one true God. He aimed to be the means of God’s reconstitution of Israel.
He would call into being the true, returned-from-exile Israel. He would challenge, and
deal with, the evil that had infected Israel itself. He would be the means of Israel’s God
returning to Zion. He was, in short, announcing the kingdom of God: not the simple
revolutionary message of the hard-liners, but the doubly revolutionary message of a
kingdom that would overturn all other agendas, including the revolutionary one. He
was a prophet, announcing and inaugurating the kingdom, summoning followers,
warning of disaster, promising vindication, clashing symbolically with other agendas,
implicitly claiming messiahship, and anticipating a showdown. He was, in other words, a
thoroughly credible first-century Jew. What relevance has such a person for the world,
the church, or the Christian today? It all depends. If Jesus’ project as I have described it
simply led to a messy death and nothing more, not very much. Who wants to follow a
two-thousand-year-old failure? Why would anyone take seriously the subversive
wisdom of a strange teacher, however fascinating, who believed that Israel’s God was
going to act through him to save Israel and the world, but who managed not only not
to save himself from death but not to deliver Israel and Jerusalem from the crushing
disasters of 70 and 135 CE?
If, however, Jesus’ death did accomplish the real defeat of evil that had infected Israel
along with the rest of the world- if, in other words, his actions in Jerusalem did
somehow accomplish the kingdom of God in the revised sense that he had been
announcing all along – then this was good news not only for Israel but for the whole
world. The early church, clearly, thought this was the case. They gave as their reason
one thing and one thing only: after his shameful death, Jesus had been raised from the
dead. The practical, theological, spiritual, ethical, pastoral, political, missionary, and
hermeneutical implications of the mission and message of Jesus differ radically
depending upon what one believes happened at Easter.
Jesus Before and After Easter: Jewish Mystic and Christian Messiah (Marcus Borg)
The phrase “Jewish mystic,” as I use it, contains five elements about which I will say
more later in this chapter: Jesus as Spirit person, healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet,
and movement initiator.
Similarly, the phrase, “Christian messiah” is compact for the exalted status given to Jesus
in the New Testament. Expressed in what are sometimes called the “exalted titles” of
Jesus (which are really “exalted metaphors”), this status includes “messiah,” “Son of
God,” “Word of God,” “Wisdom/Sophia of God,” “Lamb of God,” “Light of the World,”
“Bread of Life,” “Alpha and Omega,” “firstborn of all creation,” and so forth. All of this is
what I mean by “Christian messiah.”
My central claim is that Jesus is both, an affirmation that I make as both a historian and
a Christian. But the rest of the title points to an important qualification and clarification:
Jewish mystic and Christian messiah describe how I see Jesus before and after Easter. … I
see the pre-Easter Jesus as the former and the post-Easter Jesus as the latter.
The affirmation in the title thus also includes an implicit negation. Namely, I am not
persuaded that the pre-Easter Jesus thought of himself as the messiah, and so I describe
him in nonmessianic categories. Instead of seeing any of the exalted metaphors as
reflecting Jesus’ own self-awareness or sense of identity, I see them as post-Easter
affirmations. They are the early Christian movement’s witness to what Jesus had
become in their experience, not his own testimony about himself. Such language is
“history metaphorized,” and in this case it is Jesus himself, his life and his death, who is
metaphorized.
As a Christian, I affirm these metaphors to be true. I see Jesus as the messiah, the Son
of God, the Word of God, the Wisdom/Sophia of God, and so forth. That affirmation is a
defining element of what it means to be Christian: namely, Christians find the decisive
revelation or disclosure of God in Jesus. But I doubt any of these affirmations go back
to Jesus himself, and so I do not use them in my exposition of the historical Jesus. I
describe Jesus before Easter in nonmessianic terms.
Westminster Larger Catechism
Question 43: How does Christ execute the office of a prophet?
Answer: Christ executes the office of a prophet, in his revealing to the church, in all ages,
by his Spirit and Word, in divers ways of administration, the whole will of God, in all
things concerning their edification and salvation.
Question 44: How does Christ execute the office of a priest?
Answer: Christ executes the office of a priest, in his once offering himself a sacrifice
without spot to God, to be a reconciliation for the sins of his people; and in making
continual intercession for them.
Question 45: How does Christ execute the office of a king?
Answer: Christ executes the office of a king, in calling out of the world a people to
himself, and giving them officers, laws, and censures, by which he visibly governs them;
in bestowing saving grace upon his elect, rewarding their obedience, and correcting
them for their sins, preserving and supporting them under all their temptations and
sufferings, restraining and overcoming all their enemies, and powerfully ordering all
things for his own glory, and their good; and also in taking vengeance on the rest, who
know not God, and obey not the gospel.
Behold Your God (D. James Kennedy)
In one of his sonnets, Shelley tells of a traveler from Egypt who, in a trek across a desert
wasteland came upon the remains of a marble statue. All that remained on the pedestal
were two feet and the lower part of two gigantic legs. Nearby, lying in the sand, was
the cracked remnant of what had been the head. The face had a cruel sneer on its lips.
When the traveler rubbed the sand away from the pedestal, eh found this inscription:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty and depair!” The
traveler looked, and as far as the eye could see, there was naught but the sifting sand.
Ozymandias bestowed upon himself the name “king of kings,” but whatever kingdom
and glory he once enjoyed had disappeared.
In contrast, the true King of kings was meek and lowly of mind when He came into
Jerusalem on Palm Sunday riding a donkey’s colt. Here, riding into town in great
humility was the King of kings and Lord of lords – the King of all creation!
Napoleon observed at St. Helena, “Can you conceive of Caesar as the eternal emperor of
the Roman Senate and, from the depths of his mausoleum, governing the empire,
watching over the destinies of Rome? Such is the history of the invasion and conquest
of the world by Christianity; such is the power of the God of the Christians …”
Jesus is the eternal King of kings, the Lord who reigns supreme. No other has ever been
or ever will be greater. Behold your God!
Jesus and Men (Napoleon Bonaparte)
I know men, and I tell you Jesus is not a man. Superficial minds see a resemblance
between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That
resemblance does not exist… His empire, His march across the ages and realms, is a
prodigy, a mystery insoluble… a mystery which I can neither deny or explain.
Genesis 12:1-4
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s
house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you,
and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and
the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five
years old when he departed from Haran
Psalm 121
I lift up my eyes to the hills—
from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
He who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time on and forevermore.
John 3:1-17
Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by
night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no
one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him,
“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”
Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a
second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no
one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of
the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to
you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the
sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone
who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus
answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?
“Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do
not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how
can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except
the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the
serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him
may have eternal life.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him
may not perish but may have eternal life.
“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that
the world might be saved through him.
Journaling / Reflecting
The Westminster Confession gives us the reformed theology of Jesus as prophet, priest and
king. How do you see these roles of Jesus in Christ’s conversation with Nicodemus?
Napoleon asserted that Jesus was not a man. How would you describe Jesus to a non-Christian
friend?
Kennedy tells us the story of the Egyptian King, Ozymandias and of his inscription, “Look on my
works.” Suppose we transpose that quote to our King – Christ. On which of Christ’s works
would you look? Have Christ’s works lasted longer than Ozymandias works?
William Barclay argues that, “In reading the Fourth Gospel, there is the difficulty of knowing
when the words of Jesus stop and the words of the writer of the gospel begin. John has
thought so long about the words of Jesus that insensibly he glides from them to his own
toughts about them. Almost certainly the last words of this passage are the words of John. It is
as if someone asked, “What right has Jesus to say these things? What guarantee do we have
that they are true?”” How would you answer Barclay’s questions?