The next three chapters cover stories of the kingdom as Jesus announced (chapter 6) the kingdom and “enacted this announcement in terms of welcome [chapter 7] and warning [chapter 8].” (p. 243, emphasis original) This post will cover Chapter 6 of Jesus and the Victory of God (pp. 198-243) on the announcement of the kingdom.
What did Jesus mean by—and what did a first-century Jew hear from—his announcement of the ‘kingdom of heaven/God?’ Our twenty-first century tendency, when hearing a word like kingdom is to think it terms of king, dominion, victory, rule, land, prosperity, etc. In other words, we think of kingdom in its political and national denotation. We may have an image in the back of our mind of the British monarchy, or from the many fairy tales of childhood (castles, dragons, witches, princes, and princesses). In short, kingdom invokes a story or set of stories.
When a first-century Jew hears a prophet announcing the kingdom of God, this would invoke an unfinished story told through Davidic/Solomonic kingship expectations. Wright notes the basic expression of this story:
[1] The first Temple… was the place where YHWH chose to dwell… [2] Temple and royalty belonged closely together… the Temple-builder was the true king, and vice versa… [3] The symbolism of the temple was designed to express the belief that it formed the centre not only of the physical world, but also of the entire cosmos… the spot where heaven and earth met. [4] The destruction of the Temple… was a catastrophe at every level… heaven and earth had been pulled part, so that worship became impossible. [5] The longing for return from exile thus contained, as a major component, the equal longing for the return of YHWH to Zion. (pp. 204-5, emphasis original)
The presence of Rome over Israel meant that the exile continued; for a first-century Jew, [5] would have been understood as the “defeat of evil (i.e., paganism, typified by Babylon),” restoring the Davidic monarchy, and the rebuilding of the temple (p. 205). In a word, “revolutionary.” (p. 214) Think military, swords, battles, war.
You can understand the excitement that this announcement would generate. Messiah is here, our liberation is upon us, we are now waiting for him to say the word and the rebellion will begin! It should not surprise the reader when Peter, after declaring Jesus to be the Messiah, rebukes Jesus for telling the disciples that the crucifixion is what awaits Him (Mk. 8:29-32). A real Messiah would never say that! Unless the story in one’s head regarding the Messiah was wrong. And just how would you go about bringing awareness to that story and then changing it in the minds of your disciples? This is Wright’s argument—that Jesus announced the kingdom in such a way that one was forced to recognize this change—there wasn’t a ‘prince who rescues the princess by killing the dragon’ about to take place next. Quite the contrary, the prince in the story was going to get killed by the dragon! But I am getting ahead of Wright.
We must understand this kingdom language in a way that allows it to retain its first-century Jewish meaning and the way the early church used it (pp. 207-26). One of the misunderstandings of the last several centuries is to take the eschatological and apocalyptic language in the gospels and read them as end-of-the-world prophecy. This is one of Wright’s repeated emphases—the eschatological language describes “events for which end-of-the-world language is the only set of metaphors adequate to express the significance of what will happen, but resulting in a new and quite different phase within space-time history.” (p. 208, emphasis original) The way you express an apocalyptic event such as the temple’s destruction is as though the sun, moon, and stars fall from the sky (e.g. Mt. 24:29).
“What, then, is central to the understanding of the kingdom? That which we saw a moment ago: the Jewish expectation of the saving sovereignty of the covenant god, exercised in the vindication of Israel and overthrow of her enemies.” (p. 223) Wright argues this is the ‘kingdom’ meaning in the first-century and so we must ask: “in what sense did Jesus affirm this meaning, and how did he redefine the concept.?” (p. 224, emphasis original) This is Wright’s focus for this part of the book (chapters 6-10).
One of the ways Jesus announces the kingdom is through parables. “In explicitly describing what the kingdom is like, the parables in that very act inaugurate it… they are stories designed to evoke fresh praxis, to reorder the symbolic world, to break open current understandings and inculcate new ones.” (p. 229) If the prince in the fairy tale comes as a humble servant and is killed by the dragon, how would that modify our own symbolic world?
Wright begins by using the parable of the sower (in all 3 synoptic gospels) to illustrate what Jesus was doing, “tell[ing] the story of Israel, particularly the return from exile, with a paradoxical conclusion, and it tells the story of Jesus’ ministry, as the fulfillment of that larger story, with a paradoxical outcome.” (p. 230, emphasis original) I had always read this parable as just the different responses to hearing the gospel—‘be the good kind of soil’. But Wright suggests that Mark 4 has parallels Daniel 2’s kingdoms and Mark 12’s wicked tenants—this is a kingdom announcement parable (p. 231-2). God is sowing seeds to establish His kingdom, but it is rejected or unsuccessful historically—Israel rejects it, foreign nations ignore it—but now, in Jesus, the seed will flourish and produce fruit, but in an unexpected way (the parable can be taken as a time sequence similar to Daniel’s statue). The seed will flourish in those who are paying attention, those ‘with ears to hear’. In contrast to being obvious (i.e, military might and conquest), one must ‘hear.’ Like the stone that wipes out the kingdoms in Daniel 2 suddenly and with no warning, so God’s kingdom is being announced (the sower is casting the seed), and there are some, with ears to hear, that are receptive. It is interesting (and puzzling to me previously) that this parable is followed in Mark by three tiny ones (4:21-34) about hidden, growing, or small things. God is now revealing his plan that was hidden (4:21-25), thus “the attention you give will be the attention you get.” (p. 240) God’s kingdom is being manifested in ways that you don’t understand or expect, but judgment is soon (4:26-29)! With the parable of the mustard seed (4:30-34), “the ministry of Jesus, which does not look like the expected kingdom, is in fact its strange beginning.” (p. 241) Both Matthew and Luke have similar parables in their context to the sower that further brings out this unusual kingdom emphasis.
I found the expanded meaning of the sower interesting (and there is much more that affirms Wright’s argument that would have made this post really long), but it is the next chapter that really ‘rocked’ my NT reading—a stone came tumbling down the mountain and smashed my NT interpretative clay-footed statue. It is a large chapter, so I expect it to encompass multiple posts. Until then, live as one who has ears to hear.
Chapter 1: Jesus Then and Now
Chapter 2: Heavy Traffic on Wredebahn: The ‘New Quest’ Renewed
Chapter 3: Back to the Future: The ‘Third Quest’
Chapter 4: Prodigals and Paradigms
Chapter 5: The Praxis of a Prophet
Chapter 6: Stories of the Kingdom (1): Announcement
Chapter 7: Stories of the Kingdom (2)
Chapter 8: Stories of the Kingdom (3): Judgment and Vindication
Chapter 9: Symbol and Controversy
Chapter 10: The Questions of the Kingdom
Chapter 11: Jesus and Israel: The Meaning of Messiahship
Chapter 12: The Reasons for Jesus’ Crucifixion
Chapter 13: The Return of the King
Chapter 14: Results