Tuesday Tome - Simply Jesus (Part 2 - B)

Simply Jesus by N. T. Wright is the selection for my next book club at Valley Christian Church. Hardback copies of the book are now available for you to purchase at our church's resource center ($18). All the details about my upcoming book club can be found HERE.

In the second section of the book, Wright describes the message and ministry of Jesus. Here is an excerpt from chapter 9 which I hope will give you a little sense of what Simply Jesus is like. Please consider reading the book with me and joining our book club.

When Jesus healed people, when he celebrated parties with all and sundry, when offered forgiveness freely to people as if he were replacing the Temple itself with his own work--in all these ways it was clear, and he intended it to be clear, that this wasn't just a foretaste of a future reality. This was reality itself. This was what it looked like when God was in charge. God's kingdom was coming, as he taught his followers to pray, "on earth as in heaven." On one occasion, indeed, Jesus said sharply to those who were accusing him of being in league with the devil that, if it was indeed by God's own Spirit that he was casting out demons, "then God's kingdom has come upon [them]" (Luke 11:20). A great deal of what Jesus was doing and saying only makes sense on the assumption that he really did believe that God was already becoming king in the new way he had promised. It was happening, and this is what it would look like.

But there are constant hints, throughout Jesus's public career, that the coming of the kingdom would depend on future events yet to be realized. He speaks again and again of a coming cataclysm--a great disaster, a judgment, terrible events that would turn the world upside down. He speaks, in a famous passage, of the sun and the moon being darkened and the stars falling from heaven (Matt. 24:29, quoting Isa. 13:10). He speaks, notoriously, of the "coming of the son of man" (Matt. 24:30, quoting Dan. 7:13). So how can the kingdom be both present and future? What was Jesus trying to say? How does this affect our view of the "campaign" we have seen him carrying on to this point?

In order to answer this, we must come forward from our earlier glance at the stories of ancient Israel and look very briefly at four men, two before Jesus and two after, whose careers embody something of the same present-and-future tension. That will clear the way to a fresh understanding of what Jesus was really all about. [pp. 105-106]