Chapter Seven
1. Come back, for more detail, to the first of our four speakers. The
entire story of Israel, on one level at least, is the story of how Israel’s God
is taking on the arrogant tyrants of the world, overthrowing their power, and
rescuing his people from under its cruel weight. Think back quickly through the
great stories. (These include the stories
of Babel in Genesis; of Pharaoh in Exodus; of Isaiah and Daniel; Psalms 2 &
89.)
- Specifically, what do ancient & contemporary
tyrants have in common?
2. But the hope persists, and psalm after psalm brings it
to expression. The gods of the nations are but idols, but Israel’s God made the
heavens. God reigns over the nations, God sits on his holy seat; the princes of
the people gather as the people of the God of Abraham, who has subdued peoples
and nations. God has established his city, and the powers of wicked pagans will
not prevail against it. Again and again it comes, shaping the hearts and
imaginations of God’s people even in the many centuries when these songs of
praise and triumph bore no relation to the sociopolitical reality in which they
were living. This is the world in which we are to hear what the gospels are
trying to tell us about the story of Jesus seen as the focal point of the story
of God and Caesar.
- What do these biblical stories have in common with
our life stories?
3. This points forward to the larger power, Rome itself,
which will close in at the end, only to be symbolically overthrown as the Roman
guards at the tomb fail to prevent Jesus’s resurrection. Luke has Herod in
Jerusalem at this time as well, in league at last with Pontius Pilate (23: 1–
12). The sense is the same: the powers of the world are waiting there, in the
wings, mostly offstage, but ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. If this
really is the story of God’s kingdom arriving on earth as in heaven, sooner or
later there will be a confrontation. Again, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in
political psychology to know what the world’s powers will do to those who act
and speak to bring about God’s kingdom. As well as all the other elements in
the gospel story, we must recognize this for what it is, a telling of the story
of Jesus as the clash between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world.
- Where do you witness this clash of kingdoms today?
4. If this story of Jesus is the story of Israel reaching
its climax, it is inescapably political and will raise questions the Western
world has chosen not to raise, let alone face, throughout the period of
so-called critical scholarship. The post-Enlightenment world was born out of a
movement that split church and state apart and has arranged even its would-be
historical scholarship accordingly; and that same Enlightenment insisted that
Judaism was the wrong kind of religion, far too gross, too material. Rejection,
from the start, of a “political” reading of the gospels and of a “Jewish”
reading went together. Fortunately, genuine history— the actual study of the
actual sources— can sometimes strike back and insist that what a previous
generation turned off this generation can at last turn back on. It is time, and
long past time, to reread the gospels as what we can only call political
theology— not because they are not after all about God and spirituality and new
birth and holiness and all the rest, but precisely because they are.
- How do you understand Wright’s explanation of “political
theology?”
5.
The point about truth, and about
Jesus and his followers bearing witness to it, is that truth is what happens
when humans use words to reflect God’s wise ordering of the world and so shine
light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly
needed. Empires can’t cope with this. They make their own “truth,” creating
“facts on the ground” in the depressingly normal way of violence and injustice.
- Where is this
tragically happening today? How are we responding?
6. The four gospel writers, each in his own way, tell the
story of Jesus as the story of the new and ultimate exodus. What our present
fourfold exercise has done is to draw out the various dimensions of that new
exodus and to highlight their significance. The gospels all insist that it was
Jesus’s own choice to make Passover the moment for his decisive action. This,
they are saying, was his own chosen grid of interpretation. And all four
gospels together, once we have learned to listen to their four dimensions,
bequeath to Jesus’s followers the task of being the people in and through whom
the achievement of Jesus is implemented in the world. That is why the story
told by the gospels is not only incomplete without two millennia of backdrop
(the story of ancient Israel), which they assume we will know and which we in
our generation often have to supply with considerable pedagogic effort. The
story is also incomplete because it points forward to a future yet to come.
- How has this chapter further shaped your understanding of the role of the four gospels?
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