by Peter Enns
A new era of “God’s residence” was dawning, already hinted at in John 1:14: The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory. The Greek word behind lived is better rendered tented or tabernacled—it is the same word used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament for Moses’s Tabernacle in the wilderness. John says that, as the glory of Yahweh filled the Tabernacle in the Old Testament (Exod. 40:34), we see Jesus’s glory as he “tabernacled” with us.
All of which is to say we are witnessing here a rather seismic shift in how God’s presence is perceived, one that goes beyond anything the tradition had made room for. And we can see why some accused Jesus of blasphemy.
But Jesus is here. Things are different. The idea of God’s presence remains as it did in former days—that is the “old treasure.” But the new treasure—the new wine that the old wineskin of the Temple can’t contain—is how God’s presence is now experienced: through Jesus.
Paul, as he tends to, takes this a step farther. The Spirit of God now dwells in all believers, so that Paul can refer to the church at Corinth as a whole as God’s temple (1 Cor. 3:16) and each person’s body also as a temple of the Holy Spirit (6:19). And in the final book of the New Testament, Revelation, the end goal of the people of God is to dwell with God intimately and directly, without any need for a temple (21:22).
For the Jesus movement, the Temple’s ultimate usefulness was in foreshadowing the presence of God in Jesus and his followers. This was not where the story of Israel was supposed to go. Ezekiel, besides talking about sour grapes, had a vision of the glory of the future Temple that spans nine chapters (40–48). It is rather detailed, as you can imagine, but the punch line is that this Temple will be quite a sight, truly fitting for God’s glory. As God says, This is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet, where I will reside among the people of Israel forever (43:7).
The reimagining of God in light of the gospel has no need of this structure. The plan has changed.
Christians today might take this sort of thing for granted. Temples are not part of our experience, but in the first century the Temple was a thousand-year-old symbol of God’s actual presence.
Nothing could really approximate for us today this first-century upheaval—perhaps removing any and all Christian symbols from our houses of worship: stained glass, crosses, crucifixes, bells, organs, icons, altars, pulpits, and lecterns. We might say, “That’s okay. We’ll miss them, but we still have Jesus.” And that’s the point, really. What a very Christian thing to say. Christians have never had a Temple in Jerusalem where God’s glory dwelt.
Let’s not lose the big picture here. The really central point in all this is that the biblically rooted tradition of a holy sanctuary for God shifts from a structure to a person—and then that person’s followers. That sort of thinking only came about because the circumstances demanded it. Jesus inspired a major midcourse change in direction.
What eventually became “Christianity” began as a Jewish sect—a sect that stretched the boundaries of Judaism to its limit. Eventually, like Jesus’s wineskins, it stretched those boundaries too far.
And speaking of boundaries . . .
This Land Is My Land
You’re probably sick of hearing it, but this is my book and I’ll say it again for good measure: the Babylonian exile was a huge moment for the ancient Israelites, for several reasons, not the least of which was the loss of land and what that loss represented.
I know, I’m repeating myself. I do that a lot. My family is sick of it. We’ve already touched on all these points. But anytime you talk about the story of Israel in the Old Testament, you can’t avoid saying “exile” about every third sentence. It was the great defeat, the crisis that threatened to bring an end to the faith of Abraham, but then wound up being the creative spark that paved the way for the unbroken existence of Judaism to this day, not to mention Christianity.
Exile drove Jews to think creatively about their past, face their present, and cast visions for the future.
Along with the Law and the Temple, land was central to Israel’s story. We see it already at the beginning of the story with Abraham in Genesis 12. The first thing God does after calling Abraham is give him a tour of some prime real estate, the land of Canaan, that will eventually go to Abraham’s descendants. That is Yahweh’s promise to this chosen man and the nation that will come from him.
The stories of the Pentateuch, Genesis through Deuteronomy, are not stand-alone lessons of some sort. They are more like an entrance ramp to the promised land—the Israelites grow from a single family, to an extended family, to tribes; after a period of slavery in Egypt, they finally emerge as a nation ready to take possession of the land to fulfill the promise to father Abraham.
Now the real drama can begin.
The land was a gift of God, but with a condition. The people would keep the land as long as they obeyed Yahweh—we’re not talking perfection here, but worshiping Yahweh exclusively and without all the accoutrements of the surrounding pagan nations, like idols.
The monarchy was to have brought a central organization to the Israelites to ensure not only their safety from enemies (though that), but also their fidelity to God’s Law. Unfortunately—and to make a long story short—the monarchy was a disaster largely because the kings really blew it.
David’s reign seemed to be going well—for exactly six chapters (2 Sam. 5–10). In chapter 11, David forced Bathsheba to have sex with him and arranged for her husband, Uriah, to be conveniently killed in battle to cover up her pregnancy. From then on, David’s reign was marked by one disaster or disappointment after another until his death.
His son Solomon wasn’t much better. Sure, under his rule, Israel’s borders extended as far as they ever did, and he established a real kingdom with a bureaucracy, standing army, and so on (1 Kings 4). His wisdom was legendary (and probably exaggerated), but the good times were short lived. He amassed a lot of wealth and horses, not to mention foreign wives—things Deuteronomy warns kings not to do (17:16–17). Then, after spending seven years building an elaborate Temple, he spent almost twice as long (thirteen years) building an even more elaborate palace for himself with so much gold that the writer of 1 Kings feels the need to keep bringing it up. And silver? Fuhgedaboudit. That became as common as stones (10:27).
Bottom line, we’re talking about an opulent existence worthy of its own cable reality series. But at the end, what marked the demise of the united monarchy was Solomon’s foreign wives, who seduced him into setting up worship centers in the land for their foreign gods (1 Kings 11). That and Solomon’s history of using forced labor, especially from the northern tribes (David and Solomon were from Judah in the south), and before you know it the country breaks along the north–south fault line and two nations are formed around 930 BCE: Israel in the north and Judah in the south.
So far not a complete disaster. At least after all this they still have their land.
But the clock is ticking. By 722, Samaria, the capital of the larger nation of Israel is conquered by the Assyrians, and the southern nation falls to the Babylonians 136 years later.
The unthinkable happened. Most of Israelite territory is run by (gulp) the Assyrians. Israel is no longer a people of the land promised to Abraham. A rump state, Judah, is left in the south. And how would you feel if America were conquered and all that remained was Alabama to represent what once was? You can see my point.
Land is a major—one might even say the major—running theme of the entire Old Testament. Most of its thirty-nine books deal with gaining it, maintaining it, losing it anyway, and then returning to it—specifically we’re talking about twenty-eight of the thirty-nine books: Joshua through Nehemiah (eleven) and all the major and minor prophets (seventeen).
It is not an exaggeration to say that the backdrop of the entire Old Testament drama is about how keeping or losing the land is dependent on Israel’s religious obedience.
The Judahites returned to t
he land in 538 BCE, a testament to God’s faithful promise keeping. Surely now all will get back to normal. But their return was not truly complete until they had their own king sitting on the throne in Jerusalem, which basically never happened. Centuries pass waiting out first the Persians and then the Greeks, and the hope was kept alive, at least for some. One day, a king will rise in the line of David and thus restore the fortunes of his people, and the land will be theirs again. That was the “messianic hope” for many.
Enter Jesus.
In the midst of such a drama rooted in an ancient and irrevocable promise of God, Jesus reimagines a God who has no interest in maintaining national borders—God is no longer interested in his own promise that goes back to the days of Abraham.
Judging from the Sermon on the Mount, for example (Matt. 5–7), Jesus has no place for nationalism or political power, whether Roman or Jewish. Recovering the land of Israel—meaning an Israel the Jews run as their own with their own king, as in the old days—never gets so much as a whisper of support in the Gospels or anywhere else in the New Testament. Rather, the opposite is the norm.
Jesus was on trial and accused of claiming to be “King of the Jews,” which was treason against Rome, since Caesar already had someone filling that position at the moment—namely, Pontius Pilate. When interrogated by Pilate about his insurrection, Jesus famously replied: My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here (John 18:36).
So much for reestablishing the monarchy. What had been the whole point has now become no big deal. A central theme—if not the central theme—of Israel’s long history is not even worthy of debate. Jerusalem will no longer play the central role in God’s grand scheme.
Law, Temple, land. It’s hard to find three more central elements of Israel’s story. And all three experience a dramatic upheaval with the coming of Christ. Israel’s storyline with its expected trajectory has been ruthlessly edited and taken in a new direction.
The circumstances demand it. The story has to be adjusted. God is reimagined. And the Bible already has a long history of doing just that.
Children of Abraham
As much as the early followers of Jesus reimagined Law, Temple, and land, there is another act of reimaging God that lies behind all three. It is the issue that would come to give the Christian faith its shape in the centuries to come; an act of reimagination so daring even key figures of the New Testament couldn’t see eye to eye about it.
The issue is what place Gentiles would have in this movement—specifically, whether Gentiles needed to adopt Jewish customs and practices in order to be considered true and full members of this Jesus movement, on equal standing with Jewish believers. At the very dawn of the Jesus movement, decisions had to me made about how closely this movement would be bound by biblical tradition. Once the gospel spread to the larger Greek speaking world, outside of Judea, the issue was bound to come up.
Those who felt strongly that Gentiles had to convert to Judaism had history—and common sense—on their side. The Law of Moses wasn’t a pick-and-choose proposition, and although Gentile converts in the Old Testament are hard to find, we can presume that if any had wanted to be fully identified with the faith of Abraham, they would have needed to fall in line—especially with the command given to Abraham to circumcise every male of his household, which included his servants.
Also, in the book of Judith (Apocrypha), we have the example of the Ammonite Achior, who (in a fictitious account) helped the Israelites defeat the Assyrians, and later converted: When Achior saw all that the God of Israel had done, he believed firmly in God. So he was circumcised, and joined the house of Israel, remaining so to this day (Judith 14:10).
My point is simply that expecting Gentiles to observe the ancient customs of Judaism is hardly unreasonable. But this Jesus movement went in another direction, as we already saw briefly earlier with what Paul said about circumcision and dietary laws—Gentiles would not be bound to Jewish customs as an entrance point to being full-fledged members of the Jesus movement. They could, presumably, decide to accept some practices and not others, but Paul argues that they were not bound to do so, nor should anyone presume to hold a higher status in the movement by binding themselves to them.
Of course, Christianity has gone with Paul on the Gentile question, but that was not always the case. We read in Galatians 2 that Paul didn’t see eye to eye on this with Peter, the head disciple, and James, Jesus’s own brother. Actually, Paul thought everyone was on the same page regarding the Gentiles, but, as Paul put it, Peter and James seemed to have caved in to the pressure of “Judaizers”—Paul’s not-so-subtle description of believers who wanted to hold fast to the traditions.
And in his own letter, James seems to have Paul—or at least Paul’s ideas—in his sights:
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is barren? Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works. Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. (James 2:14–24)
Paul’s message was that we are justified by faith, not works. James sees it differently. And both prove their case by appealing to the story of Abraham!
The controversy that gripped the early years is hardly an issue now. I don’t know too many Christians today who avoid pork or lobster. But what we take for granted now was at the beginning a massive and controversial act of reimagination about who can rightly claim to be the children of Abraham.
It wasn’t clear what to do, and people disagreed—including some key New Testament characters. Even then, reimagining God wasn’t easy or straightforward. Do we think it would be anything else for us today?
* * *
God is one step ahead of us, it seems—always another surprise around the corner that forces us to stand back and wonder what God is up to and how to respond.
The belief that, in Jesus, God was making a grand and climactic appearance on the world stage drove the earliest followers of Jesus to reimagine God and what God was up to in the world—their experience, their time and place, drove them to change their thinking, even about such important things as Law, Temple, land, and whether Israel’s ancient traditions are binding on Gentiles.
But we can’t really leave this topic without touching on something that is both central to the Christian faith and represents about as profound a reimagining of God in the story as we can imagine.
I’m talking about Easter—Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. You know, those things that make Christianity what it is.
Chapter 12
Dying and Rising for Others
What Is God Up To?
Jesus, raised from the dead. Seems to be a pretty important idea in the New Testament. I think it’s fair to say that it is the idea around which the entire gospel story revolves, though I suppose, like most things, that is up for debate. But here’s a question worth asking: “Why resurrection at all?”
Why did God raise Jesus from the dead? What’s the point? Was God just showing off? (“Look what I can do!”) Why do this?
In my experience, that question isn�
�t asked very often—sort of like, “Why is there coffee?” But it was certainly a question that the New Testament writers had to deal with—and they reimagined God in the process.
I can think of some reasons why the gospel includes resurrection, and they are all tied to Israel’s story in some sense while at the same time (here we go again) moving beyond anything the Old Testament writers had in mind.
Resurrection from the dead is a metaphor in the Old Testament for returning from the Babylonian exile. In Ezekiel 37, mentioned earlier, the metaphorical dead bones of the exiled Jews are brought back to life. Babylon, after all, is the “death place,” while the promised land is “life.” Deuteronomy 30:15–20 doesn’t talk about dry bones, but it gets at the same point: living in the land is “life” and being driven from the land is “death.”
Hence—and I think we’ll all appreciate the logic—if leaving the land is to die, then returning to the land is to come back to life, or “to rise from the dead.”
I think this is one reason that all four Gospels tie the ministry of Jesus so closely to Israel’s return from exile. They all introduce Jesus’s ministry by citing (with differences, of course) the opening verses of a core return-from-exile passage in the Old Testament, Isaiah 40: The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Matt. 3:3; Mark 1:3; Luke 3:4; John 1:23).
Since this passage is cited by all four Gospels as a way of introducing Jesus’s ministry, it looks as though the Gospel writers are all trying to say that Jesus’s ministry will have something to do with bringing an end to the exile—of raising the nation back to life.
