Jesus: a new vision
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Spiritualization of Central Elements
In yet one more way the Jesus movement differed from the conventional wisdom of the Jewish social world and from the renewal movements which operated within it. Key elements of Jewish teaching were spiritualized. “Spiritualization” involves the claim that what truly matters is not the external practice or reality, but the internal or spiritual reality to which the external points.
Specifically, Jesus denied that purity was primarily a matter of externals, concerning pots or pans or hands, or whether one ate food that was untithed. True purity was internal, not dependent upon the ability to measure up to standards of purity as defined by conventional wisdom and the other renewal movements. What mattered was an internal transformation, “purity of heart,”67 which was possible even for those whom the social world placed beyond the pale. Similarly, the notion of righteousness was internalized.68
Jesus may have spiritualized the notion of the temple as well, though we cannot be sure. At the very least, the notion of a temple “made without hands” is a very early Christian tradition, and it may go back to Jesus himself.69 A saying attributed to Jesus concerning whether his followers should pay the annual temple tax affirms, in effect, “There is no obligation—but go ahead and pay it.”70 He pronounced judgment against the present temple, as we shall see in the next chapter. These traditions are consistent with the notion that “temple” for Jesus had become something more or other than the Jerusalem temple, even though he remained concerned with the latter. In any case, clearly for Jesus the temple was not the sole or primary mediator of the presence of God, as it was in its role as the axis mundi of the social world. Rather, the Spirit or presence of God was present in the movement itself.
Jesus also spiritualized the very notion of Israel. Membership in the people of God was not determined merely by descent; Israel was not to be equated with “children of Abraham.”71 Neither was “Israel” defined by conventional wisdom’s distinctions between righteous and outcast. Nor was being a “child of Abraham”—that is, an Israelite—an identity worth killing for; what mattered was being a child of God, whose fundamental trait was compassion.72
Yet, though the Jesus movement was concerned with the internal or spiritual meaning of core elements of the Jewish tradition, it also remained concerned with actual Israel and with actual Israel’s historical life. Jesus remained deeply Jewish, even as he radicalized Judaism. He neither advocated the social world of the Gentiles, nor dissolved Judaism in the name of a more universal vision. His movement was concerned with what it meant to be Israel.
CONCLUSION: THE MOVEMENT AS ALTERNATIVE CULTURE
The traits which distinguished the Jesus movement in the social world of first-century Judaism were to a large extent rooted in the history of Israel itself. Indeed, the tension between Spirit and culture runs throughout the Old Testament. Israel had begun as a charismatic movement under the leadership of Moses and was, at its inception, a group of outcasts—slaves in Egypt who were dispossessed and marginal, led into a new life by the grace and compassion of God. The great prophets of the Old Testament consistently challenged the dominant cultural consciousness of their day in the name of a more comprehensive vision, attacking their people’s reliance on arms and protesting against the treatment of the marginal.
The spiritualization which we see in the Jesus movement is also known in the Old Testament: “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken and contrite heart.”73 That is, the conflict between the Jesus movement and its contemporaries was not a conflict between two different religions, an old one and a new one. It was a conflict within the tradition itself, between a version of the tradition which had hardened into conventional wisdom under the pressure of historical circumstances, and an alternative version which was freshly in touch with the Spirit.
The politics of compassion addressed the two central issues generated by the crisis in the Jewish social world: the growing internal division within Jewish society, and the deepening of the conflict with Rome. Jesus’ emphasis upon compassion as the ethos and politics of the people of God contravened the barriers created by Israel’s social world, made up of its blend of conventional wisdom, holiness, exclusivity, and patriarchy. Historically speaking, Jesus sought to transform his social world by creating an alternative community structured around compassion, with norms that moved in the direction of inclusiveness, acceptance, love, and peace. The alternative consciousness he taught as a sage generated a “contrast society,” an “alternative community with an alternative consciousness” grounded in the Spirit.74
Thus Jesus saw the life of the Spirit as incarnational, informing and transforming the life of culture. His mission, however, did not simply involve the creation of an alternative community. It also involved him in radical criticism of his culture’s present path, warning his people of the catastrophic historical direction in which they were headed. To Jesus as prophet we turn in the next chapter.
NOTES
8. Jesus as Prophet: Social World in Crisis
Of all the figures in his tradition, Jesus was most like the classical prophets of Israel.1 Active from about 750 B.C. to 400 B.C., they are among the most remarkable people who ever lived. Sharing the feature which defines the figure of prophet as known in many cultures, they were “verbal mediators” or messengers between the two worlds of the primordial tradition. Indeed, the name of the last of them, Malachi, means simply “my messenger.”
Their role as messengers of God flowed out of the intensity of their experiences of the Spirit, among the most vivid in the Spirit-filled tradition of Israel.2 As mediators of the Spirit, they spoke “the Word of the Lord,” and the “I” of the prophetic speeches is most often the divine “I.” Moreover, their language was vivid, compact, and poetic, surging with extraordinary energy.
Especially characteristic of them was their passionate and critical involvement in the historical life of their people in their own day. Speaking in times of historical crisis, they radically criticized their culture in the name of God and became voices of an alternative consciousness challenging their culture’s dominant consciousness.
CLEARING AWAY A MISCONCEPTION
To modern ears the word “prophecy” suggests predicting the distant future on the basis of special knowledge unavailable to “ordinary” people. It implies that the future is already fixed or predetermined and that it can be known by specially gifted people who can see into it and disclose coming events to others. “Prophecy” and “prediction” have become virtual synonyms.
To some extent, the church is responsible for this stereotype, for Christians have commonly seen the prophets of the Old Testament as “foretellers” of the Messiah, predicting the coming of Jesus. Popular works of Christian apologetics3 often point to the numerous correlations between passages in the Old Testament and events reported in the New Testament, and then argue that those correlations prove that Jesus was the Messiah and that Scripture is supernatural in its origin. Though the argument is well-intended, it treats the truth of Christianity as if it were a fact to be demonstrated by tight rational argument. Moreover, it fails to recognize the literary conventions followed by the New Testament authors as well as the intent of Old Testament prophecy itself. The correlations between the two testaments stem from the fact that the authors of the New Testament were deeply versed in the Old Testament (it was, after all, their Scripture). In common with ancient authors generally, they took it for granted that present events of great importance were “prefigured” in texts that were ancient in their day. Thus the New Testament authors often allude to or quote from the Old Testament, even though the correlations most often had nothing to do with the intention of the Old Testament author.4
Indeed, some Christians continue to see prophecy’s primary significance to be predictive, as if its purpose were to disclose the signs of the end preceding the second coming of Christ.5 But the distant future—whether the first or second coming of Christ—was not central to the prophets of I
srael. Instead, they were concerned with the immediate present of their people and of the immediate future that flowed out of that present.
THE PROPHETS AND HISTORICAL CRISIS
Strikingly, the classical prophets are concentrated in two periods of cultural crisis when Israel’s social world faced destruction by a foreign power. The first cluster appeared in the decades prior to the destruction of the northern kingdom by Assyria in 722 B.C.6 Somewhat over a hundred years later, a second cluster of prophets spoke in the decades surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.7 It is no coincidence that we do not find a significant Jewish prophet in a quiet time. Rather, these Spirit-filled persons were called forth by crisis and addressed their people in the midst of crisis.
INDICTMENT, THREAT, AND CALL TO CHANGE
The prophetic urgency can be seen in the threefold pattern marking the message of the prophets who spoke before the destruction of the two kingdoms: indictment, threat, and call to change. As messengers of God the prophets charged Israel with violations of the covenant (the indictment), warned that the future would be filled with destruction (the threat), and called their people to change before it was too late. The pattern not only characterized the most common form of their speech, the “threat oracle,”8 but also their mission as a whole: Israel faced historical destruction because of her present path unless she returned to the “way of the Lord.”
The Indictment
The prophets indicted the ruling elites of power, wealth, and religion who were responsible for the shape and direction of the nation’s historical life.9 In particular, they indicted the wealthy and powerful for the exploitation of the marginal and powerless within Israel. The established classes of religion, wealth, and power, they cried, had become calloused and hardened, insensitive to suffering. No longer mindful that their ancestors were once victims of oppression in Egypt, Israel’s elite, grown “fat,” had now become oppressors themselves.
The prophets also charged that Israel’s relationship to God had become distorted. Though Israel’s religion was organized around the God of Israel, and though priests and prophets and religious practice flourished, those in charge of Israel’s religious and political life no longer knew God: “There is no knowledge of God in the land.”10 Knowledge of God did not mean knowledge about God; Israel, we may suppose, had plenty of that. Rather, knowledge of God referred to knowing God, a relationship of intimacy and trust, and not simply believing what one had heard about God. The latter was religion accommodated to conventional wisdom, an enculturated religion which legitimated the dominant consciousness of the time. For the prophets, such religion amounted to infidelity, vividly spoken of as “adultery.” Israel’s corporate life showed that she no longer was faithful to God, but had gone whoring after other securities. Not knowing God, she had become blind, her heart had become hardened; she was arrogant and insecure at the same time, “silly and without sense.”11 The ruling elites in Israel had come to trust in their own wealth and power, in kings and the established order, in arms and military alliances, rather than in God.
The Threat
The predestruction prophets warned their society of imminent judgment by God. Importantly, it was not the last judgment or end of the world, but the threatened end of their social world through historical catastrophe. Specifically, they warned of impending military conquest and destruction, understood not just as a political event but as the judging activity of God.
Amos and Hosea warned the northern kingdom that it would be destroyed by Assyria as God’s judgment upon them unless they changed.12 The same message sounded over one hundred years later when Jeremiah and Ezekiel warned that Jerusalem and the temple would be destroyed by Babylon if the society continued its present direction. Infidelity to God and absence of compassion in the society’s life meant the collapse and destruction of their social world.
Call to Change
The prophets called Israel to repent, which meant to turn or return, and which referred primarily to a change in Israel’s collective life, and not simply to a change in individual lives.13 Indeed, such change was the purpose of the threats and indictments the prophets issued. They sought to transform their social world so that the future would be different: “Seek the Lord and live! Seek good, and not evil, that you may live!”14 The contingent nature of the future (as distinct from a foreordained future) was the presupposition of the prophetic message. Ironically, to the extent that a prophet was successful, the future of which he spoke would not come to pass.15 The purpose of the prophets was not to reveal the future, but to change it.
The crisis announced by the predestruction prophets thus had both present and future dimensions. The future crisis was the threatened end of their society, and the present crisis was the need to change the state of affairs that was leading to the catastrophe before it was too late. This connection between the immediate present and immediate future gave the prophetic message its urgency.
Prophetic Acts
Occasionally, the prophets acted out their message by performing symbolic or bizarre actions. Such actions are associated especially with the two major prophets in the years before the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 586 B.C. Jeremiah dashed a potter’s flask to the ground in front of the city’s leaders and declared that God would destroy the city in like fashion. On another occasion he wore a wooden yoke around his neck to a military conference in order to proclaim that those present should not resist Babylon, but instead should wear the yoke of Babylon.16 In the public square of Jerusalem, Ezekiel built a model of the city and laid siege to it with a toy army; he was ordered by God to lie on his left side for 390 days and then on his right side for 40 days to symbolize the number of years of captivity for the two kingdoms; and he ate starvation rations to symbolize the starvation that would come with the siege of Jerusalem.17
Sometimes the meaning of a prophetic act was virtually transparent and required little or no interpretation. At other times the action may have been performed to provoke the question, “Why are you doing that?”18 Jesus, as we shall see, continued this dramatic tradition.
THE PROPHETS AS CULTURAL CRITICS
The predestruction prophets were thus charismatics who were also radical cultural critics. Their twofold focus was Spirit and culture, God and their social world. As the voice of an alternative consciousness, they protested against the victimizing of the powerless, and challenged the dominant consciousness of their day. They were iconoclasts who shattered their society’s most cherished beliefs, especially the ideology that legitimated power, wealth, and privilege with an enculturated religion which spoke of God only as the endorser of society and not as its judge.19 God would not defend Jerusalem and the temple, but would fight on the side of Babylon; faithfulness to God did not mean defense of one’s country, but meant deserting to the enemy. Israel’s status as the chosen people did not mean that Israel was first in line for blessing, but first in line for judgment; though the ruling classes within Israel practiced the religion commanded by tradition, they did not know God—indeed, God despised their worship.
Not surprisingly, these critics of the culture’s dominant consciousness were unpopular. Those in power did not like what they had to say. Often deeply alienated from their compatriots, they got in trouble. Amos was ordered to leave the country.20 Jeremiah was threatened with death, beaten several times, put into the stocks, accused of treason, imprisoned, and finally lowered into a muddy cistern to die.21 They must sometimes have envied the official prophets who prophesied what the powerful wanted to hear, crying “Peace, peace,” when there was no peace.22
Their passion about their people’s life in history had as its primary source their communion with God. Their relationship to the Spirit led them to see things from a perspective very different from the dominant consciousness. Moreover, they did not simply see differently; they also felt deeply. They not only knew God, but felt the feelings of God: the divine compassion for the victims of suf
fering, the anger of God at the oppressing classes, the divine grief about the suffering that would soon come upon victimizer and victim alike.23 What happened in history—war, oppression, injustice, the institutionalization of greed—is one of the greatest sources of human suffering, and therefore one of the greatest sources of divine concern. For the prophets, God cared about what happened in history, and not simply about what happened within individuals.
The concern of these God-intoxicated individuals was thus political in the sense in which we have used the term. That is, their concern was the shape of the human community in which they lived. They criticized their culture’s central loyalties and values and called their culture to change at a very fundamental level. As critics of culture and advocates of another way, they were concerned with their people’s collective life, both its present state and its historical direction. Their concern was the intersection between Spirit and culture, God and history.
JESUS AS PROPHET
Jesus identified with his prophetic predecessors. Not only did some of his contemporaries perceive him as such, but he spoke of himself as one.24 Like the prophets, his twofold focus was God and the cultural life of his people in a time of crisis. Like them, the pattern of threat, indictment, and call to change ran throughout his ministry. Indeed, his passion for the historical life of his people ultimately cost him his own life.