Further Reading — God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable and Responsible (Large Print 16pt)

When most first-century Jews observed Jesus, the first thing that came to mind was not the word Messiah. His contemporaries had all kinds of terms for him: some thought he was a lawbreaker, demon-possessed, a glutton and drunkard, a blasphemer, a false prophet, a claimant for “King of the Jews”; others thought he was nothing more than an illegitimate child, a mamzer in the Hebrew of his day.[1] It wasn’t just the Jewish leaders or even ordinary Jewish folk who had trouble with Jesus. Even his family at one point thought he was “out of his mind” (Mk 3:21).

But Jesus’ followers saw something else. They thought he was the Son of God and Messiah and the Son of Man and Lord and Teacher and Prophet like Moses. As we read the New Testament, titles for Jesus multiply to where it becomes quite obvious what happened: what these Jews first believed about the Jewish God, YHWH by name, was what they came to believe also about Jesus. In their mind, Jesus was God, the God of Israel in flesh. John 1:1 says it explicitly.

But we are not interested in this chapter in how Jesus’ followers saw him. We have another question, one that gets behind why so many of his contemporaries did not use the word Messiah for him. If he was the Messiah, he wasn’t what most of them were expecting. What I’m suggesting is not that there were lots of views of the Messiah in Judaism; there were. What I’m saying is that, in spite of the welter of views about Messiah, when some compared what they thought the Messiah would be to what Jesus was doing, it just didn’t add up to “Therefore, Jesus is our Messiah.” Jesus confused them because he didn’t live the script they had written for the Messiah. His confusing of his contemporaries leads me to a question: what did they see?

I’d like to sketch some items the contemporaries of Jesus most likely saw when they listened to and watched Jesus. What we will discover if we have the patience to think about Jesus in the terms of those who saw him from the outside—as if for the very first time—is that Jesus pressed upon his observers one major question: “Who do you think I am?” They were led to that question, I suggest, by ten things they observed.

1. Jesus Was Free

Jews believed the book of Leviticus was from God; that meant eating kosher foods. By the time of Jesus they had extended food laws to include eating only with those who ate kosher, which meant they didn’t eat with Gentiles or sinful people. As in our day, not only was the Bible seen as inspired, but traditional interpretation (called halakah) of the Torah (the “Law of Moses”) was just as authoritative. If someone came along and tossed some shrimp on the barbie or pulled out a ham sandwich at lunch, that person would be seen as a flagrant violator of the Torah.

Those who watched Jesus eating with others, however, observed something: Jesus didn’t seem to care for the standard halakah on some things; he ate with those who were considered “sinners.” Some of his contemporaries saw what he did and listened to what he said, and they said this: “Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Mt 11:19). These aren’t words describing how much Jesus ate or drank but technical words from the Torah of Moses. They come straight from Deuteronomy 21:18-21:

If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard.” Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid. (TNIV, emphasis added)

The words of the observers of Jesus, based in Torah according to official interpretation, were that Jesus was a “rebellious son” and he should be stoned. These words were a legal category designed for prosecution. What the observers saw, then, was that Jesus not only knew these words of Moses and how his contemporaries interpreted them, but he didn’t seem to care what they thought they meant. He was free from that interpretation. And so he did what he thought was right: he ate with those considered sinners.

What they would have seen was not what they expected of the Messiah; the Messiah would be the quintessential son of the Torah and a master interpreter—which, ironically, he was, but they didn’t see that his interpretation was different from theirs. I think observers of Jesus saw him as wild. G. K. Chesterton, in his book called Orthodoxy, pins great words on what the observers of Jesus saw: “The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”[2] Jesus, too, was running wild.

2. Jesus Was Confident

Observers of Jesus in the first century would have noticed something else immediately: his chutzpah. Every observant Jew began and ended the day reciting the Shema, roughly the words we now find in Deuteronomy 6:4-9, which reminded them to love God with every globule of their being. Not only that, they said this whenever they left their house and entered back into that house. And they recited the Shema when they were on the path with their children to remind them of the central creed of Judaism: to love God by obeying God’s commands.[3]

Jesus was free from that sacred duty as well. But there’s more. Not only was he free but he exempted his followers. It’s found now in Luke 9:59-60, where we find Jesus summoning three different individuals to follow him. To the second man, Jesus said: “Follow me.”

But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”

Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” (TNIV)

Jesus thought following him was more important than burying one’s father. To be sure, the Jewish burial process involved immediately placing one’s father’s corpse in a niche in a stone wall and waiting for the body to decompose. That took about a year. Then the eldest son checked to make sure the body had decomposed sufficiently, removed the bones and placed them in a bone box (ossuary) to be permanently buried. Even if this prolonged process is the proper historical setting for Jesus’ words, however, the words come off as full of chutzpah. The sacred duty to bury your father, Jesus was saying, is not as important as following me. “I am more important than sacred tradition,” Jesus was saying.

Elsewhere (Mt 12:1-8) Jesus scuffles with his contemporaries over the sabbath. We need to remind ourselves of how Matthew 11 ended: Jesus said he could give his disciples rest. That word rest is golden; it is what sabbath is all about, and that means the opening point of Matthew 12, that Jesus is lord even of the sabbath, is a way of saying that he was the sabbath, he was the rest. The famous Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner reads this passage and concludes that “what we face is an irreconcilable conflict. Either ‘Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy’ or ‘The son of man is the Lord of the Sabbath’—but not both.”[4] Neusner sees here a claim on the part of Jesus to be the sabbath himself—to be the one in whom the rest is found. That’s what I mean by chutzpah.

The natural response of the ordinary Jew to these words of Jesus was this: “Who in the world do you think you are?”

3. Jesus Was a Lightning Rod

For a variety of reasons Jesus was a lightning rod. After watching the same actions and hearing Jesus say the same things, two groups came to two different conclusions: Peter and Mary Magdalene believed Jesus was the answer to age-old questions and the climax of the story of Israel; many of the Pharisees thought Jesus was a menace to piety and sacred tradition. When the Pharisee saw a converted prostitute anointing Jesus’ feet with expensive oil, his response was “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner” (Lk 7:39 TNIV). But the woman saw things differently: she thought Jesus was the one who acknowledged her, showed her compassion and gave her a new start in life. As Luke tells the story, Jesus saw in her (not him) the true model of adoration.

Then he [Jesus] turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.” Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”

Not surprisingly, the question of those who saw what happened was “Who is this who even forgives sins?” (Lk 7:44-49 TNIV).

The Roman authorities didn’t like Jesus either. Once the Pharisees came to Jesus and said, “Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.” Jesus’ response:

Go tell that fox, “I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.” In any case, I must press on today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can die outside Jerusalem! (Lk 13:31-33 TNIV)

We can trust the Pharisees on this one to have known the inside story: Rome saw Jesus as a threat.

Like the Pharisees and Romans, the Sadducees made Jesus a lightning rod of opposition. Many of us learned the parable of the Good Samaritan as kids, and sometimes we were taught the parable in a way that avoids the subversive nature of the story. It was, after all, a priest and Levite—probably Sadducees—who were on their way from Jerusalem, and that means they form the foil for the Samaritan—hardly a priest!—who showed compassion (Lk 10:25-37). John the Baptist, the son of a priest and relative of Jesus, was beheaded by Herod Antipas. In the Sadducees’ opinion, Jesus was a follower of John and was threatening their positions with the Romans. During Jesus’ last week, when he went toe to toe with the Sadducees and their associates (Mk 11:27-33; 12:13-17, 18-27), there was a history of bad blood at work. Jesus wasn’t backing down, and neither were they. The perfect storm to put him away had been congealing for more than a year.

Any casual observer with open eyes and ears could not have missed that behind the scenes a plot was in motion. The question this plot raises is: Why did they think Jesus had to be killed? What sort of person is such a threat to so many that they need to put him away to deal with him?

4. Jesus Was an Activist

If we compare Jesus to Socrates or Plato or the apostle Paul or to Augustine we observe that all of them, in their own way, were intellectuals. By reading about them and by reading what they wrote or taught, we know they can sustain an argument for pages. What reader hasn’t wondered what Paul was up to in Romans 7 or Augustine in The City of God?

No one wants to say Jesus wasn’t intelligent, but his style was not that of an intellectual. Instead, Jesus’ style was that of an activist who gathered people around and plotted and organized and orchestrated an all-out agenda to get his people to respond to the message of the kingdom of God. You can see this sort of thing at work in Luke 10:1-12 as Jesus organizes and commissions seventy evangelists. Jesus moved from village to village doing this one day after the next (Lk 9:51-56).

True, Jesus gave sermons, and some of them have been remembered and set down for our own learning. We think here of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5—7) or what Luke calls the Sermon on the Plain (Lk 6:17-49). But Jesus did not write any books, at least that we know about, and his style was homey stories and clever lines and insightful remarks. One reason this is the way we remember Jesus is because he was so active that he seemed not to have the time or the inclination to turn his ideas into dissertations. When we think of Jesus, we are not to think of a professor type but of a local pastor, activist and community worker all rolled into one personality. We are to think of who Jesus was and how he would have struck those who observed him in his day.

5. Jesus Was Preachy

Anyone who took an interest in Jesus at all would have observed that he told people what he thought and sometimes had to tell people off. The kind of rhetoric we find in the Bible might surprise us today, and I know a recent study surprised me when I tried to put together James’s concern with the tongue (Jas 3:1-12) and the sharp criticisms he offers (Jas 4:1-12; 4:13—5:6). But that kind of rhetoric was common in the ancient world, and Jesus fit right in. We’ve mentioned the Sermon on the Mount, but Matthew records four others: the missionary discourse (Mt 10), the parable discourse (Mt 13), the church discourse (Mt 18) and a discourse that warns of Jerusalem’s imminent destruction (Mt 23—25). John’s Gospel is laced together with lengthy sermons by Jesus (cf. Jn 6). Perhaps Matthew 23 alone stands as some of the strongest, preachy rhetoric of Jesus, and those who were watching would have come away thinking Jesus was courageous and could be rhetorically potent if he needed to be. But more often his preachiness moved in other directions.

Everyone noticed Jesus’ parables, short stories that invite the listener in and, if the listener stays long enough, either turn his world upside down or—like the wardrobe that gives children entrance into C. S. Lewis’s Narnia or the painting that welcomes Lewis’s Eustace aboard the Dawn Treader—draw him into a new world with a new vision that leads to a new life.

Jesus’ style was to tell stories. Aristotle’s style was that of a chemist working in a mortuary! Aristotle dissected everything; Jesus “stori-fied” everything. Sometimes the listener discovered late in the game that the story was on him.

Let’s set Jesus’ preaching and parables in context: Jesus is on a mission to restore Israel, and he is being opposed. His weapon is to preach about his vision of the kingdom of God, and he tells stories to make clear to others what is really going on. When he senses the wind of opposition, instead of opening his sails to fly away, he lowers his nose and heads right into it. For Jesus, there is no looking back. He sets his sight on Jerusalem, enters the sacred temple, tips over tables and then, when asked about his behavior, gives his audience a memorable, breathtaking story:

A man planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place. At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants to collect from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. But they seized him, beat him and sent him away empty-handed. Then he sent another servant to them; they struck this man on the head and treated him shamefully. He sent still another, and that one they killed. He sent many others; some of them they beat, others they killed.

He had one left to send, a son, whom he loved. He sent him last of all, saying, “They will respect my son.”

But the tenants said to one another, “This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.” So they took him and killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.

What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others. Haven’t you read this passage of Scripture:

“The stone the builders rejected

has become the cornerstone;

the Lord has done this,

and it is marvelous in our eyes”?

The story ends, and then “the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders looked for a way to arrest him because they knew he had spoken the parable against them. But they were afraid of the crowd; so they left him and went away” (Mk 12:1-12 TNIV).

Jesus’ story is a good one, depending of course on who you are. Jesus forces his hearers to run the gauntlet—whose side are they on? Are they with the “son” or are they with the vine-growers? Of course, they think, they are with the “son” who was obviously treated unjustly. But then everything shifts into nothing less than a showdown: Jesus points out that he is the “son” and that the vine-growers are the leaders of Jerusalem—chief priests and Pharisees. Those who took the time to listen to him recognized in Jesus’ story not some moral tale but a devastating critique of their attitude toward his mission to bring the kingdom of God. Unlike the Zealots, Jesus’ “sword” was the word, usually in story form.

The observers of Jesus in this kind of situation—and this was as commonplace for Jesus as questions about policy are for presidential candidates—could not have failed to ask: Why is there so much concern with Jesus? Why does what he has to say matter so much? Who is he? They had plenty of opportunity to watch and hear because Jesus was an activist preacher who did this all day long for three years.

6. Jesus Has a Radar for Hypocrisy

We can begin with the observation that Jesus despised the ostentatious practice of religious acts. As an activist he saw lots of it; as a preacher he was compelled to reveal it.

Perhaps the gentle wit of an English novelist can help us out. When Lord Middleton invited two young women, cousins at that, home without informing his dear wife, Jane Austen (in Sense and Sensibility) informs us of the following:

As it was impossible, however, now to prevent their coming, Lady Middleton resigned herself to the idea of it with all the philosophy of a well-bred woman, contenting herself with merely giving her husband a gentle reprimand on the subject five or six times every day.[5]

It might be observed that Jesus had the same apparent approach to “helping” hypocrites see their failings, though he avoided the subtlety of Austen’s indirection. Over and over this happens, and it can’t but strike anyone who reads the Gospels how sensitive Jesus was to the matter. In Mark 7 Jesus points out that fastidiousness over washed hands needs to be met with an even more intense desire to be pure in heart. In Jesus’ last week, he remonstrates at length with the Pharisees and scribes over their hypocrisies.

What Jesus observed in certain leaders of his day has its counterparts among many in ours, including leaders in the church. Even if we are to make sure the same is not true of us, that does not mean that we don’t at times think that Jesus “got ‘em but good.” And we smile with approval, because the words he used carried their own punch. It would not be far from the mark to suggest that Flannery O’Connor’s brilliant exposés of religious pretense, dressed up as they are in the grotesque images she chooses to employ, owe their origins to the ancient prophets of Israel, like Micah or Isaiah, and to Jesus’ own excoriations in Matthew 23. Perhaps her words best comment on Jesus’: “I doubtless hate,” she wrote to Maryat Lee in June of 1957, “pious language worse than you because I believe the realities it hides.”[6] The realities O’Connor believed in were those created by Jesus, and he hated pious language for the same reason. He knew the truth, and wanted people to live in the truth. In fact, he was the truth (Jn 14:6), and that made hypocrisy detestable. His sitting in judgment on others made people wonder who he thought he was.

7. Jesus Was Charismatic

I use the word charismatic because I think ordinary observers would have said it about Jesus. When he entered the village, folks gathered to him; when he came to dinner, folks wanted to sit near him; when he sauntered out to the village well for a drink, others got thirsty. Mark’s quiet words map the life of Jesus:

Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the lake, and a large crowd from Galilee followed. When they heard all he was doing, many people came to him from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, and the regions across the Jordan and around Tyre and Sidon. Because of the crowd he told his disciples to have a small boat ready for him, to keep the people from crowding him. For he had healed many, so that those with diseases were pushing forward to touch him. (Mk 3:7-10 TNIV)

Sometime sit down with one Gospel, read it and mark down every time someone asks Jesus a question. What is surprising is how rarely Jesus initiates his actions or his teaching. Far more often someone asks Jesus a question because they want to know what he thinks. Everyone recognized this, even the opponents of Jesus. Notice the potent irony in two scenes from John 12, one in which the leaders of Judaism reject Jesus while ordinary Greeks embrace him, an irony that perfectly illustrates Jesus as charismatic:

Now the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word. Many people, because they had heard that he had performed this sign, went out to meet him. So the Pharisees said to one another, “See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!”

Now there were some Greeks among those who went up to worship at the Festival. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, with a request. “Sir,” they said, “we would like to see Jesus.” Philip went to tell Andrew; Andrew and Philip in turn told Jesus. (Jn 12:17-22 TNIV)

There’s another sense of charismatic; I will turn to that now. But being charismatic in the above sense led people to ask what it was about Jesus that made him so attractive.

8. Jesus Was Spiritual

Ordinary observers of Jesus, those who were neither committed to him nor against him, would have been struck by the spirituality of Jesus. At Jesus’ baptism he had a vision of some sort (Mk 1:9-11). He was transfigured in the very presence of his followers (Mk 9:2-13). He somehow saw Satan fall like lightning (Lk 10:18). Jesus was known for prayer, the kind of prayer that intimately related to God as Abba (Aramaic for “Father”), and he taught his disciples a prayer (Lk 11:2-4). He healed people and exorcised demons (Mt 4:23-25) and he multiplied bread (Mk 6:30-44). We could multiply the examples, but the point has been made: only deeply spiritual, charismatic people do things like this.

A point needs to be made here. Some argue from these kinds of claims that Jesus was God, and I think he was. But we miss something when we make this move all the time. We should see something else: Jesus did these things not because he was God but because, in his humanity, the power of God the Father was given to him. This dependence on God is the constant witness of John’s Gospel, and Jesus did these things because he was in tune with and empowered by the Spirit of God (Lk 3:22; 4:1, 18; Mt 12:28).[7]

At the time of Jesus there were others who were called “holy men” or Hasidim. Each is different, but they fall into a pattern. No doubt many would have seen Jesus as Jewish hasid. Notice this text from the later Jewish rabbinic text, the Mishnah:

C. They said to Honi, the circle drawer, “Pray for rain.”

D. He said to them, “Go and take in the clay ovens used for Passover, so that they not soften [in the rain which is coming].”

E. He prayed, but it did not rain.

F. What did he do?

G. He drew a circle and stood in the middle of it and said before Him, “Lord of the world! Your children have turned to me, for before you I am like a member of the family. I swear by your great name—I’m simply not moving from here until you take pity on your children!”

H. It began to rain drop by drop.

I. He said, “This is not what I wanted, but rain for filling up cisterns, pits, and caverns.”

J. It began to rain violently.

K. He said, “This is not what I wanted, but rain of good will, blessing, and graciousness.”

L. Now it rained the right way, until Israelites had to flee from Jerusalem up to the Temple Mount because of the rain.[8]

Each Jewish hasid is distinct, not the least of whom would have been Jesus, but each also fits into a pattern of someone who is charismatic in the sense of having direct access to God, and everyone knew this about Jesus. And yet they observed lots of differences between Jesus and the others. He, after all, was the only one who ended up crucified. Why?

9. Jesus Had Compassion

Jesus was known for the company he kept and the tables at which he ate. Every evening became a banquet, every night a symposium, every home a dining hall. And to the table came all sorts of the marginalized. Take note of these sorts whom you find on every page of Jesus’ life: fishermen, Zealots, tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, demonized and women aplenty. He created the first socially correct Sesame Street dinner table, and he did so because he believed his Father loved all people. He anticipated Mr. Rogers and his neighborhood, because Jesus thought everyone was “special” and that his table could be the start of both a new “neighborliness” and a new “neighborhood.” He did this because he believed all humans—whether “pure” or not, whether “observant” or not and whether morally sound or not—were made in God’s image. And, like Augustine after him, he knew that people weren’t fully persons until they turned to God.

What, we can ask, do you think the Samaritan woman said about Jesus when she got home (Jn 4)? Or the lepers who were healed when each of them got back home (Lk 17:11-19)? Or the poor man about whom Jesus told the story of Dives and Lazarus (Lk16:19-31)? Or the woman caught in the act of whatever by whomever but who was suddenly freed for a new life (Jn 7:53—8:11)? The lines these people remember from Jesus were things like this: “Be healed” or “Be forgiven” or “Be restored.” They remembered Jesus as someone who looked them in the eye, saw who and what they were, disregarded it because he knew who had made them, and invited them home. Jesus was for big tables in a big house, with places reserved for all sorts. What kind of person, they would have asked, does stuff like this?

10. Jesus Was At Home, Not at Home

The last characteristic is a double image: Jesus was both at home in Judaism and at the same time not completely comfortable with the Judaism of his day. In 1973 Geza Vermes, a Jew who became a priest and then converted back to Judaism, brought to the scholarly world’s attention that Jesus is only understood if he is understood in Jewish terms.

Jesus is at home in Judaism; he speaks like it, he thinks like it, and he worships like it. His piety is Judaism’s. He taught its themes, he told its stories, and he used its connections. Until you and I understand Judaism, we really can’t get a good hold on Jesus. Until we understand “Torah” and “purity” and “temple” and “land” and the like, we can’t grasp what Jesus was saying and what he was doing. In other words, Jesus’ mission was a “Jewish” mission—a mission to Jews and for Jews and about Jews and in the terms of the Jews. His vision was rooted in Israel’s Scriptures, his God is the God of Israel’s Scriptures, his prophetic stance over against Israel is drawn from Israel’s prophets, and his family—Joseph, Mary and his extended family (John the Baptist and his parents, Zechariah and Elisabeth)—thoroughly Jewish and concerned with things Jewish. It is more than likely that Jesus worshiped at the temple on High Holidays; he would have taken part in sacrificing lambs for Passover; he would have helped to build the “tents” for Sukkoth; and he would have participated in synagogue services and the like in Nazareth. He was a Jew among Jews, and nothing he did or said (really ever) was anything but Jewish.

However, what he did and what he said created tensions—not because what he did or said was not Jewish but because it bucked the establishment and called for a new day. Which leads to the final characteristic about Jesus. Jesus was simply not comfortable with the Judaism of his day.

Jesus told this little parable, really little more than a wisdom riddle (with a little adjustment by me): “No one but a dumb cluck puts new wine in an old wineskin” (Mk 2:22). That tells the whole story about Jesus: he came not to break the Torah but to fulfill it; he came not to tear apart the feasts of Israel but to set them on a new level—that is what the Lord’s Supper is to Pesach (the Hebrew term for “Passover”); he came not to abolish redemption but to restore it. So Jesus is himself the new wine in an old wineskin—he is (according to himself and his followers) Jewish wine but cranked up so that the old wineskin of Judaism just can’t contain his ferment. If you fill that wineskin with the juice that is Jesus, the skin will burst and the whole place will be a mess. And no one likes messes.

This all came to a head during the Feast of Unleavened Bread and Passover. Jesus entered the city of Jerusalem, pierced his way into the temple courts and started tipping over tables as an acted parable of what was about to happen to the temple itself if the leaders refused to listen to him. By the end of the week he had been tried and summarily executed on a cross just outside the city.

The Gospels tell us Jesus predicted not only that he would die but that his death would bring saving benefits to his followers. In one text, Jesus says that “even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10:45 TNIV). And, along the same line of understanding, in the Last Supper, Jesus suddenly broke with the Passover custom and said, “This is my body” and “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. . . . Truly I tell you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God” (Mk 14:22, 24-25 TNIV). Jesus believed his death was beneficial; it was a death that absorbed the wrath of God against the sins of his people and the world, turned violence on its head, and brought kingdom redemption to his followers. From this point on, association with Jesus is association with the Crucified One.

Even if Jesus thought his death was saving, he still died. His death almost undid his followers—but only until Sunday morning, when the report quickly spread among the followers that Jesus had somehow come back to life. He had been raised. They announced this because the tomb was empty, for which there are only two possible explanations: either the body was removed by the followers of Jesus and they were all liars, and Christianity is foisted up by a pack of rebel liars; or, the body was raised by God, and the Christian preaching of hope through resurrection is the gospel. There are no other reasonable alternatives: either the disciples are liars or they are truth-tellers.

What Brutus said about Mark Antony, or at least what Shakespeare depicts him as saying, may be what the Roman Pontius Pilate thought of that small band of Jesus’ followers:

For he can do no more than Caesar’s arm

When Caesar’s head is off.[9]

But what, one may ask, if the Ruler comes back to life? What then, Brutus? Does the arm come back to life too? Does the arm that has come back to life learn to see Messiah in a new set of categories? The witness of history is that it did. The Messiah who was expected was transformed by the Messiah who came.

The idea for approaching Jesus from the outside comes from reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. In part two of this sometimes quite wonderful but always punchy book, he sought to describe Jesus by an imaginary man from the moon who discovers the Gospels but had never heard of Jesus prior to reading them. Chesterton tells the truth about the Gospels with this: “If we could read the Gospel reports as things as new as newspaper reports, they would puzzle us and perhaps terrify us much more than the same things as developed by historical Christianity. . . . [T]he moral is that the Christ of the Gospel might actually seem more strange and terrible than the Christ of the Church.”[10]

How about you? Who do you think he was?[11]