In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus instructs his disciples to pray “Give us this day our daily bread.” From this one phrase a whole aura of sentimentality has been generated about “depending on God” for our food, a task that is ever so hard for middle class American Christians because, after all, we are so used to thinking that our food is something secure, that we provide for ourselves and we really don’t have to pray too hard about. Praying for “our daily bread” then, is little more than an exercise in reminding ourselves that, after all, ultimately God is in control and we need to not forget that.

In reading through Exodus last night it struck me how utterly wrong this whole way of thinking is in light of the biblical referent that is surely attached to “our daily bread.” What image could “daily bread” conjure up if not the daily gift of manna that God provided for Israel during their sojourn in the desert after leaving Egypt? The only “daily bread” that Israel has ever known was the daily allotment of bread that they received during those forty years wandering in the desert, bereft of any sort of landedness, security, or resources. There indeed, “daily bread” has real meaning. It is an utterly unproduced, unearned, insecure gift for which they can only hope in God’s promise.

When Jesus then instructs his disciples to pray for “our daily bread” ought we not — instead of thinking that this is just an injunction to remember God’s providential enforcement of that which we have already secured — realize that in calling his followers to pray in this way Jesus is calling us back into the desert with Israel. Out of the security of land, possessions, cultural production and into a life of sojourning in which we, once again, are given to depend, quite literally on God for the essentials of survival? Jesus envisions his community of followers, not as a restored Israel, or as Israel returned from exile. No, quite the opposite, he envisions his followers as a new Exodus community, a community liberated from slavery, and finding themselves so liberated (and often not knowing what to do with, or wanting that freedom) are now thrust into a complete loss of all securities save God and his unprecedented and unearned sustenance.

In short, it seems to me that for Jesus “daily bread” really means “daily bread,” not happy thoughts about how God is in control. He envisions his followers as a new band of post-Exodus nomads who possess nothing but hope in God for daily sustenance.

In the account of the passion in Matthew, the crowd responds to Pilate’s declaration of innocence with the cry “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matt 27:25). A curious irony is found here. In that the people here are taking on the responsibility for Christ’s death but do so in language that seems utterly Passoverish. And indeed, as it turns out Christ’s blood will be “on” them and their children. Just as the blood of the Passover lamb protected the families of Israel in Egypt from the angel of death, so also Christ’s blood will protect and save the very ones who shed it without regard for him.

But it doesn’t stop there. With the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost and the attending proclamation of the gospel of the resurrection, Peter claims that “This promise is for you and your children” (Acts 2:39).

Here we see the ironic and futile nature of our resistance to Christ and the radical superabundance of God’s self-giving in response to our hatred and violence. We go out for blood, thoughtlessly throwing our children in with us. God responds to us by coming to us again, as our victim, with words of forgiveness and promise. Where we would condemn ourselves and our children, God continues to come again to us with promise, with the Spirit, with new, vivifying life.

In Luke’s account of Jesus’ “love your enemies” command there’s an interesting difference from the better-known iteration in Matthew. Luke 6:35 reads “But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” Matthew, by contrast gives the rationale as being “for he [God] makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust” (Matt 5:45).

In Matthew the rationale for enemy-love is a sort of universally equal divine regard for the evil and the good alike (everybody gets sunshine and rain from God). Luke however states emphatically that God is kind to the wicked. This is a different matter altogether. We can generally countenance “loving” our enemies in the sense of hard-nosedly refusing to do them harm out of reluctant obedience to God (ostensibly thus heaping some lovely coals on their eternal souls, cf. Rom 12:20). But, are we willing to be kind to the evildoers, the oppressors, the enemy?

Taking this sort of notion seriously will always be a transgressive act, unnameable to most causes. Will Campbell, to my mind, bears out this sort of unconscionable ethic better than anyone else I know of. Consider his somewhat outrageous advocacy on behalf of members of the Kl Klux Klan:

Several months ago the Columbia Broadcasting System did a documentary film which was called “Ku Klux Klan: The Invisible Empire.” It showed the horror of such things as lynching and floggings, night riding and bombings, the castration of Judge Aaron in Alabama, the murder of four Sunday school children at prayer in Birmingham. All dreadful crimes. But there were many important things they did not tell us. They did not tell us that the same thing produced them as produces the violence born of frustration and deprivation in the black ghetto. The film did not tell us that the white redneck ghetto is produced by the same social forces as produces the black ghetto.

It did not tell us about a man, who is a friend of mine who is a leader in the Ku Klux Klan. I have no parish. I have no pulpit, and he has no church that wants him. So, you might say, I am his priest and pastor. Mr. CBS did not tell us about how his father left him when he was six years old. How his mother went to work in a textile sweat shop where for 37 years, she sewed the seam down the right leg of overalls. They did not tell us about how this boy was sent to reform school; how he ran away because he was a big boy and joined the army at 14, was jumping out of airplanes when he was 16, leading a platoon when he was 18. How for 17 years he learned from us the fine art of torture, interrogation, and guerilla warfare.

The film did not tell us that the same social forces produced the Klan’s violence that produced the violence of Watts, Rochester, Cleveland, Washington, and Nashville, and will produce much more. They did not tell us that the Klansmen are victims of the same social isolation, deprivation, economic conditions, rejections, under and unemployment, broken homes, ignorance, poor schools, no hospitals, bad diets, all the rest. (Writings on Resistance and Reconciliation, 37-38)

Too often our inclination towards peaceableness and social justice easily dispenses with our call, not merely to love victims, but to love the wicked, the evil, unrepentant, ungrateful ones whom Christ no less came to serve, die, and be resurrected for. The truly subversive word of the cross is not merely that God is on the side of the oppressed—Oh how easy is it for for us to facilely find a way to lump ourselves on the side of the victims!—but that God is on the side of all whom he has made. That God in Jesus bled and died no less for Hitler than for Gandhi.

Is that a word that we can stand? Can we stand the notion that God is kind to the wicked? That they, no less than the oppressed are slaves of the powers whom God has chosen, with his very blood, to liberate? Do we really dare to accept a liberation with and alongside the wicked? Because God in Christ offers no other liberation. And thanks be to God.

In a previous post about the story of the rich young man (Mark 10:17-21) I suggested that there’s no reason to think that the man did not indeed go away intending to do as Jesus commanded, by selling all his possessions and following him. In the comments someone suggested that there is a tradition that suggests Barnabas may be the rich young man in question here. I did some digging and couldn’t find much of anything on that point, but I did find another possibility that actually has support from the text of Mark itself.

Could it not be that the young man in question is simply Mark himself? I think we may catch a hint of this conclusion in Mark 14:51-52 where the narrative tells us that “A certain young man was following [Jesus], wearing nothing but a linen cloth.” This unidentified young man is generally thought — at least in all the commentaries I’ve come across — to be Mark.

Now, it could be that Mark just wanted to throw in some superfluous information by describing the nature of the young man’s (lack of) clothing, but given the intentionality that characterizes the narrative patterns of Mark I’m inclined to doubt it. Why tell us that the young man was dressed only in a sheet that he had wrapped around himself? Why make a point of the fact that he was following Jesus? Could it be that the complete lack of possessions, even clothing, his young age, and his description as actively following Jesus are meant to point us back to the story of the rich young man? Seems like a pretty valid connection to me. I don’t think there’s anyone else mentioned in the gospel of Mark who might qualify for this. Let us follow this line of thought. . .

Symbolically, this event is the culmination of the story of the rich young man. Unlike the others who desert Jesus and flee immediately (vs. 50), he continues to follow, to the point of being seized, at which point he makes his escape by leaving the very last of his possessions behind. His journey of discipleship is complete, he has been utterly dispossessed by following Jesus, right down to his clothing. And finally he has been driven into exile by the powers that set themselves against the mission of Christ.

The rich young man has been dispossessed of everything in following the Messiah, and is left scattered, naked in the dark. The only thing that can make this come out right is a hope beyond hope, a veritable new creation. Discipleship brings the young man to a null point, a point that can only be rendered meaningful by a radical disruption of the status quo. Only resurrection can make dispossessive discipleship of this sort anything more than a pathetic joke.

We’ve become accustomed to read the story of the rich young man (Mark 10:17-22) who Jesus commands to sell all his possessions as a kind of cautionary tale. The rich man, upon hearing Jesus’s demands, departs, unwilling to heed the call, caring more about his riches than about the life Jesus offers him.

Now, there is no way to be certain that I can see from the text, but I get no sense that we should automatically assume that this man rejected Jesus’s call. If he had rejected Jesus’s command, one would expect him to go away scoffing, not grieving (10:22). If he had rejected Jesus’s teaching there would be no reason for him to be sorrowful, and yet the text tells us that he departed in great distress.

Add to that that the whole point of the story, according to Jesus, is the hardness of discipleship and the corresponding abundance of God’s power in the face of this hardness. The response of the disciples to Jesus’s statement is the wondering, “Who then can be saved?” And yet this distressed wondering is addressed with the assurance that “for God all things are possible.”

The stress in the text, then, is on the genuine renunciation, the very real dispossession that is required in following Jesus, coupled with the assurance that God’s abundant power can indeed bring even the most compromised of us onto this liberating and life-giving path. Indeed, in reading this text we might do best to see ourselves in the shoes of this rich man. Like him, the task before us is often the journey home, into the depths of our own power and security so that we may renounce it for the sake of the life set before us.

In the final chapter of his introductory section, Wright engages in a close reading of the parable of the prodigal son (which is also the parable of the “prodigal father” in Wright’s reading) and then utilizes the interpretation of that parable as the analogy for his own methodology of studying Jesus amidst the sea of other options which he has already submitted to critique. The result is the most concise statement of Wright’s own methodology and presuppositions in the book thus far.

First off, Wright explores parables, not as narrative vehicles for aphorisms or wise sayings, but rather as subversive narratives that, in effect create a new world into which the hearer is invited to live. The parable of the prodigal, he argues is a subversive way of reading Israel’s experience of exile. The prodigal son is Israel who spurns his father and ends up in a far country, in the service of Gentiles and is now returning home, and being welcomed back in the extravagant, indeed, “prodigal” love of the father, much to the anger of the other brother who stayed behind. In this subversive retelling, Israel is cast as being in exile, and in the ministry and action of Jesus himself, they are being invited home, into the love of the father. However, those that spurn this homecoming are cast as the older brother, the one who stayed behind – in effect Jesus is casting those who oppose his ministry as Samaritans. The main point of the parable in Wright’s reading is this: “history is turning its long-awaited corner; this is happening within the ministry of Jesus himself; and those who oppose it are the enemies of the true people of god.” (p. 127)

Wright’s point in all this is to show the way in which the parables of Jesus “act”. They offer a new version of Israel’s story which makes new claims about how God is going to address his people’s expectation of messianic salvation. This is how Wright begins to answer his five questions from the previous chapter. He locates Jesus, believably within the context of first century Jewish messianic expectation and hope and simultaneously shows how Jesus deeply subverted the conventional understandings of how that hope would be fulfilled by God. Jesus believed, according to Wright that in his own ministry, God was reconstituting Israel as his people, that he was brining the exile to an end, and that the promises of the kingdom of God were coming to pass in him. This, of course as Wright notes will certainly arouse hostility, and offers a plausible rationale for why Jesus was killed.

Wright concludes this chapter with some notes about how to engage the question of reconstructing the worldview of a particular time and culture. This is particularly relevant to the study of Jesus and Jewish messianic expectation, as he has already made clear. This section provides something of a re-hash of parts of Wright’s first volume and makes a case for the fact that we can in some realistic way explore the mindsets and worldviews of past cultures and communities.

In his third chapter, Wright edges closer to beginning his own constructive work on Jesus as he outlines in more detail the nature of his inquiry into the life of Jesus. Over-against the skeptical straitjacket which has been imposed on historical study by the Wredebahn scholars of the “New Quest” for the historical Jesus, Wright explores an emerging “Third Quest”, which seeks to more thoroughly place Jesus in his Jewish context and likewise understand more accurately the way in which the career of Jesus gives rise to the early church and its beliefs about Jesus. It is here that Wright locates himself.

In setting forth his constructive methodology in conversation with similarly-minded scholars, Wright unpacks five key questions that bear on how studying the historical Jesus ought to be done. He observes how the many scholars who come up with unsatisfactory portraits of Jesus often tend to be guilty of being unable to come up with well-integrated and plausible answers to these five key questions.

The first question, which for Wright is quite possibly the most important question of all, is the question of how Jesus fits into first century Judaism. The key problem that Wright identifies with all the various scholars of the “New Quest” lies in the ways in which they construe the identity of Jesus in relation to his Jewish context. Touted claims about Jesus as a cynic or Jesus the existential preacher of forgiveness have no grounding in anything that would have been intelligible to Jews of Jesus’ time. Wright insists, rightly that any portrait of Jesus must show how he is intelligible in his historical context.

Wright moves on to discuss the question of the aims of Jesus. He explores the legitimacy of seeking to discern the motives of historical figures and contends that his is central to the study of Jesus. He then moves to the other all-important question of why Jesus died. This question is an important corollary to the first question. While Jesus must be intelligible within his own context, he must not become indistinguishable from it. Something about what Jesus said and did made him stand out from his cultural location, so much so that he was executed. Any portrait of Jesus must reckon with how he subverted and deviated from the norms of his time. The fourth and fifth questions inquire as to the nature of the early church and the gospels, respectively. Wright insists that both of these sources of information about Jesus must be understood in relation to what Christ actually did in a historically plausible way. The standard “New Quest” way of seeing that relationship so arbitrarily separates Jesus’ historical career from the church and the gospels that it is clearly driven by ideology rather than history. Finally, Wright looks at how these five questions fit together and at a sixth question, namely the question of “So what?”. A proper integration of all five of the answers to these questions is necessary, Wright insists, for a proper portrait of the historical Jesus.

In his second chapter, Write begins to lay the foundation of his argument through an exhaustive examination of the history of Jesus scholarship. At the outset he notes two very broad and basic threads in such scholarship. The first takes its impetus from William Wrede’s “thoroughgoing skepticism” which believes we can know very little about Jesus, or at least that the sources we have that purport to tell us about him are more or less pure fiction. The second thread derives from Schweitzer’s “thoroughgoing eschatology” which attempted to place Jesus in his first century setting (which for Schweitzer meant a very specific interpretation of “apocalyptic eschatology”). Thus, Wright sees two basic threads, one of them based in methodological skepticism and the other in a desire to locate Jesus within the context of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology which consequently places more value on the biblical records (p. 28-29).

Wright then proceeds to examine the major players whom he judges to fall within the train of Wrede’s skepticism (the “New Quest”). The first of these is the contemporary “Jesus Seminar”. Wright explores their agenda and methodology at length, and engages is an eviscerating critique of their methodology, particularly the way in which they engage in “voting” on the “authentic” statements of Jesus and the way in which such results are calculated (p. 33-35). He also explores the latent positivism that undergirds their quite confident account of “what Jesus really said”.

Wright then moves on to critique Burton Mack, and particularly his idiosyncratic dismissal of the gospel of Mark as a source of historical knowledge about Jesus (p. 41). In this context Wright also discusses the matter of “Q” and the ways in which statements about such a document, and the more strangely imagined “Q community” are thrown around by Jesus scholars that fall within the “Wredebahn“. Wright then moves into a lengthy and well-written critique of John Dominic Crossan who Wright sees (rightly in my judgment) as the most comprehensive and thoroughgoing contributor to Jesus studies in this school of thought. Wright proceeds to systematically examine and deconstruct Crossan’s presentation of Jesus and the epistemological and theological assumptions that sustain his wildly speculative account of Jesus and the early church (in fact it is Crossan’s reconstruction of the early church that is the most obscenely groundless of all – see p. 62-63). Wright concludes his critique of the Wredebahn scholars with an examination of the various people who posit Jesus as a cynic sage. Wright gives particular attention to Marcus Borg, who he regards as the most nuanced and variegated of all the members of this stream of Jesus studies. Wright concludes that all the members of the Wredebahn have ended up with a de-Judaized Jesus and an image of the early church that is historically incredible. He proposes that another mode of “questing” for the historical Jesus is necessary.

At the moment I am going through the second two volumes of N.T. Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God series.  Part of what I’m doing in reading the books is giving a review and summary of each chapter of both books.  I thought I might as well contribute them here, so occasionally over the next few months I’ll continue to post chapter-by-chapter sections reviewing Wright’s corpus.  Here is my overview of the first chapter.

Wright sets out, first of all to define the aim and methodology of his study of the historical person of Jesus. He notes at the outset (p. 4) that the very attempt to write an account of the person of Jesus has become a task which more and more theologians are hesitant to do, instead opting to discuss the shape of the early Christian community. Wright argues, however that a portrait of Jesus in his historical context is possible, and may very well be a point of reunion and convergence between critical historical study and theology. He notes that there are at least two “jigsaws” which need to be fitted together in putting forth such a historical study of Jesus.

The first jigsaw is a “historical one” (p. 5). Wright notes that what we have to say about Jesus from a historical point of view will be definitively shaped by what we have to say about “the first century as a whole” (p. 5). The relationship between pre-Christian Judaism, John the Baptist, Jesus, the earliest church, Paul, and the other New Testament writings are all part of the “jigsaw” which must be carefully fitted together in such a way as for us to have an accurate or at least plausible understanding of the historical person of Jesus.

In laying out this “jigsaw”, Wright explores and critiques Schweitzer and Bultmann for their particularly different ways of failing to properly place Jesus in his Jewish context. Bultmann ended up making Jesus into nothing more than a “preacher of existentialist decision” (p. 7), something that would have been utterly unintelligible in the first century. Schweitzer, likewise, though attempting to place Jesus in his historical context more thoroughly ends up saying virtually the same types of things about Jesus in terms of his relevance for today through a problematic understanding of “Jewish apocalyptic eschatology.”

This issue – that of the relevance of Jesus for today – is the “second jigsaw” which Wright is seeking to address in his work. Wright argues that “rigorous faith” and “rigorous history” belong together and can be a source of mutual enrichment, rather than mutual antagonism (p. 8). It is with that central presupposition in mind that Wright puts forth his analogy that guides the argument of the book, that of the parable of the prodigal son. The prodigal (critical historical study) demands his inheritance, scorning his father and goes into the far country in defiance while his older brother (orthodox belief) stays home, hurt and angry. However, Wright appeals to “the older brother” that, should the prodigal come home, he should be welcomed back rather than excoriated for his foolish and antagonistic youth. It is on this basis that Wright moves forward with his exploration of the previous two “quests” for the historical Jesus, and the ways in which they have been predatory on orthodox Christian faith, and seeks to move beyond them to a portrait of Jesus that is at once more historically situated in first century Judaism, and more theologically potent on the very basis of that historicity.