by Harvey Cox
The Old Testament cycle begins with creation and ends with the renovation of the world into a commonwealth of shalom, a place of justice and peace. This is a very large promise for which the promised land of Canaan is mere foreshadowing, a sort of down payment. This enlarged promise is not just to Jews, but to everyone. Also, according to some of the most lyrical passages in the Hebrew scriptures, it includes the whole creation, the plants and animals, the seas and the stars. This means that one way to see the mystery of space-time is to view it as an unfinished epic, a work in progress. It can be seen as a process in which the new, the surprising, and the unexpected constantly emerge. It means we live in a world whose potential is yet to be fulfilled.
This biblical perspective is one way to perceive the mystery of the universe, not the only one. It is the view one gets from the deck of the ship I happen to be on. But there are other vessels in this flotilla and other narratives. The biblical story portrays a universe that is “going somewhere,” but the Buddhist one, for example, has no account of creation and denies any beginning or end of space or time: what is now always has been and always will be. The Hindu saga consists of endless cycles of time and innumerable universes. The biblical story is neither static nor cyclical. It depicts a reality that is moving in a certain direction, even though that direction is hard to discern. The Bible opens poetically with a world rising out of chaos (“the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,” Gen. 1:2) and ends, also poetically, with a world in which “there are no more tears” (Rev. 21:4). This view of the world as a creative process, not the changeless substance the ancient Greeks favored, explains why hope is such an important component of the way of life it shapes. Hope is that virtue that sees the past and the present in light of a future horizon. Later, in the New Testament, the apostle Paul places hope along with faith and love as the three principal virtues (1 Cor. 13:13). In this way he was very much the Hebrew. The heartbeat of Israelite faith was the expectation of a messianic era in which all would sit under their own fig trees, the lion would lie down with the lamb, and swords would be beaten into plowshares (Mic. 4:3–4; Isa. 11:1–9). This would take place not in some transcendental realm, but here on earth. I cannot imagine how the more specifically Christian cycles would have made any sense to me, had I not been grounded in these Old Testament chronicles.
The Christmas Cycle: The Christmas stories distill the themes of the Old Testament in the life purpose of one man. Like the ancient Israelites, Jesus and his family were themselves refugees. Mary and Joseph were not married (something our Sunday school teachers skipped over rather lightly). The tyrannical king tried to kill the baby, so he butchered all the boys in the neighborhood, and the family became displaced persons. Later, Jesus’s teachings and his activities demonstrated his habitual favoritism toward the poor, the sick, and the socially ostracized—tax collectors, Samaritans, and lepers. But, like the Old Testament prophets, the constant leitmotif of Jesus’s life was his reiteration of God’s promise of a new day, an age of peace and goodwill, the “Reigning of God,” which he said was already coming to pass in a preliminary way.
I remember wondering as a small child why King Herod wanted to kill this baby so badly that he was willing to slay all the children. We did not have any pictures of the “slaughter of the innocents” in Sunday school, but somewhere I ran across a print of Brueghel’s painting of the scene and felt devastated by his depiction of pleading mothers, infants impaled on soldiers’ spears, and blood spattered on the snow. No wonder there was no picture of it in Sunday school. Later, in seminary, I learned that our Christmas accounts were written many years after Jesus’s death as an overture to the main events of his life. The portrait of a family without shelter, penniless shepherds, and relentless opposition from the rulers foreshadowed what was to occur as this baby grew to manhood.
Even later, when I read the historians who place Jesus within the context of Roman imperial rule, my childhood question received a more complete answer. Ancient inscriptions show that officials of the empire celebrated the life of Augustus Caesar as “good news” (gospel) and declared him a “savior” and a “god” who had brought peace to earth. But the angels sang exactly the same praises of the baby Jesus. This is why Matthew and Luke, who wrote the nativity narratives, but who also knew how the story had turned out, represented the powers that be, personified by King Herod, as wanting this baby dead.
Almost as if to justify the frantic fears of Herod and his imperial cohorts, the moment Jesus reached adulthood, he began to tell people that a new regime—the “Kingdom of God”—was about to replace the existing one, that the insiders would be out and those at the bottom would be on top. Naturally the ruling elites heard this promise of a “regime change” as a threat. But the phrase “Kingdom of God” is one of the most misused and misunderstood in the entire Bible. It is too often thought of as where you may go after you die, or something that begins after this world’s history is over, or something that is entirely inward. However, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus himself, and the last pages of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, all teach that the Kingdom of God is something that happens in and to this world. The glimpse the prophets convey about a reign of God’s shalom is doggedly earthy. For example, Isaiah, using the New Jerusalem as a synonym for the whole creation, describes it this way:
The sound of weeping, the cry of distress
will be heard in her no more.
No child there will ever again die in infancy,
No old man shall fail to live out his span of life….
My people shall build houses and live in them,
Plant vineyards and eat their fruit;
They will not build for others to live in
Or plant for others to eat. (Isa. 65:19–22)
This is, of course, poetry. But it is earthy and this-worldly. It evokes a picture that is far different from the ones we see in magazine cartoons featuring bored angels in ill-fitting white robes, perched on clouds and strumming harps.
The biblical idea of the Kingdom of God also includes an essential inward element. As the prophet Ezekiel puts it, “A new heart also will I give you” (36:26). In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that only the “pure in heart” shall see God (Matt. 5:8). It also includes the expectation that death, either of the planet or of an individual, is not their ultimate destiny, and it points to a cosmic fulfillment that transcends human history, encompassing the celestial bodies. This in no way undercuts the fact that the Kingdom of God, as envisioned by Jesus and the prophets, contains an undeniably utopian element, but since this is what Christians have often neglected, this futuristic dimension has frequently migrated into secular movements. It has sometimes been said that while Christians have tried to have God without the Kingdom, secularists have tried to build the Kingdom without God. But this is an oversimplification. It is true that embracing Jesus while ignoring the Kingdom’s requirement for justice inevitably results in an individualistic pietism, and that Lenin’s mausoleum is not the only monument to the disasters that result when human beings make themselves into the gods of the future. But the yearning for a different world, is thoroughly human. As the Latin American theologian Jon Sobrino writes, “the utopian impulse provides the possibility of a universal, human ecumenism of all those who hope and work for a kingdom.”1
Still, the word “kingdom” is problematical. It inevitably evokes the static idea of a spatial realm. The Hebrew word, malkuth, however, does not convey this inert feeling, but suggests something actively occurring. For this reason, in my own teaching I prefer to use the phrase “Reigning of God.” It implies something that is going on—not a place, but a “happening.” This is the grammar Jesus used in speaking of it. To be a “follower” of Jesus means to discern and respond to the initial signs of this “happening” and to work to facilitate its coming in its fullness. To follow Jesus, however, does not mean to be a mimic. It means to continue in our times what he did in his.
Jesus wa
s a man of faith. Recall how we defined “faith” in a previous chapter. Calling Jesus a man of faith does not suggest that we must somehow uncover Jesus’s “beliefs” or his ideas about God. These would be, in any case, matters of speculation, since we cannot know much about his inner life. Rather, by seeing the way he lived his life, we learn what his primal orientation was and see what he trusted and placed his confidence in. These are the components of his faith. Clearly the object of Jesus’s own hope and confidence—his faith—was the Kingdom of God.
Jesus inherited the traditional Jewish faith of his family and his people, but just as the gospels say that he “grew in wisdom and in stature” (Luke 2:52), his life story demonstrates that he also grew in faith. Some paintings of the Holy Family show Jesus as a wise little old man while he was still in swaddling clothes. But if Jesus was fully human, as Christianity has always insisted, then his childhood faith matured as he grew, faced disappointments, and felt the pain of betrayal, rejection, and misunderstanding. He struggled with crises and passed through stages of reframing and deepening his faith. It is important to notice, however, that the assaults on his faith did not come from intellectual doubts about the existence of God. They had nothing to do with “unbelief.” They arose from the conflicts he faced in his effort to demonstrate and announce the coming of God’s just and peaceful order.
So much Christian theology and preaching has fastened on to the need for faith in Jesus that the faith of Jesus has often been ignored. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), still the most influential Catholic theologian, even insisted that, since Jesus was divine, he could not have had faith. But the reason Aquinas gives for this assertion is worth noting. He says faith is directed toward that “which is hidden from sight.” But since he believed Jesus had the full vision of God from his conception on, he did not need faith, and so had none.2 Here Aquinas is relying on the intellectualized reduction of “faith” that confuses it with affirming something we don’t know for sure to be true, the idea that dominated Christian theology in what I have called the Age of Belief. He also implies that we “believe” something to be true largely because it is what the church’s hierarchy teaches. Fortunately, some more recent Catholic theologians, among them Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88), who was Pope John Paul II’s favorite, have pointedly disagreed with Aquinas on this matter, another sign that a different understanding of faith is emerging from its belief-dominated constriction.
Jesus cannot be understood, let alone followed, without reference to his own faith. The biblical book of Hebrews refers to him as “the author and pioneer of our faith” (12:2). But the faith of Jesus cannot be understood without recognizing that its focus was the “Reigning of God.” His message was not about himself, and not even about God. It was about the imminent coming of a new era of shalom. This is clear from the opening verses of the Gospel of Mark (oldest of the four canonical gospels) in which this Kingdom is equated with the “good news of God” (1:14). The most explicit expression occurs when, early in his ministry, Jesus returns to his home town of Nazareth and is invited to speak in the synagogue. Clearly wishing to align himself with the prophets before him, he reads from the prophet Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me
To bring good news to the poor
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18–19)
Virtually all Jesus’s parables are about the dawning of this Kingdom and the change of heart people would need to notice it and live in it, even though its coming had only just begun. When we try to figure out again today how to describe the relationship between Jesus and God, as the bishops tried to do at Nicaea, we ought to stay away from the mistake they made in completely leaving out any reference to the Kingdom. We should also avoid the archaic language they used about the two being of the “same substance” (homoousios), which means little to anyone today. Rather, we could say that Jesus in his life trajectory completely embodied the purpose and “project” of God.
Moving the focus from Jesus as an individual to his life purpose greatly widens his relevance in a religiously pluralistic world. When the Harvard faculty asked me to teach a course on Jesus to undergraduates in the Moral Reasoning division of the curriculum, I was apprehensive at first about what the Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Jewish students who might sign up would make of it. But I quickly learned that Christianity has no monopoly on Jesus. Hindus understood him as an avatar, Buddhists as a bodhisattva, and both Muslims and Jews as a prophet of God. Even agnostics found something fascinating and admirable in him. They were not all that attracted to Christianity, but they were all drawn to Jesus for his exemplary courage, his compassion for the disinherited, and his willingness to stand up to corrupt political and religious authorities. But what attracted them more than anything else was his emphasis on the possibility of another kind of world where gentleness and equality prevail.
As we have already mentioned, Jesus called this other possible world the “Kingdom of God.” It was the heartbeat of his life, his constant concern and preoccupation. The possibility of “another world” is always the reason many non-Christians give when they ask Christians to “go back to Jesus.” This utopian hope, even when modestly expressed, links Jesus and the prophets to a much wider history of human longing. It is the antidote to fatalism and the corrosive fear that there are no alternatives to any status quo. The slogan of the Social Forum, an international coalition of social change organizations is, “Another world is possible.
Jesus’s constant emphasis on a coming new order obviously sounded like a threat to those in charge of the old one. A new order meant the existing one would have to go, and with it their cozy perches in the alcoves of power and privilege. Consequently, Jesus found himself in serious trouble with the elites of his time. He probably could have avoided a confrontation. But he did not. Moving from Galilee, where the threat he posed was somewhat remote, to Jerusalem, where it was immediate, he faced down the occupation authorities and their local quisling supporters. Although he did it nonviolently, he paid a high price for living out the hope he taught. The story of Jesus is a logical extension of the Old Testament cycle, but in no way a displacement of it.
When it comes to understanding the mystery of the self, this Christian story builds on the Jewish one, but also introduces an important refinement. Jesus repeats again and again that we do not have to wait to begin living the kind of life the Kingdom of God makes possible: we can start now. He often used the analogy of seeds to suggest that, although the new era of human reciprocity and peace has not yet come, it is “at hand.” Its hints and signs are already present. In this respect, Jesus’s message found an echo in the idea dissident Vaclav Havel stressed during the Communist rule over Czechoslovakia. Havel told people to try to live as though they were free even under a freedom-denying regime.
In theological idiom, Jesus is the manifestation of true human personhood under depersonalizing conditions. Viewed in the light of his life story, the “mystery of myself” that I described in the previous chapter receives at least a provisional response. Simply stated, Jesus was not preoccupied with himself. The age of shalom that God had promised continued to be his ultimate concern throughout his life. It was the object of his faith.
It is important that, the biblical book of Hebrews calls Jesus the “pioneer” of faith. He is an exemplar, especially since, like all faithful people, he wrestled constantly with tests of that faith. These were not, however, the intellectual doubts that sometimes trouble people today. His hope and confidence—his faith—was constantly focused on the new world God had promised “on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus’s struggles were, rather, setbacks and losses that seemed at times to defeat the coming of the Kingdom. These reversals culminated in his own arrest and execution, which appeared to mark the ignominious failure of his life’s work. This, howev
er, moves us toward the Easter cycle.
The Easter Cycle: The Easter stories begin with Jesus leaving the relative safety and remoteness of Galilee and traveling to Jerusalem, the hub of Roman imperial power in the eastern Mediterranean and its elite Judean collaborators. It is true that he had already contended with fierce opposition and had even fled his home town of Nazareth once and moved to Capernaum to avoid arrest. But he knew that by entering Jerusalem he would be making it impossible for his enemies to avoid a decisive showdown. How could the imperial forces and their local clients disregard someone riding into town while crowds hailed him as king? How could they ignore someone storming into the Temple and chasing out the racketeers? They had to act, and they did. They arrested him, subjected him to a bogus trial, flogged him, and then killed him by slow torture as a public example.
Many churches mark the final days and weeks of Jesus’s life by observing the forty days of Lent, a season of fasting and preparation. The word itself has a curious background. In most languages the forty days are referred to by a term deriving from the Latin word for “fortieth,” quadragesima. Thus in Spanish it is cuaresma and in French carême. The English word “Lent” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for March (lenct), the month in which it often falls, a valuable reminder of how many pre-Christian seasonal observances found their way into Christianity and why it is not entirely bizarre that Easter, despite constant warnings by preachers, continues in many people’s minds to fuse a celebration of both the Resurrection and the return of spring.
In any case, as Baptists, we did not “do Lent,” which caused our Catholic playmates considerable shock and consternation. I was never urged to “give something up for Lent” and have only done so sporadically as an adult. I have never taken to fasting for either dietary or spiritual purposes. But even as a child I was stirred by the descriptions I heard of Jesus’s final days and even more so by the music that recalled them, like “The Seven Last Words on the Cross,” which our church choir always performed. I also looked forward to the annual Easter sunrise service. Held in a park, it was the one occasion in which all the Protestant churches of our little town participated, and all the choirs sang together. It was followed by a breakfast of steaming hot pancakes topped with melting butter and ladles of maple syrup, served in one of the church basements. Years later, when I learned that the word “Easter” is derived from “Eostre,” the Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn, it reminded me again, as with Lent, of the many ways Christianity has blended “pagan” elements into its worship. We should not fret unduly that the same blending continues in African and Asian churches today.