CRISIS: THE THREAT TO SOCIAL WORLD
The mission of Jesus was dominated by a sense of urgency and crisis. He charged his contemporaries with knowing how to interpret the signs of the weather, but not knowing how to interpret the present time. Their situation, he said, was like that of an insolvent debtor being dragged to court with only a small amount of time left in which to avert his fate, or like that of an unfruitful fig tree in a vineyard which had only one more year in which to bear fruit.25 Images and parables of judgment and crisis abound: the axe laid at the root of the tree, the fire licking the chaff; servants suddenly being called to account, maidens asleep and without oil for their lamps, people finding themselves shut out of a banquet because they didn’t respond. He warned his generation that they in particular faced a crisis: “The blood of the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, will come upon this generation!” “This generation” faces a crisis like the people of Nineveh in the time of an earlier prophet, Jonah.26
But what was the crisis? According to the image of Jesus which dominated scholarship throughout much of this century, the crisis facing his generation was the imminent end of the world and the last judgment.27 But, though Jesus did speak of a last judgment, there is no reason to believe that he thought it was imminent.28 Instead, like the predestruction prophets before him, the crisis he announced was the threat of historical catastrophe for his society.29
CULTURAL CRITICISM: INDICTMENT OF THE POLITICS OF HOLINESS
Jesus’ role as revitalization movement founder and prophet overlap. As founder of a renewal movement, he pointed to an alternative path; as prophet, he explicitly indicted his people’s present path. The issue was not individual sinfulness, but allegiance to a cultural dynamic that was leading to historical catastrophe. Advocating the politics of compassion, Jesus criticized the politics of holiness.
The politics of holiness had made Israel unfruitful and unfaithful. Like the prophets, Jesus used the image of a vineyard to speak of Israel’s relationship to God. Israel (or its leadership) was like the tenants who refused to give the vineyard’s produce to its owner, like the unfruitful fig tree given one more year to bear fruit.30 He also used the imagery of Israel as the servant of God. Israel had become like the servant who was not acting mercifully, like the cautious servant who buried his talent in the ground in an effort to preserve it, like an unfaithful servant.31 He used other images of things not performing their proper function: salt had lost its salinity, light was not giving light but had been hidden.32 The Israel of his generation, living by the ethos of holiness, was no longer what it was meant to be—the vineyard of God yielding fruit, the faithful servant of God, the light to the nations.
Jesus indicted those responsible for his people’s present direction. He characterized the teachers of his day as “blind” and warned of the consequences of following a blind guide: “Will they not both fall into a pit?”33 He accused the scholars of the Torah—the sages—of having “taken away the key of knowledge,” rather than unlocking the meaning of Israel’s traditions.34 He charged them with honoring the prophets whom “their fathers killed,” although they would have done the same thing.35 He found many in his generation to be preoccupied with “business as usual,” blind to the crisis (and opportunity) that faced them.36
Yet there is no reason to think that his generation was particularly “wicked.” They were no more wicked than many other generations before or since, and in their devotion and sincerity were perhaps better than most.37 We can see this especially in Jesus’ relationship to the Pharisees. Despite the modern stereotype of them as “hypocrites” (and worse),38 the issue was not “hypocrisy”—if by that is meant people putting on an outward show in order to pretend a devotion they do not feel.39 The Pharisees were good, devout people; the issue was not their sincerity or lack of it, but what they were sincere about: the ethos and politics of holiness to which they were committed.
Jesus attacked the Pharisees’ concern about purity and tithing, two of the issues most central to the ethos of holiness. Purity, Jesus claimed, was not a matter of externals, but of the heart,40 and the emphasis upon separation of pure and impure created division within society. Similarly, in the Pharisees’ meticulous concern with tithing, the politics of holiness had led to a neglect of what was most central: “Woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God.”41
Though the politics of holiness was intended to make Israel “pure,” Jesus ironically and dramatically described the Pharisaic influence upon Israel as having the opposite effect, namely as defiling and not hallowing. “Woe to you Pharisees! For you are like graves which are not seen, and men walk over them without knowing it.” Because contact with death was one of the greatest sources of defilement within Judaism, graves were whitewashed so that people could see them and avoid stepping on them. But according to Jesus, the Pharisees were like graves which had not been whitewashed; people did not realize that the Pharisees’ path of holiness was actually defiling.42 The same point was made in his characterization of the Pharisees as “leaven.” Leaven was unclean, and just as it spread through the dough which it leavened, so the influence of the Pharisees was seen as contagious and defiling.43 What Jesus criticized in the Pharisees was the same dynamic operative in the culture as a whole, only in intensified form. We miss the point if we think of the Pharisees as “bad” people. Rather, Jesus’ indictment of them was a criticism of a way of organizing life that was pervasive in his time, and, in different forms, in many times since.44
Indictment of the politics of holiness also underlies one of Jesus’ most famous parables, the Good Samaritan.45 The story is very familiar. A man attacked by robbers was left “half-dead” on the road; a priest and Levite passed by, and then a Samaritan stopped to help. The parable ended with Jesus asking a question: “Which of these three proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among robbers?”
Though the parable has a timeless relevance with its characterization of what it means to be a neighbor,46 in its original setting it sharply criticized the dominant social dynamic of the day. The priest and Levite passed by out of concern for the standards of holiness, for in that situation they could have been ritually defiled in a number of ways through proximity to death. In passing by and avoiding such contact, they actually followed the demands of holiness. Like the Pharisees, they were not “bad” people, but acted in accord with the logic of a social world organized around the politics of holiness. Thus Jesus was not criticizing two particularly insensitive individuals, but was indicting the ethos of holiness itself.47 The Samaritan, on the other hand, was commended specifically for his compassion.
Jesus also indicted those who benefitted from the politics of holiness. He ridiculed those who derived their self-esteem from the honor achieved in their culture: “Beware of the scribes, who like to go about in long robes, to have salutations in the market places, the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts.”48 For the righteous, he had especially harsh words: “Tax collectors and harlots are entering the Kingdom of God before you.”49 He indicted the rich; and though, as we have noted, it is difficult to discern an economic program in the teaching of Jesus, it is safe to say that he saw a social order organized around affluence and its legitimation to be a violation of the politics of compassion.50
Oftentimes Jesus’ criticism of his social world is seen as an indictment of Judaism itself. But it was not. Not only does such an attitude affect one’s assessment of Judaism today, but it also ignores the fact that Jesus (like his prophetic predecessors) was the voice of an alternative consciousness within Judaism calling his Jewish hearers to a transformed understanding of their own tradition. It was not Judaism itself which he saw as unfruitful, any more than the prophets of the Old Testament were “anti-Jewish.” Rather, it was the current direction of his social world that he saw as blind and misguided. The conflict between Jesus and his contemporaries was not about the adequacy of Jud
aism or the Torah, or about the importance of being “good” rather than “bad,” but was about two different visions of what it meant to be a people centered in God. Both visions flowed out of the Torah: a people living by the ethos and politics of holiness, or a people living by the ethos and politics of compassion.
The conflict thus concerned the proper interpretation of the Torah: whether the Torah was to be interpreted according to the paradigm of holiness or the paradigm of compassion. It was thus, if the language is not too theological, a hermeneutical battle. “Hermeneutics,” from the Greek word meaning “interpretation,” is that branch of theology concerned with the interpretation of Scripture, both individual texts and Scripture as a whole. The “lens” through which one views Scripture very much affects what one sees. In that time, when religion constituted the very structure of the social world, the hermeneutical struggle had decisive historical and cultural consequences.51
THREAT: HISTORICAL CATASTROPHE
Thus Jesus indicted the politics of holiness, that way of organizing a social world shaped by the ethos of holiness and hardened into a quite rigid ideology under the pressure of conflict. Indeed, Jesus saw the conventional wisdom of his time, with its division of the world into pure and impure, righteous and outcast, rich and poor, neighbor and enemy, to be leading to catastrophe and judgment. Like the prophets before him, he warned that Jerusalem and the temple would be destroyed by military conquest unless the culture radically changed its direction. In order to see the full significance of these threats, we need first to describe the role Jerusalem and the temple played in the Jewish social world.
Jerusalem and the Temple
Jerusalem drew its significance primarily from the fact that the temple was there. As already noted, it was believed that God dwelt there; the temple was the place linking the two worlds of the primordial tradition. Because it was God’s dwelling place, many believed that the temple and Jerusalem were secure, their protection guaranteed by God. Such a belief reached far back into Israel’s history. Jeremiah sarcastically quoted the refrain of those who rested their security in the temple: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!”52 The belief also existed in the time of Jesus. The temple had become the center of an ideology of resistance to Rome; it was believed that God would defend the divine dwelling place against all enemies.53 Like many cultures before and since, they believed that God would protect their nation.
The ideology was reinforced by the evidence of the senses. As was the case with most cities in antiquity, Jerusalem had massive defensive walls, making the city itself a fortress. But the temple area at its center was an even more formidable fortress. Rebuilt by Herod the Great in the decades before Jesus’ birth, it stood on a large raised platform, the height of whose walls ranged from ninety-eight feet on the west to over three hundred feet at the southeast corner where the mountain on which the temple was built sloped down into the Kidron Valley. Some of the stones in the walls were immense, measuring over thirty-five feet long and weighing more than seventy tons. Herod’s building project had made the temple look both glorious and impregnable.
But like Jeremiah and Ezekiel some six centuries earlier, Jesus warned that Jerusalem and the temple faced the threat of destruction. Like them, he proclaimed that the divine presence had left the temple. Using the “divine I” of prophetic speech, he said:
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not. Behold, your house [the temple] is abandoned!54
Bereft of the divine presence, Jerusalem faced the possibility of destruction.
Jesus warned that the days were coming when there would be “great distress in the land” for Jerusalem would be “surrounded by armies”:
But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. For great distress shall be upon the earth and wrath upon this people; they will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led captive among all nations; and Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles.55
On another occasion Jesus warned that invaders would build a “siege wall” around Jerusalem and destroy her.56 When his disciples marveled at the size of the stones in the temple, Jesus said, “There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.”57
Like Jeremiah, he told his hearers not to join in Jerusalem’s defense. Rather than entering or remaining in Jerusalem (the normal response in time of war, when one would flee to the walled city, either for protection or to join the defenders), he urged them to flee to the mountains.58 The future held the threat of invasion and war; the crisis facing Jesus’ contemporaries was the destruction of their social world and all the suffering that would accompany it.59
The message of indictment and threat which Jesus spoke required courage. Like the prophets before him, he was an iconoclast, attacking the central images and convictions by which his contemporaries lived. Holiness is what God wants, they believed; the rich are blessed, the righteous are better than the outcasts, the faithful life is the life of conventional wisdom, Jerusalem is safe because God is there, God will defend us.
Just as he and the prophets were not intimidated by the most cherished beliefs of their time, so also he was neither threatened by nor servile toward human authority. He called King Herod a “fox,” a contemptuous term meaning not simply “sly” or “clever,” but roughly the equivalent of “skunk” or “rodent.”60 He criticized the behavior of the “kings of the Gentiles,” with their concern with power, as an object lesson of how not to behave.61 Uncooperative in his interrogation before both Pilate and the Jewish authorities, he gave either equivocal answers or none at all, behavior exasperating to an inquiring magistrate in any time.62
Both his courage and perception flowed out of that same grounding in the Spirit reported of his predecessors and promised to his followers.63 Yet his message was not exhausted by his warning of historical catastrophe. Like the prophets before him, he also offered hope.
THE CALL TO CHANGE
By the time the gospels were written, the destruction of Jerusalem was in the past. To the gospel writers it thus seemed to be the inevitable result of the rejection of the Jesus movement by the dominant consciousness of the day.64 But for Jesus himself, some forty years before, the destruction was still a threat, not a foreordained future. There was still time to change, and the possibility of change was the presupposition and purpose of his mission.
In a sense, the whole of Jesus’ ministry was a call to change. At the center of it, Mark tells us in his advance summary of Jesus’ mission and message, was the call to repent, that radical turning which was also a returning to God: “The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand, therefore repent.” The Greek word used here for “time,” kairos, is different from chronological time or “ordinary” time. It refers to a time that is “momentous,” “filled” with extraordinary import. The text speaks of Jesus’ time as a pregnant and momentous time—“therefore repent!”65 Though Jesus used the word “repent” itself relatively infrequently, the notion is everywhere in his teaching. He called his hearers to a turning to God, to Spirit, that was at the same time a turning away from the present path of their culture.
Indeed, the call to change was at the heart of his various roles. As founder of a revitalization movement, he created an alternative community grounded in the Spirit, whose purpose was to provide an alternative cultural path to the politics of holiness. Much of his teaching was concerned with that movement, describing its “shape” as the community of compassion, and defending its shape in the face of questioning and opposition from others.
Similarly, the way of transformation which he taught as sage was part of his call to repentance. It was a call to be in relationship to the Spirit and not primarily to the religious beliefs and cultural convictions of the time. It was an invitation to the individual t
o change his or her orientation toward life by moving from the taken-for-granted world of conventional wisdom with its distinctions and apparent securities to a relationship with God as the heart of reality. Out of this relationship flowed a new ethos, and with it the politics of compassion instead of the politics of holiness.
The call to repentance was not simply individual but collective. Though all of his teaching was in a sense directed to individuals (indeed, to whom else can one address teaching?), his concern as he did so was Israel. That is, Jesus was concerned not only with individuals and their relationship with God, but also with the collective course of his people. Israel itself was being called to change in the face of a future that was still contingent.66
A Time of Opportunity
The call to change indicates that Jesus saw his time not only as a time when disaster threatened, but also as a time of opportunity. Though the possibility of judgment runs through his warnings, the overall tone of his ministry was not judgment but joy. His words and activities indicate that he saw his time as a time when God was visiting and redeeming his people through him and the movement centered around him.
Alongside the warnings and threats are “oracles of salvation,” passages using imagery drawn from the Old Testament to affirm that his time was also one of redemption. To the messengers sent to him by John the Baptist, he said, “Go and tell John what you see and hear: The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.”67 The phrases are from Isaiah,68 where they refer to a deliverance soon to come to the people. There, their meaning seems metaphorical—that is, Isaiah does not seem to be anticipating healings of people who were actually blind, deaf, and lame, but uses these images to speak of a time of deliverance. Though Jesus actually performed healings, these words seem to refer to more than healings; his use of them identifies his time as a time of deliverance.
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