Jesus: a new vision

by Marcus J. Borg

  It is easy to think of them as especially villainous, given our perception of Jesus’ innocence, goodness, and identity. Yet they were not, or at least there is no reason to think so. They were the established order of their society, standing at the top of their social world politically, economically, and religiously. Their place in society not only gave them the responsibility for maintaining order, but also affected how they saw things. Given that responsibility and perception, there were a number of issues in the immediate historical situation which help us to understand their action.

  First, Jesus was a charismatic leader who had attracted a large following. In the tension-ridden first-century Palestinian political situation, that was enough to get a person in trouble, as the fate of John the Baptist a few years earlier demonstrated. John had been executed by Herod Antipas (ruler of Galilee and son of Herod the Great) because Herod feared John’s influence with the people.36 Simply to have been a charismatic healer and “local teacher” who remained in his own village and did not begin a movement would not have been enough to incite a fatal hostility; but Jesus was seen as a threat to the established order because, like John, he was a public figure with a following.37

  Second, Jesus had warned of the fall of Jerusalem, an action which also got one in trouble in first-century Palestine. We know of only one other contemporary Jewish figure who warned the city of impending judgment. In the decade before the war an otherwise unknown Jesus ben Ananias roamed through Jerusalem crying “Woe,” for which he was judged insane and beaten.38 That God would judge and destroy Jerusalem, the center of their social world, was in a sense unthinkable to the high priest and his council. It was also a direct insult and affront to them as leaders of Jerusalem, for it was their stewardship that was being indicted as blind and worthy of God’s judgment.

  Finally, from their point of view at the pinnacle of their social world, Jesus was clearly wrong. Jesus had indicted the present social order and advocated another; but they were not particularly interested in the transformation of society, both because of their place in society and the ideology which legitimated the present social order. The way of peace might have been acceptable to the collaborationist circle around the high priest, who naturally wished the preservation of the present arrangement with Rome; but Jesus also spoke of a way of life in which righteousness, purity, honor, and position did not matter, which meant blessing to the poor and woe to the rich, which loosened the ties of loyalty to cultural ways, in which outcasts were accepted—all of this challenging the conventional wisdom of the time. That conventional wisdom, from their point of view, was grounded in holy Scripture and hallowed by tradition. Thus, from their vantage point, Jesus was not only a threat to public order, but profoundly wrong.

  Indeed, it was the obvious mistakenness of Jesus’ teaching that enabled them to conclude that he was a “false charismatic,” that is, a false teacher in touch with “another spirit.” The test of a true charismatic was not the ability to perform wonders, but the content of the charismatic’s teaching. If it led people astray, then the charismatic was a false prophet, and the “mighty deeds” did not come from God, but from Satan. Indeed, such a charge had been made against Jesus earlier in the ministry,39 and though the stories of his interrogation and trial make no explicit reference to the charge, the issue could not have been far from the surface.

  Thus good and prudent people could conclude that Jesus was a threat to the social order and a “false teacher.” To the established classes, his teaching spoke of a social transformation that was threatening, and his movement risked inciting intervention by the Romans. Both were unacceptable to those responsible for maintaining order. The words attributed to Caiaphas in John’s gospel, whether historical or not, are historically credible. After members of his council expressed fear that the movement of Jesus might lead to unrest and Roman intervention, Caiaphas said, “It is expedient that one man die rather than the whole nation perish.”40 From his (and their) point of view, the preservation of their social world was worth the death of a misguided teacher rumored to be in league with Beelzebul.

  In short, those who decided that Jesus must die need not have been “bad” people. Historically, the opponents of Jesus were very much like us and our contemporaries—people trying to do the best they could in light of how they saw and what they believed. They could do little else because they could see little else from their position at the pinnacle of their social world.41

  Thus the death of Jesus was in all likelihood the result of cooperation between the Roman governor and the circle of Jewish religious figures and aristocracy who mediated between Roman imperial rule and the Jewish population. But it is illuminating to move beyond the immediate situation surrounding his death to the broader question of what was responsible for the death of Jesus—from the question “Who killed Jesus” (and what we may imagine about “why”) to “What killed Jesus?”42

  To a large extent, it was the conventional wisdom of the time—the “dominant consciousness” of the day—that was responsible for the death of Jesus. The high priest and his circle were both the servants and guardians of the dominant consciousness. Shaped by it and in a sense subservient to it, they were also concerned to preserve it. With its “laws” of moderation and self-preservation, and its attempt to make reality “safe” by domesticating it in a net of beliefs and rules, the dominant consciousness of conventional wisdom is threatened by the voice of an alternative consciousness. Religious traditions as well as secular cultures have often been uncomfortable with the voice of an alternative consciousness in their midst, especially if that voice begins to attract a following. It threatens a culture at its most fundamental level, calling into question both its view of reality and its ethos, as well as the social structure which institutionalizes those bedrock notions. In Jesus, the voice of the Spirit challenged the dominant consciousness.

  The politics of holiness also played a role. It accounted for much of the resistance to his message and movement. The Pharisees, the embodiment of the politics of holiness in an intensified form, were the most vocal verbal critics during the ministry, though they do not seem to have been involved in the arrest and trial of Jesus. But the politics of holiness was in the culture as a whole, not just in the Pharisees. In this less intense form, it shaped the lives of ordinary people (even the outcasts) as well as the lives of the accommodationist ruling class.

  With its emphasis upon survival through greater differentiation between Jew and Gentile, righteous and outcast, the politics of holiness found the politics of compassion both unorthodox and threatening. For the politics of holiness, the purpose of religion (and culture) was to some extent to preserve itself. Yet the “way” which Jesus taught threatened to undermine both religious tradition and society. The way of Spirit was threatening to a society based upon conventional wisdom, the way of inclusion threatening to a society concerned about righteousness, performance, and distinctions, and the way of peace threatening to a society facing war. Thus the alternative consciousness of Jesus collided with the dominant consciousness of his culture—it was wrong from the standpoint of those who devoutly pursued holiness, and destabilizing to those with a stake in preserving the present order.

  But finally, we must speak not only of the forces operative in Jesus’ opponents but also of Jesus’ own intention. He was not simply a victim, but one who provocatively challenged the ethos of his day. He was killed because he sought, in the name and power of the Spirit, the transformation of his own culture. He issued a call for a relationship with God that would lead to a new ethos and thus a new politics. For that goal he gave his life, even though his death was not his primary intention.

  The conflict between him and his opponents was between two ways of being that run throughout the history of Israel, and through human history generally, including the church and modern culture. One way organizes life around the security of the self and its world; the essential ingredients of conventional wisdom and a politics of holiness (even if i
n a transformed and secular form) are still very much with us. That which killed Jesus is thus still alive in human history. The other way of being organizes life around God. Ultimately, it was the conflict between a life grounded in Spirit and one grounded in culture, and Jesus’ own concern to transform his culture in the name of the Spirit, that caused his death. As the voice of an alternative consciousness shaped by the Spirit, he called his people to another way.

  Though Jesus was more than a prophet, it was his prophetic call to change that caused his death. He was also, as we have argued, a charismatic healer, unconventional sage, and founder of an alternative community. But even these categories do not finally do him complete justice as a historical figure. Indeed, as the Jewish scholar Martin Buber once powerfully wrote, there is something about Jesus that transcends the categories of Judaism.43 On historical grounds alone, without any Christian presuppositions shaping the verdict, he is clearly one of the most remarkable figures who ever lived.

  EPILOGUE: EASTER AND THE BIRTH OF THE LIVING CHRIST

  Though the story of the historical Jesus ends with his death on a Friday in A.D. 30, the story of Jesus does not end there. According to his followers, death could not hold him, and he appeared to them in a new way beginning on Easter Sunday. Indeed, he has continued to be known by Christians ever since as a living reality.

  We cannot know exactly what happened. According to the earliest accounts of Easter reported by his followers, Jesus “appeared to them” and they knew that it was the same person they had known during the ministry. We do not know what form those appearances took. Sometimes the language used to describe them seems to speak of a visionary experience; sometimes Jesus is described in quite corporeal form. We can say that the resurrection was not the resuscitation of a corpse. That is, resuscitation and resurrection are quite different from each other; the former involves a once-dead person coming back to life and resuming the conditions of ordinary existence until he or she dies again. Whatever the resurrection involved, it was clearly not that. Instead, resurrection means entry into another mode of being, not restoration to a previous mode of being. In Jesus’ case, to use the language of the church, it meant being “raised to God’s right hand.”

  Did Easter nevertheless involve something happening to the corpse of Jesus? On historical grounds, we cannot say.44 What we can say, however, is from the standpoint of Christian faith most crucial: Jesus’ followers continued to experience him as a living reality, and in a new way, namely as having the qualities of God. Now he could be known anywhere, and not just in a particular place; now he was the presence which abided with them, “Immanuel” (which means “God with us”); now he was “seated at the right hand of God,” participating in the power and authority of God; now they knew him as both Lord and Christ. But the story of the living Christ and his lordship over the lives of Christians goes beyond the purpose of this book. Suffice it to say that he who was put to death because of his passion to transform culture in the name of the Spirit was not swallowed up by either death or culture. Indeed, Spirit triumphed over culture.

  NOTES

  10. Conclusion The New Vision of Jesus: His Significance for Our Time

  What Jesus was like is as much of a challenge to both church and culture in the late twentieth century as it was in his own time. The “new vision” of Jesus—an image of what can be known about him, as well as his own vision of life—radically calls into question our most common way of being and invites us to see differently.

  For both Christians and non-Christians, what can be known about Jesus is a vivid witness to the reality of the Spirit. Most generations have not needed to hear this, simply because most generations took the reality of Spirit for granted. We do not, even to a large extent within the church itself, because of the pervasive effect of the modern image of reality upon the psyches of believers and unbelievers alike. For many, faith becomes the struggle to believe the church’s teaching despite the fact that it does not make very good sense to us. As a set of beliefs to be believed, Christianity (and all religions which affirm “another world”) is radically challenged by the image of reality that has shaped the modern mind.

  In precisely this situation, the historical Jesus as a Spirit-filled figure in the charismatic stream of Judaism can address us. Jesus’ experience of a world of Spirit challenges the modern worldview in a way that a rival belief system cannot. What he was like reminds us that there have been figures in every culture who experienced the “other world,” and that it is only we in the modern period who have grown to doubt its reality. The intense experiential relationship with the Spirit reported of him invites us to consider that reality might really be other than we in the modern world image it to be. His life powerfully suggests that the Spirit is “real.”

  Even as the historical Jesus is a testimony to the reality of the Spirit, he also provides a vivid picture of what life in the Spirit is like. It is an impressive picture. There are, of course, the spectacular powers of the Spirit flowing through him in his mighty deeds. But we should not think only of the spectacular; the historical records about him suggest other exceptional qualities. He was a remarkably free person.1 Free from fear and anxious preoccupation, he was free to see clearly and to love. His freedom was grounded in the Spirit, from which flowed the other central qualities of his life: courage, insight, joy, and above all compassion. All are products of the Spirit—“fruits of the Spirit,” as St. Paul called them. Thus what we can know about Jesus invites us to see “life in the Spirit” as a striking alternative to the way we typically live our lives.

  For Christians in particular, what Jesus was like as a historical figure is significant because of the special status which he has in the tradition of the church. Within that tradition, two things have consistently been said about him: he was “true God” and “true man,” the incarnation of the truly divine and the truly human. As “true God,” even during his historical life, Jesus was an epiphany of God, a “disclosure” or “revelation” of God (as the word “epiphany” itself means).2 As “true man,” he is a model for human life, specifically for the life of discipleship. This twofold status of Jesus within the tradition of orthodox Christian theology enables us to see his significance for those who would be his followers in this time.

  THE HISTORICAL JESUS AS EPIPHANY OF GOD

  As an epiphany of God, Jesus was a “disclosure” or “revelation” of God. He did not reveal God only in his teaching (as if revelation consisted primarily of information), but in his very way of being.3 The epiphany was Jesus—his “person” as well as his message. As such, he was an “image” of God,4 an “icon” of God, revealing and mediating the divine reality.5 What he was like therefore discloses what God is like.

  In traditional language, Jesus was a revelation of the love of God. For Christians, as the “Word made flesh” he was the love of God incarnate. His life thus provides particular content to what the love of God is like, giving concreteness to what otherwise can be an abstraction.

  The particular quality of that love is seen above all in the compassion which we see in the historical Jesus. It is the compassion which moved him to touch lepers, to heal on the sabbath, to see in the ostracized members of the human community “children of God,” and to risk his life for the sake of saving his people from a future which he could see and they could not.

  There is a social dimension as well as an individual dimension to the compassion of God as we see it in Jesus. For him, as for the prophets before him,6 the divine compassion included grief and anger about the blindness, injustice, and idolatry that caused human suffering. It included warnings of judgment, as a threat and deterrent, and as an actuality. Persistent blindness and heedlessness have their consequences. As an image of God, Jesus mirrors the care of God for what happens to humans in the world of history itself. The life of culture matters to God.

  As an epiphany of God, Jesus discloses that at the center of everything is a reality that is in love with us and wills our well-be
ing, both as individuals and as individuals within society. As an image of God, Jesus challenges the most widespread image of reality in both the ancient and modern world, countering conventional wisdom’s understanding of God as one with demands that must be met by the anxious self in search of its own security. In its place is an image of God as the compassionate one who invites people into a relationship which is the source of transformation of human life in both its individual and social aspects.

  JESUS AS A MODEL FOR DISCIPLESHIP

  Jesus is also a model for the Christian life. The notion is expressed in the gospels with the image of discipleship. To be a disciple of Jesus meant something more than being a student of a teacher. To be a disciple meant “to follow after.” Whoever would be my disciple, Jesus said, “Let him follow me.” What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus?7 It means to take seriously what he took seriously, to be like him in some sense. It is what St. Paul meant when he said, “Be imitators of Christ.”8 What Jesus was like as a figure of history becomes a model for discipleship, illuminating and incarnating the vision of life to which he called his followers.9

  That vision is a life lived on the boundary of Spirit and culture, participating in both worlds. It has three core elements. First, its source is a “birth” in the Spirit. The birth involves that “dying to self” of which Jesus spoke and which he himself experienced: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”10 Bonhoeffer’s epigram caught its meaning: “When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die.”11 The death leads to a new life, a rebirth out of the world of conventional wisdom and the preoccupation with the self and its securities which it sustains, to a new way of being. Being “born of the Spirit” creates a radically new identity, one no longer conferred by culture. It is an awakening to that “place” where one may address God as Abba, the intimate one.12