Jesus: a new vision

by Marcus J. Borg

  The second core element of life in the Spirit is its dominant quality: compassion. So it was for Jesus. As the “wombishness” which he both taught and lived, compassion is both a feeling and a way of being. One feels compassion and is compassionate. Not simply a feeling of benevolent goodwill, it is a tenderness and “embracingness” which make empathy possible—a feeling with others and a capacity to be moved by their situation. As a feeling, it becomes a motive for deeds. As a way of being, it is a persistent trait or quality of character, a “virtue,” to use an old-fashioned word. One is to “be compassionate.”

  Compassion is a grace, not an achievement. Its constancy does not ultimately depend upon an effort of will, but upon the relationship to the Spirit. It is the child of the radical centering in God that we see in Jesus; empty of self, one can be filled with the Spirit of God the compassionate one. To change the metaphor, it is the primary “fruit of the Spirit.” If we take Jesus seriously as a disclosure of life in the Spirit, then growth in the Christian life is essentially growth in compassion.

  The third core element of life in the Spirit is a dialectical relationship to culture. The new life is simultaneously less involved and more involved in culture. As the movement to a life grounded in the Spirit of God, it is a movement away from the many securities offered by culture, whether goods, status, identity, nation, success, or righteousness. The distinctions generated by the world of conventional wisdom are seen as just that: socially created products that provide no abiding home. The vision of life lived and taught by Jesus means, as it did for the first disciples, leaving the “home” of conventional wisdom, whether religious or secular.

  Life in the Spirit, however, does not simply draw one away from culture. Not an individualistic vision, it creates a new community, an alternative community or alternative culture.13 So it was for Jesus and his followers, both during his lifetime and afterwards. The new life produced a new social reality, initially the “movement” and then the “church.” Indeed, the word church itself means a community which has been “called out.” In the Jewish world in which it was born and in the Roman world in which it soon lived, it stood out sharply as an alternative community with an alternative vision and values.

  As an alternative culture where the Spirit is known, the church exists in part to nurture the new life through its shared perceptions, values, and worship, confirming and sustaining the new way of seeing and being. But the new community is also meant to embody the new way of being. In its own life, it is to live the alternative values generated by life in the Spirit and become a witness to compassion by incarnating the ethos of compassion. There is a radicalism to the alternative community of Jesus, and only if it incarnates that radicalism can it be “the city set on a hill whose light cannot be hid.”14 It can do this only by being a community grounded in the Spirit.

  Taking the vision of Jesus seriously calls the church to be an alternative culture in our time. Though there may have been periods in the history of the West when its “official” values roughly coincided with the central values of the Christian tradition, that time is no more. In the modern period, a yawning gap has opened. The dominant values of contemporary American life—affluence, achievement, appearance, power, competition, consumption, individualism—are vastly different from anything recognizably Christian. As individuals and as a culture, with our securities and values centered in “this world,” in “the finite,” our existence has become massively idolatrous.

  We live in a modern Babylon, one largely unrecognized as such and all the more seductive because of its mostly benign and benevolent face.15 Indeed, to a large extent, Babylon also lives within the church, so thoroughly has it (through us) been infected with the “spirit of this age.” Modern culture functions as a rival lord in our lives, conferring values and identity and demanding obedience, all in conformity to its vision of reality. If the church were to take seriously the double movement of withdrawal from culture and entry into an alternative culture, it would increasingly see itself as a community which knows that its Lord is different from the lord of culture, its loyalties and values very different from the dominant consciousness of our culture. It would live the life referred to in John’s description of Jesus’ followers as in the world, but “not of the world,” grounded not in the world but in God.16

  There is yet another dimension to life lived on the boundary of Spirit and culture, namely the relationship between the church as community of the Spirit and the larger culture in which it lives. In the church’s history, that relationship has been seen in four broadly different ways.17 Some Christians have sought to reject culture, regarding it either with indifference or hostility. Culture is simply “the world of darkness,” and the Christian life entails rejection of that world and no further concern with it. Often described as the “sectarian” response, it can take a quite gentle form, as among the Amish, or a very militant form, as among those for whom the Christian message consists primarily of pronouncing judgment upon the world, a judgment from which they are usually exempt.

  More commonly, Christians have followed two other options, both of which domesticate the radicalism of the alternative vision. Often Christians have basically legitimated culture with their religious beliefs, seeing Christianity as the endorser of their culture’s central values. This is the essence of “Christian nationalism” in both its virulent and more benign forms, of “enculturated religion” in which it is assumed that there is a basic harmony between one’s culture’s values and the values of one’s religion. It is then inconceivable that there could be any fundamental tension between the values of culture and the Christian tradition. The radicalism of the alternative community of the Spirit is also lost by another common response, namely a sharp separation between life in the Spirit and life in culture, a division of life into two realms, one religious and one secular, each with its own norms. Life in the Spirit is domesticated by being restricted only to private life, perhaps only to “internal” life.

  There has also been a fourth response: the conviction that culture is to be transformed by the power of the Spirit. Though less common, it has sometimes surfaced dramatically in the history of the church, and no doubt has been present in some individuals in all generations. It is what we see in the historical Jesus. Compassion, the fruit of the Spirit and the ethos of the alternative community, was to be realized within the larger culture as well. The “politics of compassion” did not lead Jesus to withdraw from culture, but to a passionate mission to transform the culture of his day. Because he saw God as caring about what happened to human beings in history, he saw culture as something to be transformed, not simply rejected or legitimated.

  Taking the vision of Jesus seriously thus entails seeking to structure the life of society in accord with the politics of compassion. Though not to be identified with any specific economic or political program, its general direction is clear.18 A society organized around the politics of compassion would look very different from one organized around other norms. Indeed, it would look very different from our culture, which to a large extent is organized around the politics of a radicalized economic individualism. In many ways, we live within a secularized form of the “politics of holiness,” with only the standards of righteousness changed. Achievement and reward are its driving energies.

  A politics of compassion is organized around the nourishment of human life, not around rewards for culturally prized achievement. A politics of compassion does not emphasize differences, dividing the world into deserving and undeserving, friend and enemy. Rather, a politics of compassion stresses our commonality. It is inclusive rather than exclusive. Such a politics would look sharply different from the way we presently order our national and international life.

  What this means in the lives of Christians legitimately varies from culture to culture and individual to individual. In some cultures, Christians have been such a minuscule minority as to have little or no possibility of affecting their culture’s life. Moreover, not e
very individual Christian is called to a life of political activism. There are, as St. Paul put it, diverse gifts. But in our culture, even those whose gifts take them far away from direct involvement in political life nevertheless have a voice in shaping culture through their political attitudes. Taking the politics of compassion seriously would make a difference in the kind of “politics” Christians would support.

  The politics of compassion as a way of organizing human social life is an ideal and yet relevant to human history. Like “freedom,” it is an ideal to be approximated, even though it cannot be perfectly realized.19 Moreover, the degree to which it can be realized does not depend upon what a “politics of realism” might imagine, but upon an openness to the power of the Spirit to transform culture. Life in the Spirit not only mandates a concern for culture, but also becomes a channel for the power of the Spirit. The Spirit is the basis for courage, confidence and hope.

  LIFE IN THE SPIRIT AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD

  One of the characteristic ways Jesus spoke about the power of the Spirit and the life engendered by it was with the richly symbolic phrase “the Kingdom of God.”20 As a “linguistic symbol” with its home in the Jewish tradition, the phrase evoked the web of meanings associated with the image of God as “king.”21

  The image of God’s kingship was one of Israel’s classic ways of speaking about the relationship between the other world and this one. To speak of God as king was to speak of the “power” of the other world active in this one: at creation, in decisive moments within history (such as the Exodus and return from exile), and at the “end of time.” The kingship of God also created a kingdom, both in the present and at the end of history. In the present, the kingdom was made up of those who put themselves under the divine sovereignty, taking upon themselves the “yoke of the kingdom.” At the end would come the everlasting kingdom of peace and justice, banqueting and joy. The story of God’s kingship thus related the two worlds of the primordial tradition at the beginning (creation), in history, and at the end (consummation). It was one of Israel’s ways of telling the story of the Spirit and the Spirit’s relationship to this world.

  Jesus used the image of God’s kingship and kingdom to speak about what was happening in his ministry. As an exorcist he spoke of the Kingdom of God as the power of the Spirit which flowed through him: “If it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.”22 He identified his time as a time when the kingly power of God was active: “The Kingdom of God has come, is near.”23 He spoke of the kingdom as a present community, as something that could be “entered” now, and as something that could be prayed for: “Thy Kingdom come.” And, like his tradition, he also spoke of it as the final kingdom to which many would come from east and west to banquet with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.24

  For Jesus, the language of the kingdom was a way of speaking of the power of the Spirit and the new life which it created. The coming of the kingdom is the coming of the Spirit, both into individual lives and into history itself. Entering the Kingdom is entering the life of the Spirit, being drawn into the “way” which Jesus taught and was. That Kingdom has an existence within history as the alternative community of Jesus, that community which lives the life of the Spirit.25 That Kingdom is also something to be hoped for, to be brought about by the power or Spirit of God. Life in the Spirit is thus life lived in relationship to the kingly power of God. Indeed, life in the Spirit is life in the Kingdom of God.26

  The vision of Jesus thus provides the content for three central images of the Christian life: life in the Spirit, the life of discipleship, and life in the Kingdom of God. Each image points to a life centered in God rather than in the lords and kingdoms of this world, in Spirit and not in culture, and yet seeking to transform those kingdoms through the power of the Spirit. In the historical Jesus and the revitalization movement he founded, two elements that are commonly separated are strikingly linked: Spirit and culture, religion and politics.

  A CHALLENGING VISION

  The image of Jesus sketched in this book confronts us at many points. As a charismatic, Jesus is a vivid challenge to our notion of reality, the “practical atheism”27 of much of our culture and church. As a sage, he calls us to leave the life of conventional wisdom, whether secular or religious, American or Christian. He is, in a sense, an “undomesticated Jesus” who has not yet become part of a culture’s conventional wisdom but who challenges all systems of conventional wisdom. As a renewal movement founder and prophet, he points us to human community and history, to an alternative culture which seeks to make the world more compassionate.

  These are potent themes for our own times. They invite us to take seriously the two central presuppositions of the Jewish-Christian tradition. First, there is a dimension of reality beyond the visible world of our ordinary experience, a dimension charged with power, whose ultimate quality is compassion. Second, the fruits of a life lived in accord with the Spirit are to be embodied not only in individuals, but also in the life of the faithful community.

  These themes are also threatening to us. They threaten our sense of normalcy. What if it is true that the world of our ordinary experience is but one level of reality, and that we are at all times surrounded by other dimensions of reality which we do not commonly experience? The claim that there really is a realm of Spirit is both exciting and oddly disconcerting. What if reality is other than we ever dreamed it could be?

  The themes also threaten our comfort within contemporary culture. The historical Jesus, with his call to a counter-community with a counter-consciousness (including consciousness of another realm and lord), challenges the central values of contemporary American culture. Our quest for fulfilment seeks satisfaction through greater achievement, consumption, and enjoyment; our security rests in nuclear weapons; and our blindness and idolatry are visible in our stated willingness to blow up the world, if need be, to preserve our way of life. We as Christians are called to become the church in a culture whose values are largely alien to the Christian message, to be once again the church of the catacombs.

  Images of Jesus give content to what loyalty to him means. The popular picture of Jesus as one whose purpose was to proclaim truths about himself most often construes loyalty to him as insistence on the truth of those claims. Loyalty becomes belief in the historical truthfulness of all the statements in the gospels. Discipleship is then easily confused with dogmatism or doctrinal orthodoxy.

  The absence of an image—the most common fruit of biblical scholarship in this century—leaves us with no clear notion of what it means to take Jesus seriously, no notion of what loyalty might entail, no direction for the life of discipleship. But the vision of Jesus as a person of Spirit, deeply involved in the historical crisis of his own time, can shape the church’s discipleship today. For us, as for the world in which he lived, he can be the light in our darkness.

  NOTES

  Select Bibliography

  This bibliography has been prepared for general readers, including students in undergraduate and introductory graduate level courses. It has been limited to two elements: first, English versions of the primary ancient sources in editions especially useful for study; and second, relatively recent books within mainstream scholarship that focus on the historical Jesus. Works on particular topics (for example, parables, miracles, the trial of Jesus, worldview, conventional wisdom, and so forth) are referred to in footnotes to the relevant sections of this book.

  ANCIENT SOURCES

  The Bible. The single most valuable study edition is The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, edited by H. G. May and B. M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, 1977). In addition to using the text of the Revised Standard Version (most widely used in scholarly books and mainstream churches), this edition includes helpful introductory essays and explanatory footnotes.

  Gospel Parallels. There are three major types of Gospel parallels that display the texts of the Gospels with their relevant parallel texts
. The most widely used is Gospel Parallels, edited by B. H. Throckmorton (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1949, 1957, 1967), which concentrates primarily on Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and basically follows Mark’s order. Robert Funk’s two volume New Gospel Parallels (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985) includes John and noncanonical sources as well as the synoptics, and organizes its presentation with each Gospel in turn serving as the main text. John Dominic Crossan’s Sayings Parallels: A Workbook for the Jesus Tradition (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986) focuses on the sayings of Jesus, including all relevant canonical and noncanonical parallels.

  Other Jewish and Early Christian Literature. For Jewish writings produced between about 200 B.C. and A.D. 100, see The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, two volumes, edited by James H. Charlesworth (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983, 1985). For the Dead Sea Scrolls, see Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968). For the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, see the Loeb Classical Library edition, translated by H. St. J. Thackeray, R. Marcus, and A. Wikgrin, nine volumes, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958-1965). There is no single primary source for the rabbinic tradition in the first century, since most of it was written down only later. The earliest authoritative compilation is The Mishnah, put together about A.D. 200; the standard English edition is translated by H. Danby (London: Oxford University Press, 1933).