Jesus of Nazareth
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In other words, Barabbas was a messianic figure. The choice of Jesus versus Barabbas is not accidental; two messiah figures, two forms of messianic belief stand in opposition. This becomes even clearer when we consider that the name Bar-Abbas means "son of the father." This is a typically messianic appellation, the cultic name of a prominent leader of the messianic movement. The last great Jewish messianic war was fought in the year 132 by Bar-Kokhba, "son of the star." The form of the name is the same, and it stands for the same intention.
Origen, a Father of the Church, provides us with another interesting detail. Up until the third century, many manuscripts of the Gospels referred to the man in question here as "Jesus Barabbas"--"Jesus son of the father." Barabbas figures here as a sort of alter ego of Jesus, who makes the same claim but understands it in a completely different way. So the choice is between a Messiah who leads an armed struggle, promises freedom and a kingdom of one's own, and this mysterious Jesus who proclaims that losing oneself is the way to life. Is it any wonder that the crowds prefer Barabbas? (For a fuller discussion of this point, see Vittorio Messori's important book Pati sotto Ponzio Pilato? [Turin, 1992], pp. 52-62.)
If we had to choose today, would Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, the Son of the Father, have a chance? Do we really know Jesus at all? Do we understand him? Do we not perhaps have to make an effort, today as always, to get to know him all over again? The tempter is not so crude as to suggest to us directly that we should worship the devil. He merely suggests that we opt for the reasonable decision, that we choose to give priority to a planned and thoroughly organized world, where God may have his place as a private concern but must not interfere in our essential purposes. Soloviev attributes to the Antichrist a book entitled The Open Way to World Peace and Welfare. This book becomes something of a new Bible, whose real message is the worship of well-being and rational planning.
Jesus' third temptation proves, then, to be the fundamental one, because it concerns the question as to what sort of action is expected of a Savior of the world. It pervades the entire life of Jesus. It manifests itself openly again at a decisive turning point along his path. Peter, speaking in the name of the disciples, has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah-Christ, the Son of the Living God. In doing so, he has expressed in words the faith that builds up the Church and inaugurates the new community of faith based on Christ. At this crucial moment, where distinctive and decisive knowledge of Jesus separates his followers from public opinion and begins to constitute them as his new family, the tempter appears--threatening to turn everything into its opposite. The Lord immediately declares that the concept of the Messiah has to be understood in terms of the entirety of the message of the Prophets--it means not worldly power, but the Cross, and the radically different community that comes into being through the Cross.
But that is not what Peter has understood: "Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, 'God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you'" (Mt 16:22). Only when we read these words against the backdrop of the temptation scene--as its recurrence at the decisive moment--do we understand Jesus' unbelievably harsh answer: "Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men" (Mt 16:23).
But don't we all repeatedly tell Jesus that his message leads to conflict with the prevailing opinions, so that there is always a looming threat of failure, suffering, and persecution? The Christian empire or the secular power of the papacy is no longer a temptation today, but the interpretation of Christianity as a recipe for progress and the proclamation of universal prosperity as the real goal of all religions, including Christianity--this is the modern form of the same temptation. It appears in the guise of a question: "What did Jesus bring, then, if he didn't usher in a better world? How can that not be the content of messianic hope?"
In the Old Testament, two strands of that hope are still intertwined without distinction. The first one is the expectation of a worldly paradise in which the wolf lies down with the lamb (cf. Is 11:6), the peoples of the world make their way to Mount Zion, and the prophecy "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks" comes true (Is 2:4; Mic 4:1-3). Alongside this expectation, however, is the prospect of the suffering servant of God, of a Messiah who brings salvation through contempt and suffering. Throughout his public ministry, and again in his discourses after Easter, Jesus had to show his disciples that Moses and the Prophets were speaking of him, the seemingly powerless one, who suffered, was crucified, and rose again. He had to show that in this way, and no other, the promises were fulfilled. "O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!" (Lk 24:25). That is what the Lord said to the disciples on the road to Emmaus and he has to say the same to us repeatedly throughout the centuries, because we too are constantly presuming that in order to make good on his claim to be a Messiah, he ought to have ushered in the golden age.
Jesus, however, repeats to us what he said in reply to Satan, what he said to Peter, and what he explained further to the disciples of Emmaus: No kingdom of this world is the Kingdom of God, the total condition of mankind's salvation. Earthly kingdoms remain earthly human kingdoms, and anyone who claims to be able to establish the perfect world is the willing dupe of Satan and plays the world right into his hands.
Now, it is true that this leads to the great question that will be with us throughout this entire book: What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world? What has he brought?
The answer is very simple: God. He has brought God. He has brought the God who formerly unveiled his countenance gradually, first to Abraham, then to Moses and the Prophets, and then in the Wisdom Literature--the God who revealed his face only in Israel, even though he was also honored among the pagans in various shadowy guises. It is this God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the true God, whom he has brought to the nations of the earth.
He has brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him. Now we know the path that we human beings have to take in this world. Jesus has brought God and with God the truth about our origin and destiny: faith, hope, and love. It is only because of our hardness of heart that we think this is too little. Yes indeed, God's power works quietly in this world, but it is the true and lasting power. Again and again, God's cause seems to be in its death throes. Yet over and over again it proves to be the thing that truly endures and saves. The earthly kingdoms that Satan was able to put before the Lord at that time have all passed away. Their glory, their doxa, has proven to be a mere semblance. But the glory of Christ, the humble, self-sacrificing glory of his love, has not passed away, nor will it ever do so.
Jesus has emerged victorious from his battle with Satan. To the tempter's lying divinization of power and prosperity, to his lying promise of a future that offers all things to all men through power and through wealth--he responds with the fact that God is God, that God is man's true Good. To the invitation to worship power, the Lord answers with a passage from Deuteronomy, the same book that the devil himself had cited: "You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve" (Mt 4:10; cf. Deut 6:13). The fundamental commandment of Israel is also the fundamental commandment for Christians: God alone is to be worshiped. When we come to consider the Sermon on the Mount, we will see that precisely this unconditional Yes to the first tablet of the Ten Commandments also includes the Yes to the second tablet--reverence for man, love of neighbor. Matthew, like Mark, concludes the narrative of the temptations with the statement that "angels came and ministered to him" (Mt 4:11; Mk 1:13). Psalm 91:11 now comes to fulfillment: The angels serve him, he has proven himself to be the Son, and heaven therefore stands open above him, the new Jacob, the Patriarch of a universalized Israel (cf. Jn 1:51; Gen 28:12).
CHAPTER THREE
The Gospel of the Kingdom of God
"Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of God, and saying, 'The time is fulfilled, and the Kin
gdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the Gospel'" (Mk 1:14-15). With these words, the Evangelist Mark describes the beginning of Jesus' public activity and at the same time specifies the essential content of his preaching. Matthew, too, sums up Jesus' activity in Galilee in similar terms: "And he went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people" (Mt 4:23, 9:35). Both Evangelists designate Jesus' preaching with the Greek term evangelion--but what does that actually mean?
The term has recently been translated as "good news." That sounds attractive, but it falls far short of the order of magnitude of what is actually meant by the word evangelion. This term figures in the vocabulary of the Roman emperors, who understood themselves as lords, saviors, and redeemers of the world. The messages issued by the emperor were called in Latin evangelium, regardless of whether or not their content was particularly cheerful and pleasant. The idea was that what comes from the emperor is a saving message, that it is not just a piece of news, but a change of the world for the better.
When the Evangelists adopt this word, and it thereby becomes the generic name for their writings, what they mean to tell us is this: What the emperors, who pretend to be gods, illegitimately claim, really occurs here--a message endowed with plenary authority, a message that is not just talk, but reality. In the vocabulary of contemporary linguistic theory, we would say that the evangelium, the Gospel, is not just informative speech, but performative speech--not just the imparting of information, but action, efficacious power that enters into the world to save and transform. Mark speaks of the "Gospel of God," the point being that it is not the emperors who can save the world, but God. And it is here that God's word, which is at once word and deed, appears; it is here that what the emperors merely assert, but cannot actually perform, truly takes place. For here it is the real Lord of the world--the living God--who goes into action.
The core content of the Gospel is this: The Kingdom of God is at hand. A milestone is set up in the flow of time; something new takes place. And an answer to this gift is demanded of man: conversion and faith. The center of this announcement is the message that God's Kingdom is at hand. This announcement is the actual core of Jesus' words and works. A look at the statistics underscores this. The phrase "Kingdom of God" occurs 122 times in the New Testament as a whole; 99 of these passages are found in the three Synoptic Gospels, and 90 of these 99 texts report words of Jesus. In the Gospel of John, and the rest of the New Testament writings, the term plays only a small role. One can say that whereas the axis of Jesus' preaching before Easter is the Kingdom of God, Christology is the center of the preaching of the Apostles after Easter.
Does this mean, then, that there has been a falling away from the real preaching of Jesus? Is the exegete Rudolf Bultmann right when he says that the historical Jesus is not really part of the theology of the New Testament, but must be seen as still essentially a Jewish teacher, who, although certainly to be reckoned as an essential presupposition for the New Testament, ought not to be counted as part of the New Testament itself?
Another variant of this alleged gulf between Jesus and the preaching of the Apostles occurs in the now famous saying of the Catholic modernist Alfred Loisy, who put it like this: Jesus preached the Kingdom of God, and what came was the Church. These words may be considered ironic, but they also express sadness. Instead of the great expectation of God's own Kingdom, of a new world transformed by God himself, we got something quite different--and what a pathetic substitute it is: the Church.
Is this true? Is the form of Christianity that took shape in the preaching of the Apostles, and in the Church that was built on this preaching, really just a precipitous plunge from an unfulfilled expectation into something else? Is the change of subject from "Kingdom of God" to Christ (and so to the genesis of the Church) really just the collapse of a promise and the emergence of something else in its place?
Everything depends on how we are to understand the expression "Kingdom of God" as used by Jesus, on what kind of relationship exists between the content of his proclamation and his person, as the proclaimer. Is he just a messenger charged with representing a cause that is ultimately independent of him, or is the messenger himself the message? The question about the Church is not the primary question. The basic question is actually about the relationship between the Kingdom of God and Christ. It is on this that our understanding of the Church will depend.
Before we delve more deeply into the words of Jesus in order to understand his message--his action and his suffering--it may be useful to take a brief look at how the word kingdom has been understood in the history of the Church. We can identify three dimensions in the Church Fathers' interpretation of this key term.
The first dimension is the Christological one. Origen, basing himself on a reading of Jesus' words, called Jesus the autobasileia, that is, the Kingdom in person. Jesus himself is the Kingdom; the Kingdom is not a thing, it is not a geographical dominion like worldly kingdoms. It is a person; it is he. On this interpretation, the term "Kingdom of God" is itself a veiled Christology. By the way in which he speaks of the Kingdom of God, Jesus leads men to realize the overwhelming fact that in him God himself is present among them, that he is God's presence.
There is a second way of looking at the significance of the "Kingdom of God," which we could call the idealistic or mystical interpretation. It sees man's interiority as the essential location of the Kingdom of God. This approach to understanding the Kingdom of God was also inaugurated by Origen. In his treatise On Prayer, he says that "those who pray for the coming of the Kingdom of God pray without any doubt for the Kingdom of God that they contain in themselves, and they pray that this Kingdom might bear fruit and attain its fullness. For in every holy man it is God who reigns [exercises dominion, is the Kingdom of God].... So if we want God to reign in us [his Kingdom to be in us], then sin must not be allowed in any way to reign in our mortal body (Rom 6:12).... Then let God stroll at leisure in us as in aspiritual paradise (Gen 3:8) and rule in us alone with his Christ" (Patrologia Graeca 11, pp. 495f.). The basic idea is clear: The "Kingdom of God" is not to be found on any map. It is not a kingdom after the fashion of worldly kingdoms; it is located in man's inner being. It grows and radiates outward from that inner space.
The third dimension of the interpretation of the Kingdom of God we could call the ecclesiastical: the Kingdom of God and the Church are related in different ways and brought into more or less close proximity.
This last approach, as far as I can see, has gradually come to dominate the field, especially in modern Catholic theology. To be sure, neither the interpretation in terms of man's interiority nor the connection with Christ ever completely disappeared from sight. But nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century theology did tend to speak of the Church as the Kingdom of God on earth; the Church was regarded as the actual presence of the Kingdom within history. By that time, however, the Enlightenment had sparked an exegetical revolution in Protestant theology, and one of the main results of this revolution was an innovative understanding of Jesus' message concerning the Kingdom of God. This new interpretation immediately broke up into very different trends, however.
One of these was early-twentieth-century liberal theology. Its main spokesman, Adolf von Harnack, saw Jesus' message about the Kingdom of God as a double revolution against the Judaism of Jesus' time. Whereas Judaism focused entirely on the collective, on the chosen people, Harnack held, Jesus' message was strictly individualistic; Jesus addressed the individual, whose infinite value he recognized and made the foundation of his teaching. The second fundamental antithesis, according to Harnack, was this: Whereas ritual worship (and thus the priesthood) had dominated Judaism, Jesus set aside ritual and concentrated his message strictly on morality. Jesus, he argued, was concerned not with ritual purification and sanctification, but with man's soul. The individual's moral action, his works of love, will decide whether he enters into the Kingd
om or is shut out of it.
This antithesis between ritual and morality, between the collective and the individual remained influential long after Harnack's time, and it was also widely adopted in Catholic exegesis from about the 1930s on. Harnack himself, though, connected it with his account of the differences between the three major forms of Christianity--the Roman Catholic, the Greek-Slavic, and the Germanic-Protestant--and held that the third of these forms was the one that restored the message of Jesus in its purity. Yet there was also decisive opposition to Harnack within the Protestant world. His opponents insisted that it was not the individual as such who stands under the promise, but the community, and that it is as a member of this community that the individual attains salvation. They pointed out that it is not man's ethical achievement that counts, and they held that the Kingdom of God is, on the contrary, "beyond ethics" and is pure grace, as in their view Jesus' practice of eating with sinners shows particularly clearly (see, for example, K. L. Schmidt, TDNT, I, pp. 574ff.).
The great era of liberal theology came to an end with the First World War and the radical change in the intellectual climate that followed it. But there had already been rumblings of a revolution much earlier. The first clear signal of what was to come was a book by Johannes Weiss that appeared in 1892 under the title Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Albert Schweitzer's early exegetical works share the same outlook. Jesus' message, it was now claimed, was radically "eschatological"; his proclamation of the imminent Kingdom of God was a proclamation of the imminent end of the world, of the inbreaking of a new world where, as the term kingdom suggests, God would reign. The proclamation of the Kingdom of God, it was argued, must therefore be understood as referring strictly to the end times. Even texts that seemingly contradict this interpretation were somewhat violently made to fit it--for example, the growth parables about the sower (cf. Mk 4:3-9), the mustard seed (cf. Mk 4:30-32), the leaven (cf. Mt 13:33/ Lk 13:20), and the spontaneously sprouting seed (cf. Mk 4:26-29). The point, it was said, is not growth; rather, Jesus is trying to say that while now our world is small, something very different is about to burst suddenly onto the scene. Here, obviously, theory predominated over listening to the text. Various efforts have been made to transpose Jesus' vision of the imminent end times into the language of modern Christian life, since for us it is not immediately intelligible. Bultmann, for example, tried to do so in terms of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger--arguing that what matters is an existential attitude of "always standing at the ready." Jurgen Moltmann, building on the work of Ernst Bloch, worked out a "theology of hope," which claimed to interpret faith as an active involvement in the shaping of the future.