Chapter 4: The Crucified Messiah
Wright’s two main questions of this chapter:
1) Did Jesus think of himself as messiah, and if so in what sense?
2) Did Jesus expect or intend to die as part of his vocation, and if so what interpretation did he put upon that event?
I had to pause temporarily to consider the use of the word “vocation” here. According to the ever-reliable internet, the concept of vocation originated with Christians before moving to a secular context. Vocation is a “calling” (you can see shared root with “vocal”). That’s just an interesting side-comment and not that important.
I had not thought of Jesus’ life as a vocation. But since prophets had the vocation of being prophets, and there were others walking around who claimed to be Messiahs, so the concept of Jesus seeing himself as Messiah seems to be a reasonable question to consider. It seems sort of obvious (especially in light of Peter’s confession and Jesus’ affirmation of the confession). But we need to know what that meant in the cultural context. This leads to the question of what it is that a Messiah was expected to do.
Although there was not a singular concept of the Messiah at the time, there were two primary functions that the Messiah was expected to perform. The first is that he would rebuild the temple, and the second is that he would prevail against the enemy. So if Jesus was to be understood as being the Messiah, his followers would have expected that he did these things in some manner. If not, it would not have made sense for the followers to use this term to describe what Jesus did.
But in would seem at first that Jesus did not do either of these things. The temple was not rebuilt, and the Romans were not defeated. Of course, if you’ve had this discussion before, we like to say that he did, but just not the way that they were expecting. We usually get the temple being rebuilt on the third day (Mark 14:58 and Matthew 26:61) and the enemy was not the Romans but death and sin and all that stuff. But if he did it in this way that they were not expecting, what allowed them to connect the dots?
The resurrection alone is not a sufficient answer. That is, simply having a resurrection on its own was not enough to declare Messiah-ship. Wright does not go into detail here, but I think I can imagine why this is the case. Even though it was odd to have people resurrected from the dead, it happened in Jesus’ ministry, and those people were not claimed to be the Messiah. Even in Matthew 27:51-53, we have people being resurrected upon Jesus’ death, but they weren’t labeled as Messiahs. So for the label of Messiah to stick to Jesus, there must have been a sufficient claim of Messiah-ship that preceded the crucifixion so that when the resurrection happened, the disciples would be able to understand.
At this point, Wright begins to weave an extremely intricate symbolic picture of the Messiah. Even after multiple readings, I don’t think I follow it. He begins with a deeper explanation of the temple judgment. He discusses a couple “messianic riddles” where Jesus is speaking in parables about this judgment (his authority, his rejection, and the new temple), and this is followed by an analysis of Jesus’ trial before Caiaphas. This then rolls into the question, “Why did Jesus die?” which is also riddled with symbolic feasts, symbolic actions, and puzzles in the form of parables.
He eventually reaches his main point: “[W]e can credibly reconstruct the mindset in which a first-century Jew could come to believe that YHWH would act through the suffering of a particular individual in whom Israel’s sufferings were focused; that this suffering would carry redemptive significance; and that this individual would be himself. And I propose that we can plausibly suggest that this was the mindset of Jesus himself.” I find that I am affirming his conclusion based on the fact that this seems like a necessary conclusion to hold if we are to believe that the theology we hold regarding the Messiah did correlate to Jesus’ concept, even if I don’t really understand the argument. That is, if we don’t think that Jesus’ disciples were able to figure these things out (having been directly taught by Jesus), it seems unreasonable that Christianity would have grown out of first century Judaism the way that it did and still be rooted in Jesus’ self-understanding. At least, I think it’s unreasonable.
Wright concludes with four comments, and I will focus on his second. If the cross is the moment when evil and pain were dealt with once for all, why is there evil and pain still in this world? This is the question of the kingdom of God being both now and yet to come. If we only focus on the “yet to come” portion, then we’d be negating part of Jesus’ meaning. He will save a fuller discussion of this to later chapters. Here, it serves as a reminder of the recurring theme that the theology of Christianity does not allow us to neglect the world we are in right now so that we can blissfully dream of heaven.
