N.T. Wright's Lenten Devotional

N.T. Wright's Lenten Devotional

It was before the festival of Passover. Jesus knew that his time had come, the time for him to leave this world and go to the father. He had always loved his own people in the world; now he loved them right through to the end.

It was suppertime. The devil had already put the idea of betraying him into the heart of Judas, son of Simon Iscariot.

Jesus knew that the father had given everything into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God.

So he got up from the supper-table, took off his clothes, and wrapped a towel around himself.

Then he poured water into a bowl, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel he was wrapped in.

John 13:1-5 KNT

When we look at Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four Gospel writers, we see that they, like Jesus, don't seem to be telling us that we are all sinners and we need Jesus to die for us to take our punishment so we can go to heaven. The Gospel writers are telling several stories simultaneously. They are obviously telling the story of Jesus. They are telling the story of how the movement that they themselves are part of (which we now call the church) got started.

But they are also telling at least three other stories. One of those stories is the story of how Israel's God came back to his people at last. That's a bit of a shock because Jesus doesn't look to most of his contemporaries as though he is Yahweh in person. But John says it very explicitly, ‘The word became flesh and dwelt in our midst and we gazed upon his glory, the glory as of the father’s only son’. 

John is there, echoing that great temple promise, the word for ‘dwelt’ is ‘tabernacle’. God pitched his tent. He came like the divine glory to the rebuild the temple at last. That's what it was all about. But when we look at the beginning of Matthew and Mark and Luke, we see that in the baptism narrative particularly, we have Isaiah 40 being quoted and Malachi 3 being quoted. And then we see Jesus. But those prophecies from Isaiah and Malachi are not about the Messiah coming, they are about God himself coming back. And it says, through each of the four evangelists in their own ways, ‘When you hear this human story of Jesus, please understand this is what it looked like when Israel's God came back in person’. That’s how they want us to understand it.

This is, of course, the story of the fulfillment of Israel's hope, that great hope, in which eventually Israel's God would defeat the powers that had enslaved his people. God would rescue his people from exile, would establish his kingdom over them and through them, and would bring justice and peace and new creation to his whole world. That's the other story that the Gospel writers are telling.

Then, underneath that, there is the dark side, the dark story that they are also telling, which is the story of the buildup of evil. We often miss this until we stop for a moment and think, ‘Wait a minute, what's going on here?’ In the Old Testament, it seems again and again, even at the greatest moments, Abraham, David, times like that, there are really bad things that are infecting the people of God. Abraham is given great promises and almost immediately he nearly blows it by going down to Egypt and saying that Sarah is his sister, rather than his wife, thus risking the promises before they've even got underway.

David establishes this wonderful kingdom, the great plan of building the temple, and then goes and commits adultery and the whole thing falls apart. His family is into war and so on, and then the kingdom is divided and ultimately from thereon it's a long road to exile. And we can see in the Gospels the way in which all sorts of forces of evil are rushing together. We take it for granted that at the beginning of Matthew, Herod the great, this malevolent brooding old king, is trying to kill Jesus when he is only a baby. And then the Herod of the Gospels, Herod Antipas, is still a brooding presence in the background and at one point in Luke’s Gospel people come to Jesus and say, ‘You better get out of here because Herod is after you and he wants to kill you’. We have the sense of a buildup of pressure and tension. 

As soon as Jesus announces his public career to launch God's kingdom, there are people shrieking at him in the synagogues, demon-possessed people who are shouting out things about who he is, about what he's doing, and there are Pharisees who are saying, ‘We don't like this man. He has a different agenda. We have a kingdom agenda and he is doing it all the wrong way. He is it letting the side down. He is breaking the Sabbath’. And so they start to plot, and sometimes it is the Pharisees with the Herodians and sometimes it is the scribes and the Pharisees and sometimes it is just strange forces that seem to be bent on attacking Jesus or accusing him.

There is no period in the Gospels when all seems to be the sweetness and light that some 19th century scholars imagined. Before the 19th Century, there is a sort of dark turn and Jesus goes to Jerusalem. All the way through we sense this buildup of pressure, the pressure of evil, and it gets worse as Jesus comes to Jerusalem.

And so then they get in league with the Romans. Jesus knows what's coming, and on the night he was betrayed, he could, of course, have quite easily escaped. Why did he stay in Gethsemane that night? He could have gone up over the Mount of Olives by daybreak. He could have been down by the Dead Sea. He could have established a nice little community there, teaching people to pray the Lord’s prayer, waiting for God to do some thing some time. But no, Jesus believed that this Passover was the moment. This was the time when, at the beginning of his public career, he said, ‘The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand’. He had that sense that the time of waiting was over. This was the moment when something had to happen.

These are the stories the Gospels tell. It is only when we read them as whole, telling all these stories together, coming together in the story of Jesus himself, that we see that what it is they are saying is about the cross. The cross is woven in all through.

Take John’s Gospel. Take the beginning of the passion narrative in John 13:1, where John says that Jesus, having loved his own who were in the world, now he loved them right through to the end. This is a story of love, of covenant love, of divine love, of love doing what only love could do. We have to read the whole story that way because otherwise, if we are not careful, instead of saying God so loved the world that he gave his own son, we end up saying God so hated the world that he killed his own son. I know preachers would never really actually say that, but there are always some people in church who think that that's what they are hearing, who think for whatever reason that there is an angry malevolent God who is out to get them, and that fortunately Jesus happens to have stood in the way and taken the rap on our behalf.

So, right from the beginning of John's Gospel, we see Jesus announced as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. That's what John the Baptist says in John Chapter 1. And we know that something is going to happen which will bring his kingdom work to a climax. In Chapter 2 he says to his mother, ‘my hour has not yet come’, but in Chapter 12, he says, ‘the hour now has come’. And on the way to that, he tells the story about the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.

That’s a development of Ezekiel’s picture in Ezekiel 34 of God himself as the shepherd and of David the king as the shepherd. Somehow Jesus fuses these roles. The story of God, the story of Israel's Messiah, meets the story of the buildup of evil, so that the way for sheep to be rescued will be for the shepherd himself to take the attack of the wolf upon himself and to die in order to rescue them. In John Chapter 11, when the chief priests get together and plot, they wonder, ‘Now what are we going to do about this man? If we let him go on like this, then the Romans will come and take away our holy place and our nation’. And Caiaphas, the chief priest says, ‘This is what's best for you. Let one man die for the people rather than the whole nation being wiped out’. And John comments, ‘He didn't say this of his own  accord; he was high priest that year and this was a prophecy that Jesus would die for the nation’.

So John is telling us that this buildup of evil, which seems to be coming from all sides, is going to burst upon Jesus but that it will actually, paradoxically, be the overthrow of the dark powers.

And in John Chapter 12 we find the scene where some Greeks come to the feast. They want to see Jesus. Instead of Jesus saying, as we might expect, ‘Yes, bring them in; we'll have a talk; maybe we'll pray with them’. Jesus says, ‘The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’. Then he says, ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain. But if it dies, it will produce lots of fruit’. And then he says, ‘What am I going to say? Save me from this moment? No! It is because of this that I came to this moment. Father, glorify your name’. Then there is a clap of thunder, which is interpreted as a voice from heaven saying, ‘I have glorified it and will glorify it again’. And Jesus said – this is the crucial point— ‘Now comes the judgment of this world; now this world’s ruler is going to be thrown out. And when I've been lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself’. In other words, this buildup of evil has got to a point where evil itself is going to be judged and condemned. The ruler of this world, the Satan, the adversary, the great one who has accrued to himself all the power which properly belonged to God's image-bearing humans, he is doing his worst. Through Jesus being lifted up on the cross, this power will be broken.

So, when in John Chapter 13, we see the Satan entering into Judas, so that Judas becomes the accuser, the one who is doing the accusing work. Then we see Jesus ultimately standing before Pontius Pilate, explaining to him what a true kingdom is all about and what truth and power are all about. We begin to understand John’s picture. This is how kingdom and truth and power are launched into the world, by Jesus taking upon himself the sins of the world and thereby defeating the powers that have enslaved the world.

So, for John by 6 P.M. on Good Friday, creation itself had been rescued by Jesus, dying under the weight of that accumulated evil, dying under the weight of the world‘s sin, in order to defeat the grip of the satanic dark forces. In so doing, then the whole world would now be free to hear the gospel.

This is the foundation of the church's mission, as we see in John 20, this is what John believed had been accomplished by the evening of that first Good Friday.

By Prof. N.T. Wright from a lecture in the course The Day the Revolution Began.

© 2017 by N.T. Wright. All rights reserved.