Was Something Wrong with the Good
News?
But there was something not quite
right about my understanding of the Good News. Like fairy tales that wrap up
quickly with a sweeping, ‘and they lived happily ever after’, I was content for
the Grand Story of the Gospel to end with a note about going to live with Jesus
forever in Heaven.
And then there was the uneasy
seam between the first part of the Story and the second, between the Old
Testament and the New. The Good News the way I understood it had not required
Jesus to be Jewish. So long as He was both God and Man, salvation was possible.
True as this is, it left gaps in the story. Or, if you’d like: a bump in the
middle and an untidy bow at the end.
Until I began reading N. T.
Wright.
The first book I picked up was
The Lord and His Prayer, and I remember thinking what an unusual take on the
Lord’s Prayer it was. I had never considered those words in the context of
Jewish expectation, Roman oppression, and a re-framed Messianic hope.
Then I read Simply Christian,
which began to address the questions of the skeptic with a Story that was both
grander and simpler than the one I had tried to stitch together. It wasn’t long
after that I picked up Surprised by Hope, and everything began to change.
Three Ways Wright Unveiled the
Grand Story of Scripture
It’s been almost a decade now of
reading Wright—and I’ve read nearly everything he’s written (I say nearly
because the man is so prolific it’s hard to keep up!). Wright’s account of
Pauline eschatology even features prominently in my doctoral dissertation. But
Wright’s work goes beyond academic learning for me; it has shaped my preaching
and pastoral life. Though it can be tricky to nail down precisely how it has
done this, I think there are at least three contours to his influence on my
life and vocation.
The Scriptures tell a grand
story.
I knew the chronology, but I had
missed the Story. Wright often begins his works—whether they’re about Jesus or
Paul—with a re-telling of Genesis 1 and 2 to highlight the vocation God gave to
humans. He compares the image-bearing humans to an angled mirror: reflecting
God’s wise and loving rule downward into the world, and reflecting creation’s
grateful worship upward to God. This vocation was pushed off course when the
first humans decided to disobey God.
Thus, for Wright, sin is not
simply ‘doing bad things’, but rather a failure of vocation—we have not
worshipped rightly, nor have we rightly reflected God’s love into the world.
In Wright’s hands, the calling of
Abraham was a way of keeping God’s mission on track by means of one family who
would reveal God to the nations. Wright sums up Israel’s faith as a combination
of ‘monotheism, election, and eschatology’. Each of those terms is a compact
summary of Israel’s witness to the world: there is only one true God; He has chosen
a people for Himself through whom He will accomplish His purposes for the
world; He will bring a good and just end to time and history.
When Israel falters through
covenant unfaithfulness, the mission of God for the world appears to be in
jeopardy. Each key office falls short of its design: the priesthood is tainted
by its vigilante justice at the end of the book of Judges; the kings are
corrupted by idolatry, which in turn results in a divided kingdom; the prophets
seem to have forgotten the call for all nations to repent as represented by
Jonah’s unwillingness for Nineveh to be saved.
Then, Jesus arrives—the True
Priest, King, and Prophet. Jesus, the seed of Abraham and the son of David,
comes to be faithful on Israel’s behalf and to fulfill God’s promise to Abraham
to use his family to bless all the families of the earth and to complete God’s
promise to David that his throne would continue forever.
The story not only culminates in
Jesus; it continues because of Jesus. The church is a new humanity made up of
Jews and Gentiles. The original call on humanity to rule and to worship is
restored; those in Christ are a royal priesthood.
And then, there is the glorious
ending of the Story. But this deserves a section of its own.
The Ending is Everything
Like any good story, the grand
story of the Gospel is all about the ending. When we tell the story, however,
the ending is often heaven. But as Wright has famously and frequently said,
‘Heaven is great, but it’s not the end of the world’.1 Wright helped me focus,
not on ‘life after death’, but on ‘life after life after death’ (another one of
Wright’s marvelous sayings).
As it turns out, the Bible has
far more to say about the ultimate end than it does about heaven. Heaven, in
the Biblical view, is God’s space—a separate but overlapping and, at points,
inter-locking space with earth, which is human space. While there are glimpses
into the activities of heaven, the ultimate vision of the end of all things is
a vision of new creation and of resurrection. That is significant because of
what it means for our hope as followers of Jesus.
Think of it: our hope is not
evacuation—that God will get us out of here one day; our hope is not
explanation—that God will explain it all to us one day; our hope is not
compensation—that God will make it up to us in the end (though there will be
justice and recompense). Christian hope is better than that: it is the hope of
new creation and resurrection.
But this is not a distant hope;
the ‘age to come’ has dawned now, and all who are in Christ are already
beginning to experience new creation. (Wright’s exposition of 2 Corinthians 5
is stunning on this.) Thus, we are to read Paul’s theology in the twilight of
this age and in the first light of the age to come; all of Paul’s ‘ethical’
injunctions are pastoral reflections on how to live now as it will be then.
Wright, of course, is not the
first to articulate an inaugurated eschatology; but he makes the connections
between Jesus’ resurrection, our future bodily resurrection, and our life now
in the power of the Spirit with clarity and poignancy. I would wager that every
sermon I’ve preached from a Pauline text in the past several years has been
shaped by holding these ‘Wrightian’ connections in the back of my mind. He has
helped me to preach with the end in mind.
We Are All Counting on the
Faithfulness of God
More than just seeing the Story
and its glorious ending, Wright has taken me back, time and time again, to the
faithfulness of God. He is a theologian and a churchman, and as such he is
careful to turn the spotlight on the character of God in a way that inspires
worship. In Wright’s portrait of the Gospel, the light of God’s faithfulness
shines brightly, and this faithfulness is good news for the whole world. Here’s
how I see it: God does not scrap his project (creation), forget his promise
(the covenant with Abraham), or abandon his people (Israel).
And isn’t that good news? If all
these promises come to their ‘yes and amen’ in Christ, how firm is God’s
faithfulness? However feeble our faith may feel, it is God who remains
faithful. And just as God in Christ was faithful on behalf of an unfaithful
Israel, so will we be saved by faith in the faithfulness of Christ, even as God
the Holy Spirit empowers a life of faithful obedience in us.
Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit—three Persons, one Faithful God.
This is the Story; this is the
Song; this is our assurance that we will come to the end of it all and gasp in
awe at the faithfulness of God and the goodness of this News.
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