N.T. Wright, History and eschatology: Jesus and the promise of natural theology. 2019. London: SPCK.

Unless otherwise indicated, and other than in block quotes, inverted commas surround quotations from Wright.

Go back to notes on chapter four. Go forward to notes on chapter six.

Part 3: Jesus and Easter in the Jewish world

Ch 5: The stone the builders rejected: Jesus, the Temple and the Kingdom

The central topic of this book is Jesus himself. But the ‘natural theology’ of the last two or three centuries has left Jesus out of the picture entirely. He counts as ‘special revelation’. But

Jesus was a genuine human being, to be understood, as are other human beings, within the ‘natural’ world, the historical parameters, of his place, time and culture. And if Jesus was every bit as much part of the ‘natural’ world as anyone else—as so many of the ‘historical Jesus’ portraits, produced precisely within Epicurean modernism, were eager to show —then one cannot rule him out a priori. …

But if we are to speak of Jesus, we must do so precisely in relation to his own cultural and ideological context, not (first and foremost) our own. … (157)

We need to make the genuinely historical effort, as required by an epistemology of love which insists on allowing the ‘other’ to be genuinely different, to see Jesus and his followers, and to understand their aims and intentions, within their own world. (158)

Much that has been written about Jesus in the last 300 years has ignored this challenge. But we know that Jesus announced God’s kingdom, a contemporary Jewish notion on which he seems to have put a new spin. So we need to get inside Jewish thinking. The fact that Jesus’ message was radically new does not absolve us from understanding the context of its newness. Even less does it allow us to ‘understand’ it in the context of modern Epicureanism (159).

Wright proposes

that Second Temple Jews in general, and the early Christians amongst them, assumed an integrated cosmology of heaven and earth, within which there was always the possibility and hope of new creation, not as abolition and replacement but as redemptive transformation. They lived, that is, within a world of story, symbol and praxis in which it made sense to think of some kind of commerce between heaven and earth, and of the possibility of new creation arriving—however dangerously and disturbingly!—within the present world.(159–160)

The two central Jewish symbols in this world were the Temple and the Sabbath. These mesh with Genesis and Exodus to form a controlling narrative, visible in Biblical texts and in ancient Near Eastern parallels, that involves victory over dark forces; divine enthronement in a newly built house or world; and the role of a human king in both. This maps more specifically onto the story of Israel’s long exile, and the longing for a properly rebuilt Temple to which YHWH would finally return in visible glory and victorious saving power.

This construction is contested on the grounds that it may not have been widely accessible. But the Psalms offer strong support, as do the first-century interpetations of Tabernacle and Temple by Josephus and Philo. The apocalyptic literature from Daniel onwards stays on the same narrative.

From this it is clear that first-century Jews and Christians were neither Epicureans (God is distant and separate from us) nor Platonists (this world is a mere shadow of reality). (160)

By ignoring the imagery of the Temple, the theology of our own age has “found it hard to speak coherently of Jesus himself”. (161) By marginalising the eschatological potential of the Sabbath, they have failed to answer some of the strange proposals of the past two centuries.

By putting Temple and Sabbath back in place, as interpretative grids, and by exploring the question of the human ‘image’ within that picture, we have a chance to understand a great many things a lot better—not least the ways in which we ourselves, looking at real evidence in the real world, might learn to ‘discern the dawn’. (162)

Temple, Sabbath, image: elements of a cosmic narrative

Filling the earth, filling the Temple: from creation to Tabernacle

“Psalm 72 prays that Israel’s king will fulfil God’s purpose by doing worldwide justice and mercy, particularly for the helpless and vulnerable.” It ends (vv18-19):

Blessed be YHWH , the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things.

Blessed be his glorious name for ever; may his glory fill the whole earth.

Amen and Amen. (Wright’s italics)

We see this theme also in Isaiah 11:9—the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD—and Habakkuk 2:14—For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. Here it references the Messiah’s wise and just rule. In Numbers 14 the people rebel against God in the light of the spies’ reports and the glory of the LORD appeared at the tent of meeting to all the Israelites (v9) Nonetheless, God says that as surely as the glory of the LORD fills the whole earth (v21) no one who has rebelled will enter the Promised Land. Solomon answers his own question: But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built! (1Kings 8:27) This progression from Temple to the whole earth is also part of Isaiah’s vision:

…, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: …. And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”(Isaiah 6:1–3)

In 2Maccabees 2:7-8, Jeremiah hides the ark in a cave and says, ““The place shall remain unknown until God gathers his people together again and shows his mercy. Then the Lord will disclose these things, and the glory of the Lord will appear, and the cloud, as it showed itself to Moyses,…”

These texts witness the fact that Second Temple Jews hoped God’s glory would return to the Temple, and, when it did, would go on to fill the whole earth. (162-163)

In the ancient Near East, a temple was understood as a meeting place between heaven and earth. Temples were often symbolic mountains. Thus Mount Zion is referred to as a high mountain (it isn’t; it’s a small hill) (Isaiah 2:2–5; Micah 4:1–5; Psalm 48:1f.). (164) Solomon saw his Temple as “only a small working model of a much vaster reality.” (1 Kings 8:27; 2 Chronicles 2:6; 6:8) (166)

Jeremiah saw the destruction of that first Temple as creation reverting to chaos. The hope of Solomon’s Temple as “a forward-looking new-creation promise” was gone. But Ezekiel envisions the depareted divine glory returning to fill a newly built temple. “It’s the same story: the Babylonian chaos has been overcome; the Temple is constructed; the people’s sins are purged; the glory can return.” (165–166)

Sabbath and the Age to Come

The Temple was the place on earth where you would find yourself in heaven. The Sabbath was the moment in ordinary time when God’s new age would arrive in advance. (166)

Neither of these views makes any sense in an Epicuream context, but they reflect the way some Second Temple Jews thought. (169-170) Both see God’s presence on earth, and look forward to a future presence of God in the Temple and a future earth in which the conditions of the Sabbath will become permanently present.¹ (166) They see a new creation which will complete the project of Genesis 1 and 2, “accomplished through the redemption of the disaster of Genesis 3”. (Wright’s italics) Both reject the idea that the arrival of the kingdom of God means the obliteration of the present world. Instead, “the Temple was the place where God was enthroned; the Sabbath was the time when it happened.” (Psalm 132:8, 14)² At a later date than the Second Temple, the Mishnah instructs the faithful to read Psalm 93, YHWH’s victory over the waters, on Fridays, and Psalm 92, His enthronement, on Sabbaths. (167) Wright cites other post-70 sources, but argues that they must reflect a continuation of pre-70 thinking. (167-168)

This thinking looked forward to the Great Sabbath, and was also celebrated in the Sabbath Year³ and the Year of Jubilee.⁴ This is made explicit in the Book of Jubilees.⁵

The image-bearing vocation

“Epicureanism … sees humans as autonomous and perishable: eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die.” The response to this by many of today’s Christians is Platonistic, that they have an immortal soul and will go home to Heaven when they leave this world. But the early Christians spoke of being “renewed in knowledge according to the image of the Creator”. The role of humans, and of one in particular, is thus radically different from what our culture, including our would-be Christian culture, has imagined. (170)

The implication of God’s residence in the Temple is that he wishes to dwell with his creations, humans made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-28) (170). Right from the start, he gave them tasks to perform. He wishes “to accomplish his purposes within the world through their agency” (173). After the sorry story in Genesis 3, of course, these humans need restoring and redeeming. But God’s purposes for them are not put on hold until this is done. Hence the Sabbaths that look forward.

The resultant inaugurated eschatology therefore offers, within an ongoing interpretative tradition, a vocational and indeed political emphasis—certainly also an ecological and aesthetic emphasis. Genuine science belongs here, too: the Solomonic activity of research and classification, delighting in the wonders of creation and developing technology to use it appropriately. . . .

. . . The summons to glimpse the new creation and, on that basis, to discern and respond to the meaning in the old rather than retreating from it or letting it go to wrack and ruin is one central focus of what it means to be human. It includes the task of history, as I explained earlier. It is the call to a form of knowledge for which the ultimate word might be ‘love’. It is, in fact, the foundation for a biblical approach to the questions of the world and God which might yet—as I shall argue in the next chapters—reshape something we could still call ‘natural theology’. (174; Wright’s italics)

In the midst of this, the role of king epitomises the human role. Humans are royalty within creation, and kings of Israel epitomise this human vocation. It is the king’s role to ensure justice and peace for his subjects and to build and maintain the Temple where the divine glory dwells. (171-173)

Wright emphasises that this picture of the relationships between Temple, Sabbath and image-bearing humanity is a “big-picture construct” (174). We cannot infer that any Jewish thinker held all of them in quite this way, but we can infer that Second Temple Jewish thought was within this perspective of heaven and earth belonging together, and nothing like modern Epicurean thinking. This thought did not envisage an end of the world, but a restored creation, of which Temple and Sabbath were foretastes. This was also the thought framework of some early Christians (174-176).

Space, time and humans: Jesus and the early church

Wright sees the books of the NT as springing into life in the framework he has presented. He comments, though, that we cannot view Jesus as a natural culmination of this framework. Jesus entered into it as a figure who was far from comfortable for those whose thinking was framed in this way. (176-177)

Wright looks first at Mark’s Gospel, dominated by his narrative of Jesus’ Palm Sunday entry (in ch 11), his cursing of the fig tree, his forceful actions in the Temple courts and his question to the religious leaders: Was John’s baptism from heaven or from men?—the answer to which explains himself. But the Gospel has already opened with Jesus’ baptism, when Jesus is anointed with God’s Spirit and God’s voice speaks to him in words from Psalm 2 and Isaiah 42. This is new creation. Mark frames his narrative with quotations from Malachi and Isaiah, which focus on the return of God to his people, when sins will be forgiven, exile ended, the heavens torn open and the divine glory returns. “This is the moment of enthronement”. These things all fall into place when we see them in the context of first-century Jewish thought. (177)

Wright attacks those theologians who have attempted to interpret the text divorced from this background. (177-178) The events Mark describes mean what they mean within Mark’s thought-world.

Mark is telling us, from the start, that Jesus is the true king, the truly human one, the one who will defeat all enemies of the new-creation project and so construct, on earth as in heaven, the holy dwelling place of Israel’s God, thereby inaugurating the endless Great Sabbath. (178)

. . .

Mark sees the crucifixion in terms of royal enthronement, the fulfilment (in other words) of the cosmic victory enacted in advance in Jesus’ baptism, and not least the establishment of the true Temple. (179)

…

The crucified Jesus (then to be raised from the dead; but Mark highlights the cross) is himself the place where heaven and earth now meet, where the long-awaited victory is won so that the already-inaugurated great Sabbath can be celebrated, where the image-bearer truly reflects the creator. He is the stone rejected by the builders, now become the head of the corner. (179)

A crucial passage in Matthew’s Gospel is chapter 11, where John the Baptist sends a message to Jesus asking if he is “the one who is to come”. Jesus replies (Matthew 11:5)⁶ with a version of the messianic passage in Isaiah 35:5-6⁷ in which the future tense is replaced by the present. He goes on (Matthew 11:10, 14) to quote God’s declaration in Malachi 3:1, “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me.” asserting that John the Baptist is that messenger. The implicit claim is huge, because Malachi’s messenger is not heralding the Messiah but YHWH himself. (179-180)

Jesus then talks about the discernment of these facts. They are hidden from the wise and learned, and revealed … to little children (11:25) by God’s decision (11:26). The issue, Wright says, is to discern the dawn of new creation in the events of the present world. (180)

At this point Wright interpolates a comment about natural theology, namely that it seeks to discern God via nature, but then has to force Jesus into the picture somehow. It is more “natural” to start with Jesus and to see how he “allows us to understand the present age itself in a new light”, answering “the longings of the heart as well as the enquiries of the mind”, recognising that both belong to God’s good creation. (181)

Jesus says, ”I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28), echoing Exodus 33:14 and asserting that he will “give people the true, ultimate Sabbath”. That Matthew intended his readers to understand “rest” in this way is supported by his turning immediately to two stories about the Sabbath in Matthew 12:1-12, one about his disciples picking and heating heads of grain, the other about his healing the man with the shrivelled hand. (181)

The words ”my yoke is easy” (“ὁ γὰρ ζυγός μου χρηστὸς” Matthew 11:30) may be a play on words, as χρηστὸς ‘easy’ was a homophone of χριστὸς ’Messiah’ in Koine Greek. (181)

The cosmological and eschatological framework that Wright has outlined is also manifest elsewhere in the NT, not least in John’s Gospel. Here John begins with creation and announces new creation and

Jesus himself as the one who, like the Temple, embodies the holy presence of the creator within the midst of creation, revealing the Father in real space, time and matter within the scandalous particularity of historical events; and who, like the Sabbath, launches new creation as a present reality even while the old creation continues on its regular way. (181-182)

Ephesians’ Temple theology is right there on the surface of the text:

God’s plan was always to sum up in the Messiah all things in heaven and on earth (1.10); this was the divine plan ‘for the fullness of the times’, the great sabbatical moment. In Jesus’ enthronement (1.15–23) this plan has gone forward, resulting in the creation of a new Temple consisting of the Jew-plus-Gentile family indwelt by the spirit (2.11–22). (182)

The dark powers will strike back, but can now be defeated (Ephesians 6:10–20).

In the poem of Colossians 1:15–20 the Messiah is again present in creation and is now the replacement temple and “the one through whom the new creation has come to birth”:

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Col 1:19-20)

The framework Wright describes is most explicit in the Letter to the Hebrews. In 4:9–10 Jesus fulfils the divine promise to give ‘rest’, the great ‘sabbatical’ which had remained until then in the future. He is also the great high priest (4:14ff), fulfilling both the Davidic promise of Psalm 2 (esp v6–7) (cf Hebrews 1:5) and the Melchizedek promises of Psalm 110 (esp v4) (cf Hebrews 5:6), and joining heaven and earth together in presenting his blood in the heavenly tabernacle (Hebrews 9:12ff). The result is the establishment of the ‘new covenant’ promised by Jeremiah (31:31–40), the new dispensation in which the Levitical cult itself is rendered redundant, as Psalm 40 had indicated (8.7–10.18). The result is that those who belong to Jesus and follow him faithfully are welcomed into the heavenly sanctuary (12.18–24). (182)

By the time of the third- and fourth-century Fathers this context was no longer remembered. This was even more so in the contexts of mediaeval Aristotelianism and Enlightenment Epicureanism. Concepts such as the Temple overlap of heaven and earth, the new creation coming into being alongside the old, and the human image-bearer, were ruled out. (182–183) But Wright argues that doing the history provides “a better framework for considering the major questions of theology” than the Epicurean frameworks of much modern theology. (184)

Go back to notes on chapter four. Go forward to notes on chapter six.

 

Footnotes

1. Wright writes, “… discussions in Western scholarship of both Temple cult and Sabbath-keeping have been hamstrung by the many years of protestant prejudice which (framed by the various unhelpful philosophies of the Enlightenment) has seen nothing but ‘legalism’ in formal or sacrificial worship and in the careful guarding of the seventh day.” (167) ↩
2. Arise, LORD,a and come to your resting place, you and the ark of your might. . . “This is my resting place for ever and ever; here I will sit enthroned, for I have desired it.” ↩
3. Summarised from https://www.gotquestions.org/sabbatical-year.html. Exodus 23:10–11 and Leviticus 25:1–7 provide instructions for the sabbatical year to be observed after the Israelites moved into the Promised Land. Every seven years the land was to have a year of sabbath rest. There was to be no agricultural activity, but the people were to eat whatever the land produced.
   Further, Deuteronomy 15:1-11 says that debts owed by fellow Israelites must be cancelled in the secenth year. ↩
4. The Year of Jubilee was a special Sabbath Year coming every 50th year, was a year of releasing people from their debts, releasing all slaves, and returning property to those who owned it, and returning home to one’s relatives (Leviticus 25:1-13). ↩
5. Wikipedia says that Jubilees is regarded as canonical by the Ethiopic Orthodox Church and was known only in Ge’ez before the discovery of a Hebrew version among the Dead Sea Scrolls, if which the Ge’ez version is a close translation.
   Jubilees envisages the Lord telling Moses what will happen ‘throughout their weeks of years according to the jubilees forever, until I shall descend and dwell with them in all the ages of eternity’, with these years and jubilees inscribed on tablets detailing the full number ‘from the day of creation until the day of the new creation when the heaven and earth and all of their creatures shall be renewed according to the powers of heaven and according to the whole nature of earth, until the sanctuary of the Lord is created in Jerusalem upon Mount Zion’. ↩
6. “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.” ↩
7. Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer.