Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Believing and allowing oneself to be baptized in the name of Jesus meant a transformation of one’s whole life, a new common life in the spirit of Jesus—and, where necessary, even a counter-world against ancient society. Faith in Jesus Christ was from the beginning more than mere interiority. Where the issue is the Gospel of Jesus it is always about the world and transforms the world. The widespread notion that within the church Christians learn faith in order to apply it in the world is a perversion, to the very root, of what Jesus actually wanted. Faith is from its first second about forming and transforming the world, and the church is the place where the material of the world is grasped and redeemed by faith.

Where the church remained true to Jesus it was always “all in”; it was a new society.⁹ It not only demanded justice; it lived justice. It not only preached freedom but was itself a place of freedom. It saw itself not as a place for reflection where one was armed and equipped for the building sites in the world but as the building site itself. It hoped not only for a future life in heaven; it knew that in the common life of the baptized heaven is already revealed and the precious treasure has already been found. It was certain that within the space of its communities creation was already on the way to its integrity and the form planned for it. In short, it saw itself as the beginning of the eschatological, liberated world, the beginning of the “new creation” as “new earth.”

Now all of a sudden a book that is supposed to be about Jesus is talking about the early Christian communities! But the two are inseparable. In the physicality of the church, in its firm insistence that redemption must begin here and now, in its holding fast to visible community, what Jesus began with his disciples is continuing. We cannot avoid it: anyone who really wants to talk about Jesus must always have the church in view as well, because we have Jesus through the church or not at all.

That is why it was so tiresome when older scholarly commentaries on the Synoptic Gospels continually asked whether in this or that case we were dealing with authentic sayings of Jesus or not. Obviously Jesus’ response to Peter in Mark 10:28-30 also distills the experiences of early Christian communities, and especially the early itinerant missionaries—the persecutions they suffered as well as the experience of a new brotherhood and sisterhood that far surpassed all physical relationships. But all that had begun with Jesus—with the fire he had kindled.

Overflowing Abundance

In the double parable of the treasure and the pearl the two actors make a hundredfold or even thousandfold gain. The pearl is incomparably beautiful and the treasure in the field will fundamentally change the life of the day laborer. The reign of God appears in an astonishing and positively overflowing abundance.

But that is not only the case in Matthew 13:44-46. The superfluity of the reign of God is found in many other gospel texts. Jesus was continually describing it, especially in his parables. We are moved to suspect that he described this abundance so often because he himself had experienced the reign of God that way: as brilliance, beauty, overflowing riches.

The land that was sown in the parable of the great harvest of wheat, despite all the opponents that threatened the seed from beginning to end, produced a mighty yield: one grain brought forth thirty, sixty, or a hundred more grains (Mark 4:8). From the tiny mustard seed, no bigger than the head of a pin, grows a great shrub under whose branches the birds of the air build their nests (Mark 4:30-32). On the shores of Lake Genesareth mustard bushes could achieve a height of two to three meters. In Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels the mustard bush even becomes a world tree (Matt 13:32 // Luke 13:19). In the parable of the leaven (Matt 13:33 // Luke 13:20-21) the small amount of leaven is contrasted with a huge amount of flour (three measures [Greek sata] = fifty kilograms). What is interesting is that Jesus pays no attention to the negative connotations of leaven or yeast in Israel. He illustrates the coming of the reign of God by describing how the trivial amount of yeast (or sourdough) leavens the whole quantity of flour.