Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

What is decisive in our context is the following: In the Old Testament and in Judaism there was a clear-cut tradition that described the coming of the Spirit of God as a phenomenon of the end time, indeed, as a sign preceding the end of the world. We need only recall Joel 3:1-5, a text quoted by Peter in his Pentecost discourse. The quotation begins as follows: “then afterward [lit.: in the last days] I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28). This text clearly shows how, already in the Old Testament,¹⁸ the coming of the Spirit can introduce the end time. It was against that background that the sudden and elemental experience of the Spirit was comprehensible to the earliest community in Jerusalem. The ecstatic phenomena of the day of Pentecost and their interpretation in terms of the Spirit of God would have been unthinkable without the firm conviction of the participants at that time that the end-time events had already begun. The ecstatic shock of the Pentecost assembly was immediately understood to be the eschatological outpouring of the Spirit of which the Old Testament prophets had spoken. This again supports our interpretive approach, which says that without the network of coordinates that made up the tense expectation of the Parousia the history of the earliest community cannot be understood at all.

Further Indications

What we have seen thus far could easily be expanded. We would then have to speak especially of baptism, which was practiced from the beginning of the earliest community and appeared as suddenly and abruptly as the experience of the Spirit. It can only be understood phenomenologically as an eschatological sacrament, a saving seal in view of the nearness of the end.¹⁹

We should also speak of the earliest community’s self-perception, recorded in the terms it applied to itself. It would become clear that concepts such as “the saints” (Acts 9:13), “the elect” (Mark 13:19-27), or “the church of God” (Gal 1:13) reveal a fundamentally eschatological structure. They refer to the Israel of the end time, which God has created, chosen, and sanctified for God’s self.

Finally, we would have to speak of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, which also points toward the eschatn. The maranatha, “Our Lord, come!” (1 Cor 16:22), at worship sounded forth already in the earliest Jerusalem community. When we read in Acts 2:46, “they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts,” we are reading of the end-time rejoicing of the community that erupted in their eucharistic celebrations; this is about the overflowing joy of people who rejoice and can be jubilant that in their meals they were permitted to anticipate the eternal banquet with God they expected to encounter in the very near future.

World-Altering Expectation

But none of that can be pursued here. Even this brief description has probably shown already what approach we need to take if we are to understand the course of the Easter events. Here I will propose only one more question: What happened in the long term to that understanding of Easter, that tense and eager expectation of the Parousia in the first weeks after Jesus’ death? Did history invalidate it and lay it to rest? Was it an illusion? Was it all like a grass fire that blazes up suddenly and just as suddenly collapses?

It is helpful, in trying to answer this, if we recall a basic feature of all the appearance accounts. There is not a single Easter narrative in the New Testament that would point our attention to the “beyond,” to heaven, to eternal happiness or the disciples’ own resurrection. Nowhere in the Easter stories in the gospels do we find the basic idea of many of today’s Easter sermons, meditations, hymns, and petitions: because Christ is risen we can be certain that we will also rise.