Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Instead, all the Easter texts culminate in the Risen One’s sending of the disciples. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” says Matthew 28:19. “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation,” says Mark 16:15. In the name of the Messiah “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things,” reads Luke 24:47-48. Finally, “as the Father has sent me, so I send you,” according to John 20:21. Even Paul said nothing in response to the question of why the Lord had appeared to him except that God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles” (Gal 1:15-16). And to round off the whole, in Acts 1:11 the disciples who are staring after the vanishing Christ hear, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” That is, they should not fixate on heaven but be Jesus’ witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

Matching all these texts is the remarkable circumstance that it was precisely this original Jerusalem community—which, as we saw, expected the return of the Risen One and the end of the world in the immediate future—that stood up before Israel, preaching and missionizing (Acts 2:38-40). The expectation did not falter; rather, it compelled them to gather Israel and lead it to repentance in light of the approaching end. The same can easily be demonstrated in the case of Paul, who in spite of his imminent expectation of the end traveled the Mediterranean world to win as many people as possible for Christ (cf. Rom 15:17-21).²⁰

Real, genuine biblical expectation of the approaching end does not grow lame, does not allow one to stand idly looking up to heaven, but instead draws our eyes directly to the world and its distress. So it was in the early communities; so it had already been for Jesus. We have seen that his proclamation of the reign of God (cf. chap. 2 above) was tied to the most intense expectation of the approaching end imaginable—namely, an expectation that was constantly being fulfilled “today.” That kind of expectation knows that it must act because it is about “now,” and because there is no time afterward. Every hour is then precious; the time must be used up entirely just because it has an end-time quality. Jesus’ purpose was nothing else but to gather Israel in view of the already approaching reign of God and to lead it to repentance.

Jesus’ disciples had experienced all that intimately; they had internalized it, and with the appearances of the Risen One it broke out in them anew. Their urgent expectation of the Parousia was therefore never pointed only to what was to come, but instead, just as in the mind of Jesus, always also to today. This is evident in their idea of the Holy Spirit and the sacraments. In earliest Christianity the Holy Spirit is certainly the beginning of the end time and the deposit on fulfillment, but at the same time that Spirit is the power of God for the new creation of the world. When the Spirit is received and given room in the church, the world will be created anew—toward its perfection.

The sacraments too are eschatological. That is evident in the Eucharist, which is characterized by the cry, “come, Lord Jesus!” and yet this very sacrament binds Christians together as brothers and sisters and so creates new community. Something similar is true of baptism. It is an eschatological sign; it seals one for the end, and yet precisely this sacrament obligates us to a new life in the world. Whoever has died with Christ in baptism is born into the new society of the church. The sacraments contain eschatological dynamite, and yet they are the place where the earliest church made real its present eschatology.

It is against this horizon of the coming of Christ, already being fulfilled and yet again and again delayed, that the anticipatory texts of the New Testament must be interpreted. Then the Easter expectation in Christian communities would mean anticipating that at every hour the Spirit of Christ will show the community new paths, expecting new doors to open at any moment, counting on it that at any hour the Spirit can transform evil into good, hoping at every hour that the impossible will become possible, and never saying “later!” but always “now!” Then the texts of expectation in the New Testament are not something embarrassing, something we need to be ashamed of, and also not something time-bound that we can leave behind us; instead, they are at the center of what it means to be Christian.