Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

To continue listing texts would be no problem. It is superfluous to ask whether each one of these sayings is authentic, because the relevant logia run throughout the gospels and belong to very different genres and situations. There are “I have come” sayings that are by no means retrospective summaries of the life of Jesus but have the sense of “it is my task to.…” There are the antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount, formulated with shocking authority,¹⁹ in which Jesus places himself in the stead of the one who formerly gave the Torah at Sinai. There are the discipleship sayings in which Jesus does not urge his disciples to study Torah or grow in the love of God but to abandon everything, even father and mother, spouse and children, to follow him.

There are the sayings in which he sends out his disciples, the words of command to the demons, the amen-sayings that replace the way the prophets introduced their message and themselves as messengers, and above all the sayings in which he inextricably links the decision of the final judgment to the decision about his own person—still more, in which he presents himself, though reticently and in code, as the end-time judge.

For Christians who hear the Gospel every Sunday this “I” of Jesus is a matter of course. But in reality it is anything but. Why? Because the center of Jesus’ message is not his own self. The heart, the center that dominates all of his preaching and his whole doing is the reign of God. And, as has already been made clear (chap. 11), the proclamation of the reign of God is nothing but the end-time realization of the primary commandment, namely, that Israel is to love its God as the only God, with its whole heart, soul, and strength. This one, this only God will now be master in Israel and, through Israel, in the whole world. So Jesus’ message is not at all his own person. His entire, his sole concern is God the Father, the One, the Only. He corrected someone who addressed him as “Good Teacher” by saying, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18). Thus God, the one, the absolute Lord, is the center of Jesus’ message, and for that very reason it is so appalling that Jesus unceasingly connects this One and his rule with his own person. This is the real stumbling block, then and now. It was because of that scandal that Jesus was brought to the cross. Many pious people, and especially the religious authorities in Israel, could not bear to hear that claim. Today also there are many who cannot stand to listen to this elementary link between God and a Jesus who spoke and acted as if he stood in God’s stead and as if God were coming to his people in Jesus himself.

Consequently, Jesus has been made a simple rabbi, a Jewish Socrates, or an itinerant Galilean philosopher who spoke about God with infinitely wise words. Or people have overlooked his message about the reign of God and made of him only a preacher of himself. Neither does justice to the historical record. Jesus’ radical proclamation of the reign of God contains an implicit Christology.

And it is not just his message; it is his actions as well. It is his coolness in authoritatively pronouncing the forgiveness of sins, when it is only God who can forgive sins.²⁰ It is the claim that underlies the fact that he appoints the Twelve as a sign of the gathering of Israel, though in the Old Testament and in many Jewish prayers that gathering is predicated of God: “…who gathers the dispersed of Israel.” It is his deeds of power, the driving out of the demons of society and the many healing miracles along the way. He saw them as the works of God, and yet he accomplished them by his own power.

There was the messianic entrance into Jerusalem, the almost matter-of-fact taking possession of the temple, and the words of interpretation at the last meal, in which Jesus authoritatively declared his blood, now to be shed, to be “the blood of the covenant,” that is, the blood of the renewal and completion of the covenant God had once made with Israel (cf. chap. 15). And then, above all, there is the acknowledgment before the Sanhedrin that he, Jesus himself, will come again and judge his accusers. At this point, at the very end, the Christology implicit throughout his activity is unveiled and becomes public.