Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

This is the precise point to which Jesus linked. He applied Isaiah 52:7-9, and the theology of the book of Isaiah as a whole, to his own present in a wholly personal way unique to him: he himself is the messenger of the good news; he himself proclaims it. And this message says that God’s royal reign is happening now, is coming now. This eschatological event that God is setting in motion and that is manifest in Jesus’ actions will gather and restore Israel. That Jesus simply applied to himself a text that spoke of God’s messenger of good news and the royal reign of God now manifesting itself assumes a breathtaking boldness.

5. One final observation about Isaiah 52:7-9: it is not a marginal text in Scripture to which Jesus refers and on the basis of which he speaks and acts. This is a central text because the creed that “God rules as king” constitutes the center of the Torah. After all, what is this solemn formula “God rules as king” all about? It is a clear reference to the first commandment of the Decalogue. What does that commandment say? “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod 20:3 // Deut 5:7). And the commentary on this commandment in Deuteronomy, the shema‘ Israel, says, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut 6:4-5).

And now comes the crucial point: the announcement of the present coming of the reign of God is the eschatological historicization and making present of what the first commandment of the Decalogue and its commentary in Deuteronomy 6 say. To put it another way: the proclamation of the reign of God coming now is the definitive historical realization of what has always been before Israel’s eyes and what it sought to live in the Torah: for Israel there can be only this one God and he must become Lord of one’s whole life, of every hour of the day, of all spheres of life.

How closely the royal reign of God and the great commandment (with its motif of God’s unity) belong together in the Old Testament is evident from the parallelism in Zechariah 14:9: “And the LORD will become king over all the earth; on that day the LORD will be one and his name one.” So Jesus, with his proclamation of the reign of God, makes the center of the Torah the center of his preaching. What Jesus proclaims is thus nothing other than the center of the Torah—an insight that is of the utmost importance for Christian-Jewish dialogue. It is, of course, true that this center of Torah is found in Jesus in a new, eschatological sense that overthrows everything else.

In Mark’s gospel this association between the first commandment and God’s reign is unmistakably set before our eyes: after a scribe has called the first commandment (together with the love commandment from Lev 19:18) the greatest of all commandments, Jesus says to him, “You are not far from the reign of God” (Mark 12:34).

Jesus must have had a sense, for us almost shocking, of who God is and what is the center of God’s will. It is a historical will: it is manifested in God’s actions in his people in the midst of this history. And Israel is called now to surrender itself totally to this will manifested in Jesus.

So what has our first sample shown us? It suggests that Jesus had a unique and genuine access to the Sacred Scriptures. He applies Isaiah 52:7-9 to himself and develops his proclamation of the reign of God out of this text. This in no way excludes the possibility that he also linked to the existing abstract term malkutha. It does not even deny that people in Israel had otherwise made use of Isaiah 52:7-9.¹⁰ But beyond all these caveats, Jesus was apparently in a position to read Scripture with new eyes and on the basis of a breathtaking claim.

Jesus and the State

The second sampling relates to the Our Father.¹¹ This prayer, which Jesus gave to his disciples as their very own, is one of the shortest and at the same time one of the most profound prayers in Christianity. It discloses, as does no other text, who Jesus was. Every petition in the Our Father is deeply grounded in the Old Testament. We have already seen that in the fourth chapter of this book, where we spoke of the first petition in the prayer, the so-called gathering petition. That plea draws on the theology of the book of Ezekiel.