Together

Thank you very much, and thank you all for turning out tonight. I, I'm delighted and surprised to see just how many have made time on a January evening, uh,

to, to, to come out to hear a lecture on the Gospels. And, uh, it's, it's a great pleasure to be in Bristol. I don't often come here, and this

is the first time I've even been inside this very famous church, so it was obviously long overdue that I should do that. And thank you for the welcome and

hospitality that folk at Trinity and elsewhere have been offering to Maggie and me. Um, I, I was, was relieved by that introduction. I told some people this story earlier

today, but it bears repetition. I was being introduced at a gathering about this large, if not larger, in Newcastle on Tyne in the summer, and the person doing the

intro had actually given me a copy of what he was gonna say, and I was following it, so I could see that his text didn't say what he actually

said. But he said, without batting an eyelid, that Tom Wright was born in Morpeth in Northumberland in 1848 and went on to study

... And the chap sitting next to me on the platform dug me in the ribs and saying, "You're looking quite well for your age." And so when I came

to the front and, and made my speech, I could only begin by misquoting Mark Twain and saying that the rumor of my birth had been greatly exaggerated.

Um, although there have been some people subsequently who, following on that rather cheeky remark reported from the Archbishop of Canterbury, have suggested that actually that's the reason why I've

written so many books, because I've had 162 years to write them in.

Um, but anyway, I am delighted to be here. And actually the reason I've written so many books is because if you have children and grandchildren who do the stuff

that my children and grandchildren do, then it takes all that writing just to stay in touch, so there we are, and one of them is happily in the front

row tonight, and I'm delighted. Anyway, it's wonderful to be here and to have a chance to talk about the Gospels and, uh, and what they're all about. W- And

it's rather a basic question really, but scholarly work on Jesus and the Gospels has spiraled out of control for many years, and there's ever-increasing specialization and ever-fattening commentaries, and

it's easy to lose sight of the forest when debating the number of leaves on one particular branch of one particular tree. That's the sort of thing scholars often like

to do. But there's a large and simple question which has crept up on me of late, and it surprises me that so much of the academy and so much

of the church has managed, in practice at least, to ignore it. And the question concerns the interconnection between two of the greatest themes of the New Testament, namely the

kingdom and the cross. I'm not touching here on questions to do with Jesus himself and what he actually said and meant. I've written a certain amount about that elsewhere.

I'm concerned with the canonical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, each of which, in its own way, makes a vital connection, a close connection between the kingdom and the

cross, which much subsequent Christian tradition, not least in the popular Christian cultures of our own day, seems largely to overlook. And my surprise is occasioned not least because this

ignoring of something central to scripture is characteristic today, not least of those elements which claim to take scripture itself very seriously. People today speak a lot, in some theological

and church circles at least, about the canon and the importance of canonical orthodox Christianity. That word canon and canonical readings is heard all over the place, sometimes apparently opposed

to historical reconstructions. "Oh, you're just reconstructing things with your funny old history, and we are taking the canon very seriously," I hear that quite often. And yet the point

I'm highlighting tonight is front and center in the canon itself, and it routinely goes unaddressed, even among those who speak about the canon of scripture and the need to

check historical speculation against the benchmarks of canonical orthodoxy. So here is my question.

From years of close acquaintance with various parts of the Western Christian tradition, both Catholic and Protestant, conservative and liberal, charismatic and social gospel, it seems to me that a

great gulf has been placed between kingdom and cross. But in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they go extremely closely together. They are indeed more or less defined in relation

to one another. And I have come to the view, which is a bit shocking, but which I don't think I'm overstating, that we have all been misreading the Gospels

one way or another, and that it's time that we stepped back and rubbed our eyes and had another look. In the first half of the lecture, I shall describe

the problem, and in the second, I shall show how the Gospels themselves address the issue before concluding with some wider reflections. So the problem, kingdom or cross. The problem

I perceive comes in two parts. First, a cross without a kingdom. Second, a kingdom without a cross. First, a cross without a kingdom.

There are many Christians in our day, and I know many of them, and there may be some here tonight, for whom it would have been quite sufficient if Jesus

of Nazareth had been born of a virgin, died on a cross, and then been raised three days later. Nothing between the cradle and the cross really seems to be

load-bearing for such people. It is enough that Jesus was the second person of the Trinity made flesh, shh-p, and that He died for our sins. Notoriously, of course, the

great Catholic creeds, the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed, make exactly this leap. Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, dead and buried, and then raised.

The early fathers spent massive energy defining what could and should be said about Jesus' divinity, but the only things that were officially said in their final collected statements in

the creeds about his kingdom or about the kingdom of God inaugurated by him were, first, that he was now seated at the right hand of the Father, and second,

following the mention of his second coming, that then his kingdom would have no end. Of course, many of the great fathers in the early church discussed the meaning of

the kingdom of God. Think of Irenaeus or think of Augustine's City of God. But when it came to official formulations, nothing. Now, whether the framers of the creeds intended

it like this, I don't know. That's not my topic tonight. But once the creeds were used not just as the church's washing line, you see, the creeds basically list

all the things that there were disputes about. When those disputes were settled, then that went in the creed so that we could know where we were. But once it

moved from being the church's washing line to being a teaching syllabus, a list of the key topics in which converts now had to be trained and instructed, it was

bound to look as though the kingdom of Jesus Christ was something that would simply come into being at the time of his return in glory to judge the living

and the dead. And though the mention of Jesus sitting at the Father's right hand ought to indicate his immediate executive sovereignty over the whole creation, we may suspect that

that mention was designed to say more about who Jesus was and is, his actual personal identity, than about what he's now doing or indeed what he was doing during

his public career. In other words, there is no sign at all in the great creeds of what the four gospels prima facie are eager to affirm, namely that if

Jesus was doing powerful deeds by the finger of God or the Spirit of God, then in some sense the kingdom of God had come upon them. The gospels are

trying to tell the story of how God became king on earth as in heaven, but that is not how they have been read when they have been read through

the filter of the creeds seen as a teaching aid rather than simply a list of settled controversies.

There is then a kingdom-shaped blank at the heart of the picture that many Christians have in mind when they think about Jesus or when they summarize the gospel. I've

sometimes asked clergy in study groups and so on what was going on when Matthew, Mark, Luke and John spent so much time telling their readers about all that stuff

in the middle, from Jesus' baptism right through to his trial. Stuff like the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the multiplication of loaves, the walking on water, and not

least the healings and the feastings with outcasts, with tax collectors and sinners. And when I've done this, and I've given clergy and others a chance to mull it over

and talk in groups and produce little scribbles as to what they thought it might be about, I've had an interesting but deeply unsatisfying range of answers. For some, Jesus

was simply teaching people about how to go to heaven. For others, Jesus is the great moral teacher on a par with Socrates or the Buddha or whoever. For others

again, Jesus came to warn against outward religion and to insist on the inward, a romantic low churchman born out of due time. For others again, Jesus is the great

example, showing us how to live, sometimes with the implication that genuine Christianity consists of trying to imitate him so that God will be pleased with you. In some of

these systems, we observe an interesting slide towards a moralistic religion which simply says, this is how you're to behave and don't worry about anything else. That may be one

reason among many why in the Protestant tradition some have been very suspicious of the Gospels. There's a lot that could be said about that. There's been a great deal

of writing of serious Protestants anxiously worried about how the Gospels can actually fit with the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. Jesus seems to think it really does matter

how you behave, how you're going to put that together with what Paul said, and so on. And a reaction to this comes in the more subtle readings in the

Reformed camp in which Jesus came to fulfil God's law so that from his store of personal righteousness God may reckon or impute that righteousness to those who believe. Well,

don't think you would have deduced that from the study of the Gospels alone. And in particular, many Western Christians have read the Gospels on the assumption that they were

really trying to reveal and display, on the one hand, Jesus' divinity and, on the other hand, his humanity, so that the powerful deeds which Jesus did functioned for such

people as signs of his divinity, whereas his hunger and sleep and suffering and tears and finally his death revealed his human nature. On this view, the Gospels were written

to provide, as it were, backup illustrations for the Chalcedonian definition of Jesus as fully divine, fully human. Actually, if you were going to want to use the Gospels in

some such way, it would be much more interesting to explore it the other way around and ask what we learn about God from the fact that he hungered and

wept and suffered and died and what we learn about human nature from the fact that in Jesus an obedient, prayerful human being did all that stuff. But that's another

story.

A more recent development which has taken hold in some conservative Christian circles as well as liberal ones is to see the Gospels simply as the backstory for the real

saving events, whose salvific force we know not through the Gospels themselves, except for odd hints, but through Paul and the other early Christians. I was chatting with an American

friend about this recently and he said thoughtfully, yes, for many Christians the Gospels function as the optional chips and dips that you have at the beginning of a dinner

party before you actually go and sit down and have the real meat course, which is of course Paul's doctrine of the cross. That is how many Christians regard them

and actually treat them and preach on them. They are bits and pieces from which you can draw interesting lessons, but ultimately it all comes back to Paul or to

Hebrews or whatever. An earlier liberal theology described the Gospels as, quote, passion narratives with extended introductions, unquote. And now a neoconservative theology, without realising that it is following Rudolf

Bultmann exactly, is saying, so I gather, that Jesus' earthly life and teaching is a historically bound pre-Pentecost affair and that the universal message of the Gospel begins with the

Spirit and finds full expression in Paul. And for this odd pair of positions, even the passion narratives themselves say very little about the salvific meaning of Jesus' death. They

may tell us how he came to be crucified, but it's Paul and the others who tell us why. Now, these viewpoints are not completely wrong, but they show no

interest in the main theme which the Gospels themselves put forward, namely the kingdom of God and the closely correlated theme of Jesus' messiahship. And hence they show no interest

either in the way in which this theme integrates with the flanking themes of Jesus' divine identity on the one hand and his saving death on the other, not to

mention his resurrection and ascension. But let's be quite clear. For the canonical Gospels, God's kingdom, as inaugurated by the Messiah Jesus, is central and vital and is intimately integrated

with the question of his death and its meaning. And if you hold a high theology of Scripture, you dare not ignore or marginalise this. But for the great tradition,

both in the creeds and in popular Western Christianity to this day, Jesus' messiahship is marginal. It is reduced to the word Christ as a proper name, and it is

shorn of its dimension of the great Israel story which it brings to fulfilment. God's kingdom, as inaugurated by Jesus the Messiah, likewise is marginal in much Christianity today and

is simply misunderstood in terms of going to heaven as though that's what the phrase kingdom of heaven and the phrase eternal life were referring to rather than, as is

quite clear in the Gospels, God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven and eternal life being the life of God's new age which is to break into the present

one. Likewise, that same kingdom theme has become detached both from Jesus' divinity and his salvific work. Something is seriously wrong here. Return for a moment to the idea of

the Gospels as passion narratives with extended introductions. That was never actually a neutral or historical or critical observation. It always reflected the unspoken assumption that the early Christians could

not or should not have been interested in those events for their own sake. That's why Luke has been accused by some of falsifying the Gospel by looking back to

historical events rather than on to God's future. And that's why, too, recently a high-profile conservative evangelical volume on the atonement managed to ignore the four Gospels more or less

entirely. These assumptions and positions are based foursquare on the mainstream Western presupposition that if Jesus has a kingdom, it is not of this world. It is detached from ordinary

space-time events. This has found particular expression in the Lutheran two kingdoms theology which stands behind a great deal of 20th century Gospel scholarship, but actually it's much more widely

spread among modern Western Christian movements in general. Just as a footnote on the kingdom being not of this world, in John's Gospel where that phrase comes, Jesus is in

conversation with Pilate and Jesus, what Jesus says is, my kingdom is not from this world. The old authorised version, which we are all doffing our caps at in this

year of its celebrated anniversary, says my kingdom is not of this world and that has been read in a dualistic fashion, that my kingdom is just somewhere else entirely.

This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through. But Pilate knows, and this is why he ends up having Jesus crucified, that Jesus is saying that his

kingdom has come from somewhere else, but that it is emphatically for this world.

Now of course the Lord's Prayer at the heart of the great tradition challenges all this. We pray that God's kingdom will come on earth as in heaven. That's the

point of Jesus' ministry. But this has been so different from the mainstream misreading that it's gone unnoticed and I suspect that generations of Christians have imagined that that kingdom

petition refers either to their own private circumstances only or simply to the second coming. But the Lord's Prayer does not, in fact, stand alone in resisting these reductions. It

meshes with the statement of the risen Jesus in Matthew, that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him. Jesus is now, this statement claims, in

charge on earth, having announced that program from the beginning and implemented it through His death and resurrection. And if someone were to say, "Ah, but that only began at

Easter," I remind you again of the famous saying that if Jesus was casting out demons by the finger or the Spirit of God, then God's kingdom had, in some

sense, already arrived.

So we thus have a reading of the Gospels in which all that material between Jesus' birth and His death is at best incidental. Nothing theological hinges on it. It

is not, as I said, load-bearing for these theological constructions. It provides, at best, second-order proofs or illustrations of truths that we might have come at by other means. And

that is the explicit, if surprising, position of some zealous would-be conservative Christians, as well as old-fashioned Bultmannian liberals. And the main message of the Gospels goes by unnoticed. So

what is this main message? Well, it's the Kingdom of God. But what does that mean?

Here my second strand of Western Christianity comes into play, a kingdom without a cross. If the first option is to skip from Jesus' birth to His death, the second

option is to concentrate on that bit in the middle precisely to the exclusion of the outer points. For many Christians, many in the Western world today, Jesus is the

great initiator and exemplar of social revolution. "Here," says Jesus, "is a different way to run the world. Watch me, copy me, follow me, and it'll start to happen." That

describes loosely the social gospel movement of the early 1900s, and indeed some of the productions of the so-called Jesus Seminar and associated movements in the 1990s. This highlighting of

a kingdom message, seen as a different way of ordering society, is at one level the heir of the 18th century protest spearheaded by Reimarus and others, whose Jesus was

a failed revolutionary. Jesus announced God's kingdom, He died without bringing it about, but His followers then neutralized His revolutionary message by translating it into a spiritual key. And part

of that new translation which Christianity offered, according to Reimarus, and indeed Schweitzer and many others, was the writing of Gospels in which the kingdom message of this powerful revolutionary

social doctrine was somehow radically transformed by being linked in with Jesus' death, with the cross. Those were originally, it was thought, antithetical, but now the Gospels had somehow managed

to scrunch them together. And part of the reason that that gained so much power was that most people had already been reading the Gospels with a great gulf fixed

between the inner Gospel narratives and the creedal framework, and it was then easy to switch from a cross without a kingdom to a kingdom without a cross.

So that the social gospel movement, cognate with Reimarus or Schweitzer, but with a pragmatic rather than a historical focus, couldn't see the point of Jesus' death. I'm reminded of,

you know, in one of C.S. Lewis's books, in The Great Divorce, there's that magnificent scene of a dialogue between the bishop who has come up on a day visit

from hell and the curate who has come down on a day visit from heaven to try to persuade him to come back up with him. This arch-liberal bishop explains

that, no, he can't possibly come with him, uh, because he's promised to give a paper at the Theological Society down there. And the paper is on growing up into

the full stature of Christ, and it's going to argue that had Jesus' life not been so cruelly cut short, He would, of course, have outgrown some of His early,

more angular ideas and arrived at something more like, well, more like Western liberalism. And this then has a spin-off in terms of understanding the cross. The bishop says, "One

feels for the first time what a waste it was. So much promise cut short." And the bishop then wanders off to take the bus back to hell, humming City

of God, How Broad and Far. It's one of Lewis's great scenes.

Now, the kingdom theology of the last 200 years has been hampered, in my view, by two things. First, people have assumed that whatever Jesus meant by God's kingdom, it

can't have had anything to do with His death. From this point of view, Calvary was at most the inevitable result of a revolutionary life. It merely validates the authenticity

of Jesus' message. Oh, well, if you preach that social revolution stuff, that's what's gonna happen to you, without adding anything to, to it or achieving anything in relation to

it. But second, recognizing that Jesus' message was, in some broad sense, political, sent thinkers and pragmatists in the wrong direction. They assumed that they could locate His political intentions

and aspirations on the theo-political map of their own day. Think of a parallel. Western salvation theology, as many of us now think, has erred by reading the New Testament

through the lens of the theological, spiritual, and pastoral questions of the 15th and 16th centuries. And we are now repenting of that and trying to retain the best of

that while reading Paul more carefully and accurately. But I now believe that the Western kingdom theology of the last 200 years has also erred by reading the New Testament

through the grid of the social and political questions and answers that were being offered in that great revolutionary century in the 18th century, when the French and American revolutions

and much else besides was going on. An obvious answer is the way in which recent writers like my good friend Don Crossan in America have assumed that if Jesus

or for that matter Paul seem to have shown themselves to be in favor of this or that aspect of today's liberal agenda, we can safely assume that they were

liberals all down the line, ticking all of today's boxes out on the left, and that any signs that they might have supported what appears to us a more conservative

line must be either misunderstandings or that wonderful catch-all of the scholars, the addition of later editors or redactors. Now some, of course, do it the other way around, assuming

Jesus was basically a conservative by today's standards and that he really ticked all our conservative boxes and all the liberal stuff is because somebody got it muddled up. This

is about as useful as arguing about whether Paul was really a Lutheran or really a Calvinist, which is about as useful as arguing about whether Paul went, um, by,

by, uh, 747 jet or Sea King helicopter when he eventually went from Jerusalem to Rome. Those weren't the options available at the time. Yes, Jesus announced the Kingdom of

God, but no, it didn't fit on today's left-right spectrums, or on the 18th century's for that matter. And as we all perhaps know, in America and Britain there are

different left-right spectrums, and on the Continent different ones again. You simply can't fit Jesus into our grid.

Not only has the discussion been bedeviled by the failure to get beyond that split-level world of the 18th century, the deism in which God was up there and we

were running the show down here, so what was the connection? That left the way clear for either an apolitical Jesus or, in reaction, a standard modern revolutionary. "Oh, well,

Jesus is actually doing stuff down here, so he must look like this." No. Jesus inhabited a world in which there were several possible and available political options, none of

them leaving God out of the equation. And Jesus seems, at least the four Gospels tell us that he seems, to have intentionally redefined them around himself and his vocation.

One of the most striking sayings in the Gospel tradition concerns the contrast between the way the kings of the earth managed their affairs and the way in which Jesus

was proposing to order things instead.

But at the level of the Gospels, we must say that the canon of Scripture ought to force those who claim to adhere to it to do two things. First,

to pay close attention to the political and social parameters of first-century Jewish thought within its larger Greco-Roman context. Second, to do their best to plot the ways in which

the Jesus of the Gospels seems to have charted a course which, in relation to those parameters, must be seen as subversive, affirming some parts, denying others, and transforming yet

others. Jesus, according to the Gospels, had his own variation, but it was a variation on the themes of his time, not of ours. So we are left contemplating a

theology of the cross that has detached itself from the kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, and a theology and practice of the kingdom that regards the cross as

an unfortunate and irrelevant accident. And yet Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John insist that the two go together. The kingdom of which their Jesus speaks came to an extraordinary but

emphatic climax on the cross, and the cross of which they speak means what it means within the context of that kingdom inauguration, that powerful royal proclamation. And though it

is certainly possible to read the great creeds in the light of the four Gospels, supplying from the Gospels the missing bits in the creeds, if you try it the

other way, as has long been traditional and is now explicitly advocated in some quarters, things become, to say the least, problematic.

This brings me to the second half of this lecture, to a sketch of some key highlights of an alternative proposal.

And I want to show how the four canonical evangelists, in their different ways, developed theological accounts of Jesus' kingdom inauguration and his crucifixion in which the two fitted perfectly

together. Begin with the bookends, Jesus' baptism and the title on the cross. For the Synoptic evangelists, the baptism is dramatic and decisive. When the voice from heaven says what

it says, "You are my beloved child. With you I am well pleased," the combination of echoes of Psalm 2 and Isaiah 42 indicate both the messianic nature of the

kingdom which Jesus will then announce and the fact that it will end in the sin-bearing work of the cross, à la Isaiah 53. Matthew emphasizes this, but of course

it's there too in the famous Mark 10:45, "The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many," and by implication in Luke's insistence that the

Messiah's death was in accordance with the Scriptures, "This was what the Messiah had to do and to suffer to enter his glory," and in Luke's explicit description of the

innocent Jesus dying the death for things of which everyone else was guilty.

When it comes to the title on the cross, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews," the context makes it clear that this should be seen as explicitly messianic, and

thus it is connected directly to the kingdom proclamation which Jesus has been making and implementing. And this, it appears, astonishingly, then as now, is how the kingdom was to

come, the kingdom of God which Jesus had been announcing and, as Messiah, inaugurating. This is obvious in the Synoptics, but John too is an explicit kingdom theologian. In fact,

if you want to know where I think the most dense and concentrated material for New Testament political theology is to be found, John 18 and 19, for my money,

is the place to go. Dense and detailed kingdom theology with Jesus and Pilate arguing about kingdom and truth and power, and with all that flows from that. And that

gives to the title when you get it in John 19, when Pilate has it written, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews," gives it a special and heightened irony,

coming as it does between the conclusion of that discussion, Pilate and Jesus, and the Jewish leaders as well. Jesus, for all four evangelists, is the true king whose kingdom

comes in a totally unexpected and radically counterintuitive fashion. It is folly to the Roman governor. It is a scandal to the Jewish leaders. And in all four gospels, there

is no drawing back from the meaning of the kingdom as the sovereign rule of Israel's God on Earth as in heaven, exercised as always intended through David's true son

and heir. The fact that the kingdom is redefined by the cross doesn't mean it isn't still the kingdom. And the fact that the cross is the kingdom-bringing event doesn't

mean it isn't still a horrible and brutal injustice on the one hand, and powerful, rescuing divine love on the other. Those meanings are brought dramatically together and held there.

That's the tough challenge which the gospels presented then and present now. This is on display in the scene in the middle of Matthew and Mark and Luke, namely the

confession of Jesus' messiahship at Caesarea Philippi and the consequent challenge to discipleship leading to the promise of the imminent kingdom. Here, as elsewhere, it is vital that we don't

short-circuit the messianic meaning of what Peter said, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God," in our quest for and our hurry for creedal affirmations about Jesus'

divinity. Don't misunderstand me. Yes, the four gospels do indeed affirm, often in subtle and profound ways, that Jesus is the embodiment of Israel's God come back at last to

rescue his people. Richard Hayes is currently writing a wonderful book, I've read some of its draft chapters, on the use of the Old Testament in the gospels. And it's

clear again and again that over against people who'd said, "Oh, well, during the gospels it doesn't seem as though Jesus is divine at all," actually the evangelists are telling

us in very subtle and sophisticated ways, "Oh, yes, he is, but it's the God of Israel we're talking about and not any other god." The phrase "Son of God"

doesn't mean when Peter says, "You're the Christ, the Son of the living God," you're the second person of the Trinity. It means you're Israel's Messiah. But we are then

led on beyond that.

Uh, we approach the fuller meaning through the messianic kingdom-bearing gateway, which is in fact the meaning, the gateway both to the meaning of Jesus' divinity and of his humanity.

There is a real danger, and has been in Western Christianity for a long time, that our proper emphasis on Jesus' divinity can actually obscure the gospel's emphasis on his

inauguration of God's kingdom. For the gospels, Jesus' divinity is his kingdom-bringing divinity. And what the gospels are eager to tell us is that the messianic kingdom which Jesus is

bringing will come through his suffering, and indeed through the suffering of his followers. But it is Jesus' suffering in particular, gradually revealed as unique and uniquely effective, that is

highlighted as the gospel narratives proceed. The key text of Mark 9:1 and parallels, "Some standing here who will not taste death till they see the kingdom of God come

with power," that's often been read as an unfulfilled prediction of the end of the world or something similar. It was not intended that way by the evangelists, I believe,

or their sources or traditions. Okay, that view that it's an unfulfilled prophecy of the end of the world has been axiomatic in much gospel scholarship for some generations. But

that's a classic example of trying to fit the court of the gospels into the pint pot of 18th century political and theological imagination. The Parousia-related reading, it's all about

Jesus' second coming, has of course been helped on its way by Matthew's version of the saying, "Some standing here will not taste death till they see the Son of

Man coming in his kingdom," on the basis of the normal but misguided assumption that the coming of the Son of Man referred to in the gospels is his downward

coming to Earth rather than, as in Daniel 7, the parent text, his upward coming to the Father in vindication. I said this in a lecture in Regent College, Vancouver

several years ago, and afterwards an angry young man came up to me and said, "In my Bible it says he's coming on the clouds, and you've just said he's

going." And I said, "Well, in the Greek it's a common on which could mean either going or coming." And he said, "Well, now I don't know whether I'm coming

or going." I completely-- I had just deconstructed his, one of his favorite texts. Well, have to wrestle with that. But this is about the vindication of Jesus After his

suffering, which vindication is the sign that God's kingdom actually, though strangely and paradoxically, is coming, has come on earth as in heaven? Oh, yes, there is still a future

dimension. Again, don't misunderstand me. There is still, of course, the wonderful hope set before us in Acts, in Paul, in Revelation, and so on. But don't for that reason

miss what the Gospels are actually saying.

All four Gospels believed that with his crucifixion, Jesus of Nazareth had been enthroned, however paradoxically, as Israel's Messiah, and that with that event, God had established his kingdom on

earth as in heaven. And they believed this, of course, because of Jesus' resurrection. Just as it was disbelief in Jesus' resurrection which made scholars from Reimarus to Bultmann and

on beyond assume that nothing really had happened, so there must be some great event still to come to which these sayings referred. And that scholarly mistake, on the one

hand, has fueled with dispensationalist speculation on the other to produce our present state of eschatological confusion. Let the reader understand that rather dense sentence.

Ask me about it afterwards if you want.

The four Gospels are well aware that this central contention about the kingdom's arrival was, as I've said, highly paradoxical in their own context. Then as now, a claim about

the presence of God's kingdom was likely to meet with the obvious rejoinder. Of course God's kingdom hasn't arrived. Just look out of the window. Just read the newspaper. See

what's going on in the world. But this isn't an argument against this reading. Indeed, it strengthens it, since we can see each of the evangelists in their own way

stressing that Jesus went about redefining God's kingdom, explaining that it wasn't going to be coming in the way people expected. And they stress, too, that Jesus' redefinition of the

kingdom always pointed precisely to his suffering and his death. Perhaps the most striking example of this is in Mark 10, 35 to 45, where you know what happens. James

and John come with the request, we want to sit at your right and your left when you come as king. They're thinking of an ordinary kingdom with themselves taking

the top jobs. Jesus says, don't you realize the kings of this earth lord it over their subjects and exercise dominion like that? It's not going to be like that

with you. And then he concludes with that ransom saying, which so far from being a detached saying about the atonement stuck on the end of a saying about something

else, as many have seen, both liberals and conservatives, that is actually the theologically and politically apposite climax to the whole train of thought. What we call atonement and what

we call kingdom redefinition belong together. The cross is the sharp edge of the kingdom redefinition, just as the kingdom in its redefined form is the ultimate meaning of the

cross. And here Mark and John say substantially the same thing. The Johannine portrait of Pilate's conversation with Jesus and the chief priests is one of the key passages, as

I said, in all New Testament political thought. And here John brings us near interpretatively as well as narratively to the meaning of the cross. In other words, he isn't

just telling you how it happened. He is telling you why. He's giving you the salvific meaning. The stories of the hearings and the trials are not just the backstory

to explain the mere historical shell of how Jesus got crucified. They address the question why from God's point of view. Learning to read the gospel stories this way may

be a novel art, but I suggest it's one we Western Christians should acquire as soon as possible. And John is a good place to start. The cross stands at

the heart of John's kingdom theology, which in chapters 18 and 19 is revealed as the heart and climax of his redemption theology. This is what it means that Jesus,

having loved his own who are in the world, loved them to the uttermost. Don't detach that, John 13.1, and use it in support of a purely spiritual meaning which

has no purchase on reality, just as you can't detach the political meaning from that revelation of the divine love. The two go together. And equally, the kingdom is central

to the meaning of the cross. You can't separate them in John. Gradually, inch by inch, in a narrative heavy with ironic kingdom theology, you discover the theological why of

the cross inside the historical how. As we should have realized all along, the lifting up of Jesus on the cross is his exaltation as the kingdom-bringing king of the

Jews, because the kingdom which is thus put into effect is the victory of God's love. Kingdom and cross in John fully joined. Now, it would be fatally easy for

us Westerners to sigh with relief at that point. Ah, we think, okay, God's kingdom is actually the sum total of all the souls who respond in faith to God's

love. That's what a lot of Western Christians have thought. And soul by soul and silently, its shining bounds increase. This is the other country I've heard of long ago

in that deeply flawed poem which we still find ourselves forced to sing from time to time.

It's just not what the New Testament is about. That isn't a real kingdom in space, time, and matter. People think, "Oh, well, it's a spiritual reality. It's not of

this world." John will not collude with that. John has got all those earlier passages about the ruler of this world being cast out, and condemned, and overthrown. Those references

appear to refer to a being which stands behind the present earthly rulers, but also incarnates itself in them. We are not, in other words, talking merely about a spiritual

victory which leaves present human rulers unaffected. For another thing, the resurrection scenes in John 20 and 21 are not about a heavenly existence detached from this world, but precisely

about new creation. I, I do hope you know this stuff when you read John. The famous cry, "It is finished," in John 19 matches the word, "It is finished,"

in Genesis 2:2. This is the sixth day of the week. This is the Friday God finished all the work that he had begun, and God rested on the seventh

day, the Sabbath. And then how does John begin chapter 20? "On the first day of the week, very early in the morning." This is about new creation. This is

not an escape from the creation into a Platonic disembodied heaven. This is about the renewal of creation. Mary is sent to tell the others that Jesus is now to

be enthroned. That doesn't mean Jesus is now going to be absent. It means Jesus is now taking control. Peter is told to go and feed and tend the flock.

This is how the kingdom which is from above is coming into this world. The work of redemption is complete. It is finished. Now the kingdom can come on Earth

as in heaven, and this is what it's gonna look like.

You find a very similar line in Matthew, find a very similar line in Mark, find a very similar line in Luke. The Messiah had to suffer and rise from

the dead. And as we learned in Luke's chapter four, this was so that the Jubilee vision, the kingdom vision which Jesus articulated in his so-called Nazareth Manifesto, could actually

come to birth. It wouldn't be a matter, as John the Baptist no doubt hoped it would be, of Jesus going around actually liberating political prisoners, including John, then and

there. That's part of the tension which we feel in the Gospel narrative. Rather, it was the result of Jesus accomplishing something through his death and resurrection which would generate

an entire new order of being that Jesus' followers would then have to bring to birth and instantiate in the power of his Spirit.

The four canonical Gospels thus demand to be read, I suggest, with their two main themes, kingdom and cross, fully and thoroughly integrated in a way which the great majority

of the modern Western Church at least has simply not noticed. Now, there are of course many historical examples of theologians who have actually tried to do what I'm talking

about. I was looking just recently at Martin Bucer's remarkable 16th century work on the kingdom, where he was determinedly resisting some of the spiritualizations that were going on and

wrestling with the real issues. But those have not been the strands which have come down into popular post-Enlightenment Western Christianity, whether conservative or liberal, whether Catholic or Protestant, whatever.

So that's the issue that we have to face. And I now want briefly and in conclusion to suggest some rather obvious reflections on the meaning of the two main

terms when thus combined, and, uh, we'll, we'll then wrap it up from there. So kingdom and cross in mutual interpretation, some remarks by way of conclusion. Three quick reflections

either way.

First, according to the Gospels, the kingdom truly was inaugurated by Jesus in his active public career between his baptism and his crucifixion. That entire narrative is the story of

how God became king in and through Jesus. Please note what follows. We in the West, perhaps ever since Chalcedon in the fifth century or even Nicaea in the fourth,

have read as main text what the Gospels treated as presupposition. In all four Gospels, Jesus is the incarnation, the embodiment of Israel's God, but that's not their main theme.

The main theme is that in and through Jesus, Israel's God reclaims his sovereign rule over Israel and the world. In musical terms, we have mistaken key for tune. The

key in which the Gospels are set is that of incarnational Christology, but the melody is that of the kingdom and of Christology in the much stricter sense of Jesus

as Messiah. And those whose catechism was based on the great creeds would never guess what their canonical scriptures were trying to tell them, that in the messianic life and

death of Jesus, Israel's God really did become king of the world. But second, this kingdom is radically defined in relation to Jesus' entire agenda of suffering leading to the

cross, and this draws the sting of any hint of what we might call triumphalism. Those who would implement Jesus' kingdom are just as prone to forget this as Peter

and the others were, trying to dissuade Jesus from his insistence on the suffering and dying vocation which, with which he had interpreted his Messiahship, and to push him towards

a kingdom vision much more like the kingdoms of the world. The paradox remains, and those who engage today in the work of the kingdom Know again and again that

the principalities and powers they are confronting are cruel, mean, and dirty. Martyrdom of one sort or another, suffering of one sort or another is what kingdom bringers must expect.

Here, by the way, is the Christian answer to the postmodern challenge. Our big story is not a power story, and if we've translated it into such, woe betide us.

Our big story is not designed to gain money or sex or power for ourselves, though those temptations will lie close at hand. It is a love story, God's love

story, operating through Jesus and then by the Spirit through Jesus' followers. That is why it remains so paradoxical. For us, when we say somebody is in charge, it means

basically they can send in the tanks and clean out the, the opposition. That is precisely what in the Gospels God is not doing and is setting his face against,

back to Mark 10 again, or indeed John 18 and 19. And this is how the church is to be built, against which the powers of hell, or for that

matter deconstruction, cannot prevail.

Thirdly, the kingdom which Jesus inaugurated, which is implemented through his cross, is emphatically for this world. The four Gospels together demand a complete reappraisal of the various avoidance tactics

Western Christianity has employed rather than face this challenge head-on. It simply won't do to line up the options, as is often done today, into either a form of Christendom

with a bit of a sneer, "Oh, that's so retro. It's so nostalgic. Want to turn the clock back to the day when everyone went to church," da, da, da,

da, dum. Or a form of sectarian withdrawal, "We're not gonna have anything to do with society. We're just gonna have a pure church over here." No, that is a

radically false alternative. Life is more complex and more interesting and more challenging than that, and the Gospels are there waiting to inform a new generation for holistic mis- mission

to embody and explain and advocate new ways of ordering communities and nations in the world.

So second then, the cross in relation to the kingdom. The way we have normally listed options of atonement theory, what the cross meant, simply won't do. Our questions have

been wrongly put because they haven't been about the kingdom. They have been about, how can I get saved to be away from the world instead of for the world?

The first point then is that whatever the cross achieves for individuals must be articulated within a vision of what it achieves in terms of the kingdom bringing victory of

God over all the forces of evil. This is the ultimate redefinition in action of the messianic task, the kingdom bringing messianic vocation. In all four Gospels, not only in

John, the king- the cross is the victory which overcomes the world. I am wary of describing this with the label Christus Victor because historically that has been associated with

other kinds of development and sometimes has been played off against other theories. But the idea of a messianic victory as a fresh interpretation of an ancient Jewish theme is

precisely what the four Gospels have in mind.

Second, seeing the cross in the light of the kingdom provides a fresh and helpful framework for understanding the vexed questions that surround what we have called substitutionary atonement, Jesus

in our place. I have argued elsewhere at length for Jesus' self-understanding in terms of Isaiah fifty-three, which gives you a high road into that substitution, wounded for our transgressions,

bruised for our iniquities. But the Gospels insist that Jesus is dying a penal death in place of the guilty, of guilty Israel, of guilty humankind, and that through his

death there will therefore come the jubilee event, the great redemption, freedom from debts of every kind. One of the fascinating things about living and worshiping in Scotland now is

finding myself saying, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." It's quite good for an English person to be reminded that that's an equally valid translation at that

point. That's what Jesus had announced, and that's what the kingdom looks like. And this makes the sense it makes, not by playing off Jesus as substitute against Jesus as

representative, as has often been done. But through Jesus' role as Israel's representative Messiah, he is able to stand in for Israel and hence for the world. And if you

de-Judaize this doctrine or de-historicize it, as is often done, you run the risk of the gross caricatures which have sadly been all too common in some evangelical preaching. To

ignore this massive narratival gospel scheme and then go hurrying on to Paul for a more abstract formulation is to marginalize the center of scripture and to misinterpret Paul as

well. Think of Philippians two, six to eleven, which on this reading functions more or less as a summary of what the Gospels are all about. Perhaps that is why

twentieth century Pauline scholarship has sometimes tried to split that passage off from the mainstream of the perceived Paul of Protestant imagination.

Thirdly and finally, if the cross is to be interpreted in terms of the coming of the kingdom on Earth as in heaven, centering on some kind of messianic victory

with some kind of substitution at its heart, making sense through some kind of representation, then the four Gospels leave us with the primary application of the cross, not in

terms of an abstract preaching about how you can go to heaven or how you can have your sins forgiven. Though, of course, please don't misunderstand me, sin remains enormously

important, and the cross as the remedy for it remains absolutely central. But rather that belongs within an agenda in which the forgiven people are put to work addressing the

evils of the world in the light of the victory of Calvary. Those who are put right with God through the cross are to be putting right people for the

world, constituted as the justified people who are the key agents in that latter project. And from this, there flows a new missiology, including an integrated political theology and the

new ecclesiology which will be necessary to support it, a community whose very heart will be forgiveness.

I suspect that this too is a point at which massive resistance will be encountered today for the same reason that the kingdom cross split happened in the first place,

but now with the added incentive of the implicit Enlightenment divide. Our culture, including much so-called Christian culture, doesn't want to know about this kingdom. It prefers a cross which

takes us safely away to another sphere. And the burden of my song is that to think like that is to be radically unfaithful to scripture, to the very heart

of scripture, to the four inspired books through which we encounter the Messiah, Jesus, the same yesterday, today, and forever.

So final paragraph. I hope I've said enough this evening to highlight what seemed to me an important and urgent question about how we read our central texts.

I have no doubt given plenty of hostages to fortune, and no doubt fortune will make good use of them. I confidently expect to see on somebody's website in the

next day or two, "Did you know what Bishop Tom Wright said the other day?" Well, we'll see. But as with Paul, so with the Gospels, it is not good

enough for a theology that claims to be Christian or indeed evangelical to content itself with traditional formulations, however true in themselves, however venerable their pedigree and helpful in pastoral

work. We must again and again return to the core texts themselves and be ready to be surprised by them and not presume that our traditions have said the last

word about them.

Scripture itself, in other words, is what matters. Don't listen to those who, in fear, urge us to avoid the uncertainties of historical exegesis and stick with the rule of

faith. The rule of faith itself urges us to go back to Jesus, the Jesus we know through those scriptures, who became historical flesh, through whom God became king, and

who in his risen bodily humanity already rules from the Father's right hand. Indeed, that fear of history may not be unrelated to the fear which prompted Peter to dissuade

Jesus from going to the cross. The mutual relationship between kingdom and cross may perhaps go all the way through at the epistemological and hermeneutical levels as well as the

theological ec- and exegetical, and as I've suggested, the spiritual and the political. We inhabit all of those worlds, and so do the Gospels, and it's time to bring them

all to bear in a fresh, integrated reading of the four converging stories of Jesus the kingdom bringer, Jesus the cross bearer, the Jesus whose kingdom is accomplished through the

cross, and whose cross sees him enthroned as Israel's Messiah and the world's true Lord.

You may recall that faced with the heightened papal claims of the 19th century, Cardinal Newman declared that he would drink to the pope, but to conscience first and to

the pope afterwards. Faced with today's heightened claims about the church's great tradition, I will drink to tradition, but to canon first and to tradition, including the creeds, afterwards, and

to Jesus himself first of all. Thank you.