God So Loved the World: Clues to Our Transcendent Destiny from the Revelation of Jesus: 3 (Happiness, Suffering, and Transcendence) by Robert J. Spitzer

Author:Robert J. Spitzer [Spitzer, Robert J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781681497013
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2016-03-28T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Jesus’ Identity and Mission

Introduction

We concluded the previous chapter with the following question: Did Jesus really claim to be “God with us”? The short answer is yes, but He did so explicitly only with His disciples and closest friends. When He is with the crowds and religious authorities, He speaks implicitly and cryptically.

Some readers familiar with New Testament scholarship will know that Jesus did not proclaim to general audiences that He was “the Son of God”1 or “the Lord”2 or “God with us” in an explicit way. These were titles given to Him by the apostolic Church shortly after His Resurrection and gift of the Spirit.3 Why didn’t Jesus come out to the crowds and clearly state “I am the Lord” or “I am the Son of God”? As the reader may already know, such a proclamation would have brought opprobrium upon Him, putting a premature end to His ministry and mission. The crowds would have been shocked (and probably repulsed), because they were looking for a Messiah (the anointed one of God), but had no expectation that the Lord Himself (the Son of God) would be the Messiah. Without Jesus’ Crucifixion, Resurrection in glory, and gift of the Spirit, the extraordinary nature of the “good news” would not have been easily understood. The shocked reaction of Jesus’ general audience would have been considerably less than that of the religious authorities. They would have found His blasphemous claim to deserve not only contempt and ostracization (undermining His ministry), but also condemnation and possibly death. Since Jesus did not want to bring His ministry to a premature end, He waited until the appointed time to openly expose His relationship to God the Father.

Jesus chose the “appointed time” to be at His trial, where He expressed the significance of His impending self-sacrifice. At this point, no part of His ministry would come to a premature end, because He knew He was about to be executed, and so He had nothing to lose by announcing that He is the preexistent judge of the world sent by God to initiate the new age. This announcement conveyed His conviction that He would fulfill the mission reserved by Israel to Yahweh alone, revealing not only His Messiahship, but His exclusive Sonship with God (see below, Section II). When the high priest asks, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” He responds with an unambiguous, “I am; and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mk 14:62).

Wright believes that this unambiguous declaration is essentially historical. Jesus’ response to the questions of the interrogators led them to believe that He not only had messianic but divine “pretensions”, worthy of a charge of blasphemy. This charge in Jewish legal proceedings seems to have been wholly original and was apparently formulated specifically to address Jesus’ response to His interrogators. According to N. T. Wright: “Since we have no evidence of anyone before or after

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