ANew World

N. T. Wright

   The gospel which Jesus preached is a direct challenge to the power structures of this world. We do not often, perhaps, think of it like that. Children of our times as we are, we like to keep politics and religion in separate and watertight compartments. But try selling that line to a Jew of the first century. Or try selling it to a Roman emperor, for whom the worship of the national gods was a vital part of what constituted obedient allegiance to himself!
   Religion was woven tightly into the whole social fabric of the world, as it has been at almost all times and almost all places in human history, with only the last two centuries in certain parts of the Western world being exceptions, and even then the split is only skin deep. Result: challenge the religion, and you challenge the society. Summon people to a new allegiance to God, and you weaken their allegiance to Caesar. Or, as it may be, summon nationalist rebels to a new allegiance to God and you weaken their allegiance to the rebel cause, as they discover that their rebellion proceeded not from faith and trust but from fear and bruised arrogance. There you have, in a nutshell, the historical and political reasons why Jesus was crucified.

   So when we say that the gospel of Jesus posed a threat to the established power structures, we cannot imagine that he was simply offering an alternative political solution. He wasn't coming to propose a left-wing alternative to a right-wing government, or vice versa. He was offering a new world. Up until now, the world had been shared out among the rulers of the world. Caesar and his rivals had parceled the world out between them. And the Jewish nation had been getting more and more frustrated, waiting for God to step in and give them their place in the sun. And behind Caesar and his rivals, and behind the Jewish nationalism too, we hear a more sinister claim, made by an old acquaintance in the wilderness: "To you I will give all this authority and its glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will."

   When people make the state a god, they make it a demon. We see it all around us in our world, too, even though a good many people would mock the idea of there being actual demons. We, too, appeal to the "forces" of economics, of political theories; or, at a personal level, to the forces of aggression and sexuality; and increasingly people talk about such forces as if they are known to be things that it is pointless to resist. The pattern is that of paganism, even though in polite society we ignore the lunatic fringe of real pagans.

When Jesus dies as a failed, bizarre, nonpolitical political Messiah, Pilate embodies for a moment the apparent triumph of Satan over Jesus. "This is your hour," says Jesus to the soldiers in the garden. "This is your hour, and the power of darkness." Satan had offered Jesus the kingdoms of the world on one condition, that he fall down and worship him. Jesus had refused to do so and the cross is the direct result of that refusal. The kingdoms of the world reject him, and kill him. And not only Rome, either. There was no room for Jesus not only in the Roman empire of his day, but also in the official Judaism of the day.

    We must not imagine that when Jesus was put to death it was by second-rate religious nonsense and third-rate political ploys. It was Judaism and Rome that put Jesus on the Cross: the highest religion and the finest political and governmental system that the world of that time had ever seen.

   That tells us something very important about God's verdict on the whole of human affairs. But, beyond that, we can see that the whole life and ministry of Jesus has indeed been a battle with demons. Not just with the evil spirits who possessed poor lunatic souls whom Jesus set free, though they were real enough in their own way. No: the battle has been with the rulers of the world, the power structures who have organized themselves and their authority so that there is no room for God in the world. Jesus, then, has come not to offer yet one more political alternative but to break the stranglehold that the powers have on the world. He offers a new world, a world in which God is God and human beings are set free to be human beings.

   And what happens to him in consequence? The rulers of this world, acting out Satan's revenge upon this one who dares to raid the strong man's house and plunder his goods, strip him naked, and hold him up to contempt in public, dancing round him and celebrating their triumph over him: "You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself!" "What I have written, I have written." But it is at precisely this point that Satan has overreached himself: because the cross is, in point of fact, not the world's victory over Jesus, but Jesus' victory over the world.

   Here is the mystery, the secret, one might almost say the cunning, of the deep love of God: that it is bound to draw on to itself the hatred and pain and shame and anger and bitterness and rejection of the world, but to draw all those things on to itself is precisely the means, chosen from all eternity by the generous, loving God, by which to rid his world of the evils which have resulted from human abuse of God-given freedom.

   Listen to what St. Paul says, taking the brutal facts of the cross and turning them inside out: "God cancelled the bond which stood against us, with its legal demands: he set it aside, nailing it to the cross." That is to say: The world, and the rulers of the world, had you in their grip. Satan had you in his power, and you could not escape. But Jesus took that bondage upon himself: it is all there in the charge which was nailed over the cross, and in Pilate's cynical use of his authority: "What I have written, I have written." Jesus took it on himself; and, being the one person who had never, in fact, submitted to the rulers of the world, the one who all along had been free of them, who had lived as a free human being, obedient to God and lovingly sovereign over the world, he beat them at their own game. He stripped the rulers! He made a public example of them; God, in Christ, celebrated his triumph over the prince of this world.

this edition published 1995 through special arrangement with SPCK by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan.