By David Gushee
Reading Advent scriptures this year, I am struck more powerfully than ever at the unfulfilled or only very partially fulfilled nature of the expectations, promises and statements made about the Child soon to be born:
Luke 1:17: the son to be born to Zechariah and Elizabeth will “make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” But the Jewish people as a whole were not made ready. Only a small number believed in Jesus.
Luke 1:32-33: the child to be born to Mary will “reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” But this Child never became the king of the Jewish people. And the Jewish understanding of Davidic or Israelite kingship had to be radically reconfigured to understand Jesus as the fulfillment of the hope of an eternal king for Israel. Most Jews could not make that leap.
Luke 1:71: The mighty savior coming will “save [us] from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.” But Jesus did not save Israel from Rome or other national enemies, and Jerusalem was desecrated and decimated by the Romans a generation later.
Teaching through Luke-Acts over the last two years at church, it has become increasingly clear to me that whatever varieties of eschatological hope existed among the Jewish people in the early first century, the career of Jesus simply did not match them. This has long been recognized by Jews, such as one of my own mentors, Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who wrote:
“Was Jesus the fulfillment of the biblical hope for a messiah? To the overwhelming majority of Jews, then and now, who understood ultimate redemption to include the political, economic, and social liberation of humanity …the answer to this question was clearly no…. Given the facts on the ground, this person was no messiah.”
Christians who embrace a kingdom-of-God theology, like myself, face the problem all the more acutely. We have purposefully sought to understand Jesus’ life and ministry within the context of first century Palestinian Judaism, and therefore to understand his proclamation of the kingdom of God to have decidedly this-worldly implications. Glen Stassen and I have by now taught a decade’s worth of students that when “Jesus came preaching the kingdom,” he meant a transformed world characterized by justice, peace, deliverance, healing and so on.
We can point to these themes in his message, and these realities can be glimpsed in his ministry. It can be shown that Jesus did advance justice, peace, deliverance, healing and restoration of true community in how he conducted his ministry. But Rabbi Greenberg is right that he certainly did not bring into existence either an Israel or a world characterized by “political, economic and social liberation.”
A strong kingdom theology together with a still unredeemed world places a great deal of ethical pressure on the church to be able to point to glimpses of kingdom breakthroughs in the world or, alternatively, to be able to point to the church itself as embodiment of the kingdom.
The first strategy has proven susceptible to confusion or worse (American democracy as sign of the kingdom, peace treaty between Egypt and Israel as sign of the kingdom, etc.) The latter often leads to deep disillusionment whenever the church fails to be even minimally what God has called it to be, as is far too often the case.
I will turn 50 in 2012. A friend tells me that is about the age that youthful optimism is no longer sustainable. Those doleful words come with an interesting warning about the limits of a this-worldly eschatology with a transformationist bent.
I guess I can say that I have seen enough church and enough world by now to no longer nurture the hope of more than occasional glimpses of transformation in either.
Contrasting the exalted hopes of Luke 1 and kingdom theology with the stubbornly recalcitrant human condition drives me, at least, back to a fresh appreciation of classic Christian understandings of Cross and Resurrection, and of the message that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God..[and] are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans. 3:23-24).
What is my hope at Advent? “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means God is with us” (Matthew 1:23). The last word is God’s gracious, suffering love.