Transposing Jesus

When I read the New Testament lately I'm pretty amazed by how impassioned all of it is; sometimes to the point of irrationality.  I'm also amazed by how divergent the interests of the authors are.  I get the vague impression that there are a lot of people trying to grab the reigns of a movement that has become more powerful than anyone originally thought it would.  

There's something in this story that grabs everyone, which could conversely be argued that there's something in everyone who grabs hold of this story.

Most of the theology I've read the last few months has elucidated the fact that everyone writing the NT had a different idea as to the role that Jesus filled.  This gets really convoluted particularly in the Gospels where the authors are editing together a wide variety of traditions trying to make a coherent narrative.  I've found it invaluable lately to remind myself that all of the NT is rhetorical:  meaning the entire purpose behind their writing is to persuade the reader.  There is no impartial reporting anywhere.  Even in Acts, which has the most "historical" quality, every word is written like a sermon, trying to inspire us to live differently.

One funny thing is that all the acclamations given to Jesus in the NT are pre-existing ideas.  Terms like Son of God, Messiah, Son of Man are all Jewish concepts which had a rich history of meaning long before Jesus came on to the scene.  We often speak anachronistically as though these were vacant terms with no figure to fill them until Jesus came, but this is quite far from the truth.  People who spoke of these concepts were not idly waiting for Jesus to come and fulfill their expectation, and when Jesus did come, not all accepted the notion that he did fulfill them.  I find that to be extremely significant.

I think Christians all to often assume some self-righteous indignation that Jews won't accept Jesus as Messiah, or that both they and Muslims will not acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God.  In this I think we grossly misunderstand what the NT is doing.  Jews, both in Jesus' time and contemporarily, don't claim Jesus as Messiah, because he wasn't.  Jesus did not restore the glory of Israel.  He did not drive out the Roman oppressors.  And, as evidenced by the extreme prevalence of sin and oppression the coming age of the Kingdom of God is not here in it's fullness.  When Jews deny Jesus as the Son of God, they do so because they are making a blatant observation.   The Messiah was a concept that existed before Jesus, and it bore a variety of expectations which Jesus did not meet.  For them to deny Jesus as Messiah is not an insult to him, but a simple statement of fact.

I think at its core, the heart of the New Testament is not to demand in an absolute sense that Jesus adequately fulfilled the "vacant" concepts which awaited him.  He didn't.  And, I think we have to respect people who call that to our attention.  The simple fact is that the concepts weren't nearly as vacant as we would like to assume, and insofar as the were, Jesus did a poor job of filling them.  Instead at its core, I believe the New Testament is calling us to alter our expectations in light of the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus does not fulfill all our expectations, but instead, his person radically challenges us to reframe our hopes.  

I believe the NT's way of doing this is transposing the person of Jesus onto the pre-existing concepts that were prevalent in society of that time.  

The NT uses a brilliant irony, and contrasts what was hoped of the Torah, the coming Messiah or Son of Man, Caesar, etc.  and places Jesus under those titles, or in their place.  Where the Caesar/King would ride into a city on a stallion, Jesus comes in on a donkey.  Where the Torah was assumed to be the truth and the life of the Jewish people, we hear Jesus shouting to a crowd that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  I think historians I fully justified in questioning whether such a speech ever happened; I wonder myself.  But the facts are not the point.  The point is that our expectations that we will be liberated by law are void.  Hope is found in self-sacrifice and graciousness, which we have seen in Jesus.  When we hear Peter claiming "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God", and Jesus replies that on that confession the Church will be founded, I think we can rest assured that such a dialogue never happened.  It seems highly likely that Jesus never uttered the word "church".  Yet, a member of a church that knows the end of the story in advance could readily discern the irony that Jesus was the Christ, and would readily affirm that this paradox is the foundation of all the Church is.  

The Church rests on the transposition of Jesus of Nazareth on the concept of Christ.  We often hear that the Jews were expecting the "wrong kind of Christ".  This is silly statement since they were the ones who created the concept.  They were expecting no other kind of Christ than the one they had expected all along.  But this is where the beautiful humor Christianity becomes apparent.  Jesus' followers took what everyone was expecting and claimed that "this Jesus whom you crucified is he."  This stark contrast of expectations against a new claim of virtue is the rhetoric which the whole Christian message is built on.  

At the heart of it all is not an objective confession, but an ironic proclamation which admits a radical alteration of values.