We’ve spent quite a few weeks at Westbourne Grove Church looking at the troubled and changing world in which we now serve the living, creator God. No doubt we will come back to some of those themes, but we now turn to consider the significance of Jesus—and of the New Testament story about him—in all of this. So we ask: Why Jesus?
What follows is not a transcript of the teaching, just a brief overview.
The little book Why Jesus? is part of the materials for the Alpha Course. In it, Nicky Gumbel writes:
Jesus is the only man who has ever chosen to be born, and he is one of the few who has chosen to die. He said that the entire reason for his coming was to die for us. He came ‘to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45).
To say that Jesus is “the only man who has ever chosen to be born” is faintly ridiculous even on high christological terms. The only possible New Testament support for it is the idea expressed in Philippians 2:6 that he did not grasp at a certain type of being equal to God or a god, my views on which can be found here.
And why follow such an extravagant theological claim with the admission that his choice of death was not exceptional? He is merely “one of the few who has chosen to die.” Borderline bathos, surely—“an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous” (ODE)?
But that’s not my concern here. It’s the contention that the “entire reason for his coming was to die for us” and the citation Mark 10:45 in support.
It is, of course, the standard “evangelical” argument, though perhaps more baldly stated than usual. But it is not what is said about Jesus in the New Testament. The too familiar Jesus of modern evangelical piety and evangelism is not the unfamiliar, historical Jesus to whom the New Testament documents bear witness.
This is one of a number of, I suppose, systemic problems that we face as we try to re-present Jesus to the world today.
Paul writes:
When the fulness of the time came, God sent out his Son—having been from a woman, having been under Law—in order that he might redeem those under the Law, in order that we might receive the adoption as sons. (Gal. 4:4-5*)
The expression “fulness of time,” I think, refers to a critical moment in the history of God’s people. God sent his Son, as he had sent the prophets before him, to redeem those under the Law of Moses—that is, first century Israel—before it was too late. Or as Paul says in Romans 15:8, “Christ became a servant to the circumcised….” That is the “entire reason” for his coming or being sent.
The saying about a ransom in Mark 10:45 has the same context.
The narrative setting has to do with the establishment of a messianic kingdom: those who suffer will rule over Israel amidst the nations (Mk. 10:35-44; cf. Matt. 19:28; Lk. 22:30); and Jesus is subsequently acclaimed as the Son of David who will rule in the coming kingdom (10:46-11:10).
His suffering is for the sake of that kingdom. That’s what the texts say.
If the “ransom for many” saying alludes to Isaiah’s suffering servant, the same historical template obtains. On the one hand, the Son of Man is not the human Jesus but suffering righteous Israel. On the other, the servant was stricken because of the transgression of a particular generation of Judeans (Is. 53:8) and “bore the sin of many” in Israel (53:12).
There is no justification for Gumbel’s flagrant decontextualisation of Jesus’ words.
There is only one Jesus. We need a familiar, popular Jesus for the religious life of the church—so we will be running a low-key Alpha course at Westbourne Grove Church over the coming weeks. But we also urgently need the unfamiliar, historical Jesus of the New Testament. The challenge for “discipleship” in the longer term is to refocus these two images into a single person, as far as possible. Tricky, but doable, I think.
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