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.
Immediately after his baptism, Jesus is led by the Spirit to re-enact Israel’s journey through the wilderness. He is not “tempted” by the “tempter” but “tested” (peirasthēnai) by the “tester” (ho peirazōn), just as God led Israel in the wilderness “so that he might distress you and test (ekpeirasēi) you and discern the things in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not” (Deut. 8:2 LXX). So when the devil suggests that Jesus should turn stones into bread to prove the validity of his new vocation, Jesus quotes from the continuation of this passage in Deuteronomy:
And he distressed you and let you hunger and fed you with manna with which your fathers were not acquainted in order to announce to you that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that goes out through the mouth of God man shall live. (Deut. 8:3; cf. Matt. 4:4)
It is the beginning of a long learning of obedience through stress-testing that would culminate in the anguished prayer in Gethsemane—at least, that seems to be what the writer to the Hebrews is getting at:
In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. (Heb. 5:7-8)
Then, following the arrest of John the Baptist, Jesus returns to Galilee. What did he do? He proclaimed the kingdom of God, he healed the sick, he cast out demons, and he taught in parables. And the key thing to note here is that the healings, exorcisms, and the obscurity of the parables were all signs of the coming kingdom of God.
The details are in the video, but I’ll give one example here.
Perhaps reflecting on his response to the accusation that he casts out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons (Matt. 12:22-29; cf. Lk. 11:14-26), Jesus tells a story about an “unclean spirit” which goes out of a person, wanders through “waterless places” finding no rest, and decides to go home. He finds the house swept and put in order, so he goes and brings “seven other spirits more evil than itself.” The result is that “the last state of that person is worse than the first” (Matt. 12:43-45).
I presume Jesus means a real “unclean spirit”—as real as any that he encounters in the Gospel story. But then it becomes a parable about Israel: “So also will it be with this evil generation.”
Jesus can only do so much. He can restore some Jews to their right mind as a sign of the wholeness of life that the people will experience in the age to come. But in the period leading up to the end of this age, the likelihood is that the nation will descend into a much greater chaos.
Josephus perhaps helps us understand what is going on. He tells the story of the suppression of an uprising led by an “Egyptian false prophet” by the procurator Felix (War 2:261-63; cf. Acts 21:38). But further mayhem ensues:
Now, when these were quieted, it happened, as it does in a diseased body, that another part was subject to an inflammation; for a company of deceivers and robbers got together, and persuaded the Jews to revolt, and exhorted them to assert their liberty, inflicting death on those that continued in obedience to the Roman government, and saying, that such as willingly chose slavery ought to be forced from such their desired inclinations; for they parted themselves into different bodies, and lay in wait up and down the country, and plundered the houses of the great men, and slew the men themselves, and set the villages on fire; and this till all Judea was filled with the effects of their madness. And thus the flame was every day more and more blown up, till it came to a direct war. (2:264-65)
It is this “madness” and violence in the name of freedom that will make the last state of the current evil and adulterous generation of Judeans so much worse than the situation confronted by Jesus in Galilee.
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