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.
Discussing Robert P. Jones’ book Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, David Smith writes in the Guardian:
Faced with shrinking numbers and cultural marginalisation, white evangelicalism embraced not spiritual renewal, but existential panic—creating fertile ground for Trump’s demagoguery.
That’s probably true, one way or another, for a lot of churches and Christian demographics in the West. The demagogues may change; there are more of them inside the church, I suspect, than outside. But the failure remains the same.
So how do we get from there to Jesus? I went this way.
We have a classic account of “spiritual renewal” in 2 Peter 2:1-10—the rebuilding of a credible priesthood for the living God among the nations in anticipation of a day when Jesus Christ would be revealed to all.
There is repeated reference to a controversial “stone” in the passage, derived from three Old Testament passages: a stone placed by God in Jerusalem, the criterion by which Israel will be judged (1 Pet. 2:6; cf. Is. 28:16); a stone rejected by the builders, which has become the cornerstone (2:7; cf. Ps. 118:22); and a stone of stumbling and offence that will prove the downfall of many in Jerusalem (2:8; cf. Is. 8:14-15).
In the letter, of course, these different stones are Jesus, who suffered violence at the hands of a régime that had lost its way: it is the sin of first century Israel that is brought sharply into focus by the quotations from the scriptures.
So the point I make is that the antidote to existential panic, then and now, is not the familiar Jesus of our various modern pieties but the historical Jesus. This is the story that needs to be told—all the way through.
We begin with his baptism (the birth stories can wait till the end of the year), where he deliberately identifies with a movement of national renewal and reform.
The template for the baptism, I think, is the presentation of the servant of YHWH:
Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. (Is. 42:1)
Jesus has been endowed with the Spirit at a time of national crisis to fulfil the purposes of YHWH. God takes great delight in him, is “well pleased” with him, but at the baptism the servant Jesus is the “Son”—the mightier one whose sandals John is not worthy to carry (Matt. 3:11).
It is the story of the baptism, it is the story of Jesus’ retelling of Isaiah’s parable of the vineyard (Is. 5:1-7; Matt 21:33-41). The master of the vineyard sends a stream of slaves—the prophets—to get the fruit of righteousness, and the tenants maltreat and kill them. So he sends his Son to do the work of a servant in the hope that he will command respect.
Sadly not.
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