This saying presupposes the threat to their lives that the disciples would face when they announced the coming of the reign of God to Israel (cf. Matt. 10:27). If they are killed by the Jewish authorities because of their witness, they have nothing more to fear because God will watch over them (12:6) and they will be vindicated when the Son of man receives the kingdom from the Ancient of Days (12:8-9).
The idea that Israel, as the servant of the Lord, would be a ‘light for the nations’ is found in Isaiah (42:6; 49:6; 60:3). The argument in these chapters is that YHWH will act justly with respect to his alienated people, delivering them from oppression, restoring them to wholeness, and by virtue of this act of salvation redeemed Israel will be a light to the nations. Their existence as a transformed community is a sign to the world that God is intervening to deliver his people from oppression, from the consequences of judgment, and to restore his servant Jacob. In narrative terms it is not so much what the disciples do that constitutes a light to the nations but what God does (cf. Is. 51:5 LXX).
In the context of Jesus’ address to the community of renewed Israel it makes more sense to translate gē as ‘land’ than ‘earth’. The issue here is the role of the disciples in the eschatological transition from second temple Judaism under judgment to a restored people of the Spirit.
An article by Holland Cotter in The New York Times (‘Collectives blurring the lines of who makes modern art’) got me thinking about what the phenomenon of ‘art collectives’ might teach us about the nature and purpose of the church. An art collective represents the sort of fusion of community, creativity and mission that I think the emerging church is struggling to understand and embody. The analogy needs to be handled with some care, but I have been intrigued by the possibilities that lie in thinking of the work of church as a distinctly postmodern artistic collaboration.
I have been reading with some considerable frustration An Emergent Manifesto of Hope, edited by Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones. The book describes itself on the back cover as:
a coming together of divergent voices into a collection of writings that will bring you the latest thinking of the emerging church. You will have a front-row seat as both established leaders and up-and-comers in this influential international movement grapple with how to be faithful Christians in today’s ever-changing cultural context.
The comment about the stone rejected by the builders and the preceding parable are addressed to the ‘chief priests and the elders of the people’ (21:23), who question his authority to enact (through the events of his arrival in Jerusalem) the judgment and restoration of Israel. The parable is directed against the tenants of the vineyard - that is, against those who were responsible for leading and caring for the people of God. The conclusion is that the owner of the vineyard will put the tenants to death and let out the vineyard to faithful tenants who will give the fruit of the vineyard to the owner. In other words, God will destroy the corrupt leadership of Israel and entrust his people to a new leadership that will give him what is rightfully his.
In a vigorous Fulcrum article entitled ‘The Cross and the Caricatures: a response to Robert Jenson, Jeffrey John, and a new volume entitled Pierced for Our Transgressions’, Tom Wright argues that in order to make sense of the idea of ‘penal substitution’ we must locate it
within the biblical world, the Old Testament world, within which the creator God, faced with a world in rebellion, chose Israel - Abraham and his family - as the means of putting everything right, and, when Israel itself had rebelled, promised to set that right as well and so to complete the purpose of putting humans right and thus setting the whole created order back the right way up.
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