Jesus tells the disciples to choose a difficult road leading to life rather than an easy road leading to destruction. The basic question to be addressed here is this: Is this a choice exclusively for the community of his followers in the context of first century Judaism, or does Jesus have in mind a universal dilemma? We should also consider the possibility, of course, that Jesus intended both the historical and the universal frame of relevance.

Here is a good example of the sort of tight corner that a historical reading of New Testament eschatology can get us into. The Lord’s prayer is a central element in our formal and informal liturgies. We assume that it is timeless: we imagine that we pray it in the same way and for the same reasons that the first disciples prayed it. For example, I have been reading Scott McKnight’s The Jesus Creed. He regards the prayer as fundamentally an expression of Jesus’ core creed: to love God and to love others. This is an excellent thing to express, but I fear that it really misses the point of the prayer. McKnight recognizes that it is Jesus’ version of the Kaddish but he appears to have nothing to say about the significance of the obvious eschatological orientation of this Jewish prayer. There are numerous other ways in which the prayer is tied to - and potentially confined to - a narrative framework, but these are obscured by the traditional liturgical use of the prayer.

The beatitude is a common Jewish literary form, found widely in biblical and post-biblical writings. Essentially, it is an affirmation of those who have gained divine approval or of a way of life that will ensure divine approval: a man is blessed, for example, if he fears the Lord or delights in his law or does not walk in the way of the ungodly; a man is blessed ‘whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered’ (Ps. 32:1).

The announcement that Jesus will ‘save his people from their sins’ is followed immediately by the reference to the prophecy in Isaiah about a virgin or young woman who will bear a son whose name will be Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14).

Joseph is told by the angel that the boy will be called Jesus because ‘he will save his people from their sins’. We expect the Christmas story to have universal relevance, good news for all mankind, but the message here is only that Jesus will be Israel’s saviour: he will save his people. The reference to Israel’s ‘sins’ should also be understood in a quite specific eschatological sense. These are the sins that have placed the nation under judgment, the outcome of which will be political destruction if the nation qua nation does not repent. We should hear in the background passages such as Micah 3:8-12, not least because Micah has the prophecy about a ruler who will come from Bethlehem….

The Christmas stories have to do more with Jesus as Messiah than with the incarnation. There is no suggestion that only in this way could he be sinless, etc.; it is not taken as an argument for Jesus’ divinity. Rather the virgin birth is a ‘sign’ to Joseph (the reference to the prophecy occurs in the middle of the account of Joseph’s dream) of God’s involvement, just as the birth of the child in Is.7:14 is a sign to Ahaz of God’s presence with Israel.

This passage has traditionally been understood to describe an end-of-history coming of Jesus to take the church to heaven to be with God. It needs to be read, however, with a strong awareness of the historical setting, on the one hand, and of the nature of the prophetic language, on the other. If we take these two contextual elements into account, we hear Paul constructing a powerful and urgent narrative of hope for a community facing deadly opposition from the powers of Greek-Roman paganism.