King Jesus: What does he do?
The gospel isn’t a description of how we are to live life if we are to get the best out of it. It isn’t even a set of instructions telling us how we’re to live to make sure we will have a good post-mortem experience. In fact, the gospel isn’t about us at all except as a direct consequence. It’s about God and about what he has done, is doing and will complete in Jesus whom God has made Lord of All.
The gospel isn’t a private message addressed to individuals who want to be wise and good and it isn’t the wise and mostly correct theological formulations we come up with though these are ways to get at the gospel and ways to give voice to it various facets. The word itself says it is good news—it’s always good news. It’s always “news” because, as William Willimon said, “It is not common knowledge, nor what nine out of ten average Americans [or Brits] already know. Gospel doesn't come naturally. It comes as Jesus.”
By the time the wise ones of the Western world in the 18th and 19th centuries had thrown out miracles, divinely guided history and insisted that all religion was the result of the evolution of man’s body and mind—by that time the Bible was hardly worth the paper and ink it takes to print it. But what were these wise people to do with Jesus Christ when they did all that? They knew they couldn’t simply dismiss him but they knew they couldn’t accept him as the NT presented him so with their new found self-confidence they got to work on the biblical witness. They carefully cleaned off the surface portrait they said the NT offered and came back to tell us that they’d found the true and original one underneath.
It turned out that the real Jesus was an ordinary but lovely human who taught very wise things and wanted us all to be nice to one another. Fancy that—the real Jesus turned out to be like themselves!
And his teaching, when all the myths and silly claims that his followers conjured up were thrown out, turned out to be the kind of thing that any intelligent and decent person could have agreed with. In fact, it was the kind of thing they would have jotted down on a note pad if they’d been asked how life should be lived. You know, treat others as you would like them to treat you; that sort of thing. Hmmm, well, whatever else that is it isn’t “gospel” and it isn’t what galvanized the early believers into taking on the world powers in a no-quarter-given war.
In Acts 2:23, 36 Peter told his listeners that God had made Jesus “Lord” despite the fact that they and their leaders tried to prevent it! (See Psalm 2 and Acts 4:23-28 for a development of that truth.) Later, faced with something like the Jewish Supreme Court, Peter and John wouldn’t give an inch and insisted that God had exalted Jesus and made him Prince and Saviour (Acts 4 & 5:30-32).
The “heralds,” whose job it was to publicly proclaim “good news,” proclaimed things they said were true and were good news whether the hearers liked them or not. The Priene Inscription makes that very clear when it speaks of the emperor Augustus.
Paulus Fabius Maximus proconsul of a Greek province wanted to honour Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. His birthday was celebrated on 23rd of September (the beginning of the civil year). The inscription (dated about 9 B.C.) reads,
“It is a day which we may justly count as equivalent to the beginning of everything...Whereas the Providence which has ordered the whole of our life, showing concern and zeal, has ordained the most perfect consummation for human life by giving to it Augustus, by filling him with virtue for doing the work of a benefactor among men, and by sending in him, as it were a saviour [soter] for us and those who come after us, to make war to cease, to create order everywhere...and whereas the birthday of the God [Augustus] was the beginning for the world of good news [euaggelion] that have come to men through him...Paulus Fabius Maximus, the proconsul of the province...has devised a way of honouring Augustus hitherto unknown to the Greeks, which is, that the reckoning of time for the course of human life should begin with his birth.”
The proconsul wasn’t saying that Augustus was a saviour if people believed on him and he wasn’t asking their opinion about the emperor. He was announcing that with the birthday of Augustus providence had given humanity a saviour, a peace-bringer, a benefactor and one who gave order to their lives. This he announced was “good news”; he wasn’t calling for a debate or agreement.
Peter insisted that Jesus was Lord before the Sannhedrin and told them it didn’t really make any difference to him what they thought about that matter (see Acts 4:19-20 and Acts 5:28-29). And when Paul entered the Roman city of Philippi (constituted an imperial province by Augustus himself) he said that God had made JESUS Lord (Philippians 2:5-11); it wasn’t an invitation—it was a counter-claim! Rome hung him on a cross as a failed rebel against Roman dominion (2:8) but God raised and exalted him to the place of “Lord” (kurios, a title claimed by the Caesars) above all kings and lords.
Paulus Fabius Maximus said the coming of Augustus was the beginning of “good news” for the world and Paul denied that, saying that the coming of Jesus was the beginning of good news for the world; Jesus was the true saviour, peace-bringer, benefactor and it is in Jesus that all things hold together (Colossians 1:17).
Whatever Westerners say when they or their loved ones are faced with serious disease and death or some calamity, in practice the Enlightenment view of Jesus seems to have the upper hand in our lives. Jesus lived way back then, was a nice person, wise in many ways like Buddha and has affected Western society in many good ways but he isn’t much help in the 21st century and the person who isn’t of much help to us (individually or nationally) can politely be sidelined.
Of course if he were doing something it would be difficult to confine him to little rented halls and run-down church-buildings where little handfuls of people gather in a ceaseless search for forgiveness for their sins. But what does he actually do? Even his “faithful” lament that their prayers are mostly unanswered. (Click here)
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
