Chapter 2, part 2 (more on "the Challenge of the Kingdom")

Well, things are beginning to sound very familiar over here, because Wright says basically the same thing every preacher says every Sunday: Jesus was calling people to a new way of living, a life of love. It is also a bit disconcerting, because Wright embeds Jesus's teaching in the political climate of his--His?--day. The rest of chapter 2 talks about 2 things: first, Jesus is inviting people to join the Kingdom of Heaven by repenting--of their desire for political revolution and a Jewish return to power in their own nation, i think--and believing that Jesus's way of love and peace is the true way to spread the Kingdom. Kind of sounds a lot like hippies, actually. Second, Wright says that when Jesus warns the people that if they do not change their ways they, too, will come to a disastrous end, he's saying that unless they forsake their original idea of a Jewish supremacy Jerusalem will be destroyed (as in fact it was,  not too long afterward).

Here's the interesting part: Wright claims that while Jesus came to save the world at large,  he focused on the Jews and basically ignored the rest of us (he points to Jesus's line about many coming from the east and the west as his one mention of the gentiles). He writes, "[Jesus] seems to have been conscious of a vocation to focus his own work quite sharply on Israel; once his decisive work was done, then the kingdom-invitation would go out much wider, but the time was not yet" (48). I think this line, more than anything else in here, has given my imagination a picture of Jesus who existed in one particular point in history. I tend to think of him outside of time, with a far-seeing gaze that looked ahead to my life even as he walked by the Red Sea, but the idea that he was truly focused on the Jews makes his work seem very specific, intentional and focused on the life he lived rather than the lives that would follow. As if he was aware of his part in a grand scheme but also not really cognizant of how that would play out or what it entailed.