Broken Signposts

How Christianity Makes Sense of the World

N. T. Wright

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780062564115
• eBook ISBN: 9780062564108
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito biblico

In this thoughtful follow-up to Simply Christian, today’s leading Bible scholar, Anglican bishop, and acclaimed author uses the Gospel of John to reveal how Christianity presents a compelling and relevant explanation for our world.

N. T. Wright argues that every world view must explain seven “signposts,” indicators inherent to humanity: Justice, Spirituality, Relationships, Beauty, Freedom, Truth, and Power. 

If we do not live up to these ideals, our societies and individual lives become unbalanced, creating anger and frustration—negative emotions that divide us from ourselves and from God, he contends. Using the Gospel of John as his source, Wright shows how Christianity defines each signpost and illuminates why we so often see them as being "broken" and unattainable. 

Drawing on the wisdom of the Gospels, Wright explains why these signposts are fractured and damaged and how Christianity provides the vision, guidance, and hope for making them whole once again, ultimately healing ourselves and our world. 

Chapter One

Justice

WE WERE HAVING DINNER WITH FRIENDS. THE HUSBAND is an academic colleague of mine, but since he lives on the other side of the world, we don’t meet that often. He and I were looking forward to chatting about many things—who was researching what, the latest theory on St. Paul, who should be the next professor at such-and-such a university, and so on. But the seating plan for the meal didn’t work out that way. Instead, my friend was seated next to my wife, whose interest in academic biblical studies ranks slightly lower than my interest in the biology of the earthworm.

He and she didn’t know one another that well. But almost at once he asked her what she was reading. And, from the other end of the table, I saw her face light up. She mentioned one crime writer, then another. Yes, he was reading them too! And within seconds they were exchanging comments, comparing favorites, and finally swapping email addresses.

What is it about crime novels? Some people have teased me that of course my wife likes crime novels because, being married to a bishop, she has had too close-up a view of the twisted side of life. Well, maybe. But I think there is more.

The thing about crime novels—and this isn’t rocket science, but it helps me understand what’s going on—is that justice is done in the end. The mystery is solved. The murderer is identified and, normally in the genre, apprehended, charged, and convicted. There is a collective sigh of relief. I don’t myself care for the grisly or gory bits in stories like that, but I can well understand the satisfaction of seeing everything put right at last.

It is a universal human longing. We all know that things are out of kilter: in the world, in my country, in your country, in my neighborhood and yours, in my family and perhaps in yours. If we were given a blank sheet of paper and asked to write down the names of people who had done something wrong to us, most of us wouldn’t have much difficulty filling the page. If we were honest, we might also be able to compile a list of people to whom we had done something wrong. And most of those wrongs go unaddressed. Like untreated wounds, they fester.

That is how wars start: long-term grievances, something not put right. The history of the twentieth century, in Europe in particular, is the story of how perceived injustices gnawed away at this or that nation or people until finally “something needed to be done.” Tragically, the “something” that was then done produced more grievances, more cascading effects. The “law of unintended consequences” kicked in, and the world is still wondering which of those “consequences” need now to be “put right” and which ones can be glossed over. When we look at the Middle East today, we only have to think of certain countries—Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, not to mention Israel and Palestine—to call up a list of perceived injustices stretching from Tripoli to Baghdad and back again.

And if that’s how it goes on the global scale (I haven’t even mentioned the two Koreas, or China and Taiwan, or the plight of Native Americans), it works just the same on the personal level—in families, on school playgrounds, and elsewhere. Many adults can still tell you the name of the class bully or the mean-spirited teacher who made their lives miserable when they were ten years old or even younger. Many families include siblings or cousins who are “not speaking,” because of something that happened years ago, perhaps decades.

The instinct for justice, in other words, runs deep. You don’t have to have a master’s degree in philosophical ethics to know what it’s all about. It’s a universal human sense: That isn’t right—something needs to be done to put it right.

We all know it. But we all find that “putting right” is difficult. The teacher may or may not be able to sort out the problem on the playground. Parents may or may not be able to reconcile squabbling siblings. Diplomats and peacemakers may be able to bring all parties together around a table and work out agreements, but often it doesn’t come off. Systems of “restorative justice” have been tried in some countries—notably New Zealand, building on elements in traditional Maori culture. That has been creative and positive. But many countries still have “justice systems” that, seen close up, are neither just nor systematic. Here is the problem. We all know justice matters, but we all find it difficult or sometimes downright impossible to achieve it.

In other words, we find that justice serves as a signpost pointing toward what is foundational or essential to our lives. At the same time we find that it is a broken signpost in that, no matter how hard we strive to live up to the ideal, we fail, often in ways that create more injustice. How do we explain this tension, lying as it does at the core of so many of our problems?

A God of Justice

Those who know John’s gospel well may think of it as a book about God’s love, an invitation to an intimate relationship with the Father, a promise of spiritual renewal. Well, it is all those things, as we shall see. But near its heart is a message about a world held to proper account at last:

This is the condemnation: that light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light, because what they were doing was evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light; people like that don’t come to the light, in case their deeds get shown up and reproved. But people who do the truth come to the light, so that it can become clear that what they have done had been done in God. (3:19–21)

So although many people know the famous verse in John 3:16 about how God “so loved the world” that he sent his Son to save it, they might not realize that this is followed almost immediately by this powerful statement about justice. God’s light will expose the evil deeds done in darkness. Justice is a manifestation of God’s love.

So the coming of God’s light and love into the world is all about God’s putting everything right in the end. It is about that final “passing of judgment” which, in the Jewish world, was the ultimate revelation of “justice”:

The father doesn’t judge anyone, you see; he has handed over all judgment to the son, so that everyone should honor the son just as they honor the father. Anyone who doesn’t honor the son doesn’t honor the father who sent him.

I’m telling you the solemn truth: anyone who hears my word, and believes in the one who sent me, has the life of God’s coming age. Such a person won’t come into judgment; they will have passed out of death into life. I’m telling you the solemn truth: the time is coming—in fact, it’s here already!—when the dead will hear the voice of God’s son, and those who hear it will live. You see, just as the father has life in himself, in the same way he has given the son the privilege of having life in himself. He has even given him authority to pass judgment, because he is the son of man. (5:22–27)

John’s gospel, then, depicts a God who cares deeply about justice. This point is fundamental: although we humans have within ourselves a strong echo of this longing for justice, in God himself that longing is complete and perfected. Part of the hope the Christian faith offers is the knowledge that God will not allow injustice to be the last word. That is a central element in the good news of the gospel.

It is vital, then, to remember that John’s gospel is a book about how the whole world is being put right at last. It is a book about justice. It tells the story of how the creator God himself is passionate about things being sorted out, straightened out. And it tells us what he has done to bring it about. Unless we read the book with this larger story in mind, we won’t understand the teaching about love and comfort that we are (rightly and properly) wanting and expecting.

That ultimate truth is important for us to remember as we encounter two dark realities in John’s gospel: the fact that Jesus himself is seemingly a victim of injustice, and the power of the Adversary to create and exacerbate injustice in this world.

Jesus Stands Accused

God’s promises of true justice do not go unchallenged. Indeed, as the gospel story moves forward, it becomes clear that Jesus himself is, in a sense, on trial—and that this is actually good news. Some of us in this life struggle with feelings of anger, even rage, at the injustices we have suffered. Maybe we have been falsely accused. Maybe we were physically or emotionally hurt by others. One of the most redemptive messages of Christianity is that Jesus himself suffered these kinds of injustices too. This may not seem like a particularly hopeful message at first glance, but it helps us understand in the end that God is on the side of the victim—especially when we see what happens next.

Accusations and threats mount up against Jesus from early on in the Gospel of John, particularly following his healing of the lame man on the Sabbath (5:18; 7:1). These are balanced by the regular summoning of “witnesses” to testify on Jesus’s behalf, including John the Baptist and then the Father himself (5:31–38). Things come to a head in chapters 7, 8, and 9 when Jesus’s accusers close in, declaring that he is demon-possessed (7:20) and a “deceiver,” that is, the kind of person Moses warned against in Deuteronomy, one leading the people astray (7:12). It’s in this setting that Jesus again insists that right judgment is vital and will take place on God’s terms:

Don’t judge by appearances! Judge with proper and right judgment! (7:24)

You are judging in merely human terms; I don’t judge anyone. But even if I do judge, my judgment is true, because I’m not a lone voice; I have on my side the father who sent me. (8:15–16)

Chapter 8 is all the more interesting because it opens with the strange little story of one particular “accusation,” the attempted stoning of a woman caught in the act of adultery (8:1–11). Among the many dimensions of the story—including the extraordinary sight of Jesus squatting down and writing with his finger in the dust—we find, in particular, the question of what justice will look like in this situation.

The crowd, cynically manipulating the woman’s perilous situation, is clearly hoping to frame a charge not so much against her, but against Jesus. Will he or won’t he uphold the law of Moses? But, in a dramatic anticipation of the eventual playing out of the whole gospel story, Jesus turns the tables on them. “Whichever of you is without sin,” he says, “should throw the first stone at her” (8:7). In other words, he is now accusing them—of both sin and hypocrisy. And they know it. They slink away, starting with the eldest. The question hangs in the air: “Where are they, woman? Hasn’t anybody condemned you?” (8:10) No one has done so, and neither will Jesus.

But that question comes back with a bang in the discourse that follows. Having failed to incriminate Jesus one way, they accuse him in another, even though all the real evidence is on his side:

“Even if I do give evidence about myself,” replied Jesus to them, “my evidence is true, because I know where I came from and where I’m going to. But you don’t know where I come from or where I’m going to. You are judging in merely human terms; I don’t judge anyone.”

Yes, thinks the reader; as in the story we just heard. But then he goes on:

“But even if I do judge, my judgment is true, because I’m not a lone voice; I have on my side the father who sent me.” (8:14–16)

The question Jesus asked the crowd about the woman now turns into a challenge: who is going to bring a charge of sin against him? (8:46). But they persist: Jesus must be demon-possessed (8:48, 52). By now we should see where this is going. John has transposed the question of justice, of ultimate judgment, into a different sphere. The term “the devil” in v. 44 looks back to the Hebrew term ha-satan, which means “the accuser,” and the irony of these middle chapters in the book is that the crowds who are trying to accuse Jesus—including accusing him of being demon-possessed!—are themselves doing the work of “accusation.” Hence the complexity, which will only finally be resolved at the end of the story.

At this stage what is clear is that the narrative is indeed addressing the larger question of justice, the longing of all humans that things should be put right in the end. But how? Jesus declares one more time that his whole mission is to sort things out, to clarify how everything stands:

“I came into the world for judgment,” said Jesus, “so that those who can’t see would see, and so that those who can see would become blind.” (9:39)

But what does this mean? And how will Jesus do this? Doesn’t “justice” imply that in the end all will see and understand, even if they don’t like it? And, in particular, how will the spiritual battle—since that is what is now increasingly being revealed as the real issue—be won and lost?

These questions are all interconnected. In part, the answer is, “Wait and see”—both in the sense that the drama will play out in Jesus’s own trial and execution and in the larger sense that those events themselves will precipitate a new world, a new way of being, which in the longer term will lead to the ultimate new creation. But before we can get there, we have to go deeper into the dark side of the story.

The Adversary

In the light of all that has been said, we should not be surprised when finally, in chapter 12, the real “adversary” is identified. In a passage to which we shall return more than once, Jesus points to “this world’s ruler” as the real culprit, the dark power behind the evil and death that has defaced and corrupted God’s good world. Justice will be done at last, but not on the basis of secondary causes and agents. If John’s gospel were some kind of crime novel, this would be where we would get a clear hint as to who the real villain is and how things are to be sorted out. This scene functions like a coup de théâtre, in which a director suddenly changes the lighting so that we see the real villain who had been standing in the background all along, knife poised, ready to strike.

Jesus, realizing that the moment has come, suddenly bursts out with a whole new theme. The dark power itself must be defeated if the world is to be rescued:

Now comes the judgment of this world! Now this world’s ruler is going to be thrown out! And when I’ve been lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself. (12:31–32)

This, at last, discloses how the real lawsuit now stands, how ultimate justice is going to be done. No wonder we humans can’t get it right: there are larger, more shadowy forces involved. This, in other words, is not just a story about human justice. It isn’t even about creation being put right, though it is that as well. It is about a dark power, a power without a real name because it is the power of anticreation. It is “the world’s ruler.” What has happened? How does it all fit together?

Humans have worshipped idols, and the idols have taken over. The dark force, the accuser, “the satan,” the shadowy one that brings death itself, stands behind all the injustice and wickedness in the world. John is telling us that the story of Jesus—of Jesus on trial, with the witnesses lining up to give evidence and the plotters plotting against him—is the story of how the moment of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Seven Signposts
• 1: Justice
• 2: Love
• 3: Spirituality
• 4: Beauty
• 5: Freedom
• 6: Truth
• 7: Power
• Conclusion: Mending the Broken Signposts
• Scripture Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher