God So Loved the World

A Christology for Disciples

Jonathan R. Wilson

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780801022777
• eBook ISBN: 9781441231550
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Explores how Jesus Christ demonstrates the love of God in the stories, images, and practices of the New Testament.

INTRODUCTION

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). This verse summarizes a story. Sometimes a story summary is all we need. Especially in our culture, we are used to others summarizing a story for us. “Get to the point!” we exclaim. But often the story itself is the point. Imagine how impoverished our understanding and our lives would be if, rather than reading Romeo and Juliet, we simply skimmed a one-paragraph summary:

Boy and girl meet. Boy and girl fall in love. Parents hate each other. Boy and girl still love each other. Parents object. Boy and girl disobey parents. Boy dies. Girl dies.

The same is even more true of the good news of Jesus Christ. We don’t need a plot summary; we need to know the story.

Indeed, we need to learn the story so well that we live in the story. Perhaps you know a child who was so taken with a fairy tale that she lived out that fairy tale and assigned everyone in her life a role in it. As long as this fairy-tale living doesn’t go on for too long or become too obtrusive, we are amused and entertained by it.

Like a child with a fairy tale, we need to become so immersed in the gospel story that we are continually living it out in our lives. However, just at this point we need to recognize that the gospel of Jesus Christ is a story—but it is not a fairy tale.[1] If the gospel were a fairy tale, then living by the gospel would be a refusal to grow up, a refusal to face life and live according to the truth of human existence. In this case, Christianity would be a religion for the immature.

Far from being a fairy tale, however, the gospel is the story of truth. As the story of truth, the gospel teaches us what the real world is and how to live in that real world.[2] The gospel story challenges us to consider that all our “realities” are half-truths, distorted truths, or lies. The story of the gospel presents us with the truth that we dared not believe existed. The gospel is the story of a reality more real, more truthful than our wildest dreams, our most extravagant desires. The truth of this story shows us how weak and misdirected our desires and dreams are and shows us what we were created for. This story invites us into the reality it proclaims. Living in this reality is something we can never outgrow. On the contrary, “growing up” means living in the gospel story more and more completely all the time.[3]

The story of the gospel concerns Jesus Christ. We may even say that the gospel is Jesus Christ. In the story of Jesus Christ, another reality—the reality of God’s love for the world—is identified and established. Since the story of Jesus Christ is the gospel, nothing else can be substituted for that story.[4] That is, the story of the gospel is not just about sacrificial love or forgiveness or simple living as it happens to be exemplified in Jesus of Nazareth but could be exemplified in some other story. The gospel is the story of Jesus Christ.

Since it is the story of this person, Jesus Christ, and not some abstract principle or concept, the story of the gospel cannot be replaced by some other story. That is, we cannot substitute another story for the story of Jesus Christ just because some other story also talks about love or forgiveness. Christians believe that the story of Jesus Christ is the unique story of the gift of God’s love for this world. Therefore, all our thinking about God’s love for the world must begin with this story.[5]

An enormous number of questions could be asked at this point about the story of Jesus Christ as we have it in the New Testament. How much do we really know about what Jesus said and did? Do the Gospels report what Jesus actually said and did, or are they accounts of what the early church wished Jesus had said and done? Some people engage in historical and literary research and argument in order to prove something one way or another about the accuracy of the Gospels. Many of their efforts are commendable, but in this book I invite you to another kind of research and proof.

In this book, I will try to lay out, as clearly as I can, the reality of God’s love in Jesus Christ. I ask you to consider whether that story makes sense to you. Does it reveal to you something you have not seen before? Is it a reality you would like to live in? If so, then you can prove the truth of the gospel in Jesus Christ in your life not by historical investigation or philosophical argument but by participating in the love of God made real through Jesus Christ. This is possible because, although the story of the gospel begins thousands of years ago, it continues today.[6] The reality which is the good news of Jesus Christ is an everlasting story; it is eternal life through God’s Son, Jesus Christ.

In the next three chapters, we will explore together the story of Jesus Christ as the story of God’s love. I am not going to retell the story; remember, there is no substitute for the story. I will, however, draw your attention to particular features of the story in the New Testament and highlight ways that the story is continuing among us today.

In the first chapter, we will explore the words and deeds of Jesus in the four Gospels. This beginning point allows us to follow along with the memory of the early church and the way they told the story of Jesus. In the second chapter, we will continue our exploration of the story of Jesus Christ by examining the roles he played in establishing God’s love in the world. This approach allows us to see the story of Christ as a coherent whole rather than as a series of isolated incidents. In the third chapter, we will look back over the story and our explorations in order to consider why and how Christians believe the story of Jesus Christ is the story of truth and reality.

ONE

THE STORY
OF THE KINGDOM

THE WORDS AND DEEDS OF JESUS

Today, many people question the continuing relevance of Jesus. After all, he was a first-century Jewish male. What did he know about life in the twenty-first century? He knew nothing about our culture and the challenges we face. Does he have anything to say about nuclear and biological weapons, AIDS, mass starvation, or genocide? He had less education than most of us in North America. What can he teach us? Did he study quantum mechanics, much less Newton’s law? He never traveled outside a very small region, so what can he teach us about living in a global society?

If we think these are the questions that need answering, then we will find very little that is initially satisfying in the things Jesus taught. But if we are willing to begin with Jesus’ teaching, seek to understand it, and shape our lives by it, then we will find enormous, cosmic, redemptive help. And in the end, even these questions may find the proper response from those who have allowed themselves to become “learners-followers-disciples” of Jesus Christ.

What we will discover in this chapter is that Jesus came to teach us reality. The reality that he teaches us is the reality of God’s love. That love cannot be twisted to mean whatever we want it to mean; rather, the love that Jesus reveals takes the shape of his own life. Moreover, that life and that love are present and powerful today. What Jesus taught in his earthly life, therefore, remains as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago. Jesus never goes out of date.

In John 3:16, we read of the love of God, which leads to eternal life. This eternal life is God’s gift to us through God’s Son, Jesus Christ. As we explore God’s gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ, we discover Jesus’ own proclamation of that gift recorded in the first four books of the New Testament. These books are the church’s memory of what Jesus Christ said and did. For several years, the disciples had been trained and taught by Jesus. Now, as the Holy Spirit brought the disciples into eternal life, the Spirit also guided them so that they faithfully remembered and understood what Jesus taught about God’s love for the world.[1]

In John’s Gospel, God’s love for the world leads to “eternal life.” In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the same reality is conveyed by the phrases “kingdom of God” and “kingdom of heaven.” Some have argued that the kingdom of God (which Mark and Luke use) is something different from the kingdom of heaven (which Matthew uses), but I think the difference is simply due to the authors choosing language familiar to their audiences. We can find instances of this in our own lives. For example, North Americans would call the game my daughter plays every Saturday in the fall “soccer,” but in Great Britain the game would be called “football.”

Whether “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven” or “eternal life,” the Gospel writers are reporting one reality: God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ. They may have different emphases and perspectives, but taken together their accounts give us a portrait of the reality of God’s relationship to the world according to Christian convictions. For the sake of consistency, throughout this chapter I will use the phrase “kingdom of God” for that reality.[2]

Using the phrase “kingdom of God” is a bit risky. We are not familiar with kingdoms today, and for many the language of kingdom and kingship carries with it ideas of oppression, domination, and slavery.[3] However, when we look at the kingdom of God in Jesus’ life, we find that he defines what the kingdom is rather than being defined by our ideas of the kingdom. The kingdom he establishes is unlike our oppressive human kingdoms. Our calling is not to abandon the term because it has been misused but to rediscover the good news of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed and enter into it so our lives bear witness to it.

The difference between our kingdoms and God’s kingdom is stated clearly by Jesus in Mark 10:42–45:

You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Apart from Christ, our ideas of the kingdom of God are upside down; he comes to turn them right side up.[4]

Since Jesus comes to turn our world right side up, his coming is good news. Often, because we are used to living in an upside-down world, Jesus looks like bad news. When I was a boy, I loved standing on my head and imagining what the world would be like if everything were turned upside down. I would get so lost in that other world that when my father walked into the room, he looked out of place. He was walking on the ceiling!

That is what happens when Jesus brings the kingdom of God. When he fellowships with outcasts, forgives his enemies, and turns the other cheek, he looks upside down and out of place, but in truth he is the only one walking and living right side up. That is why his coming is good news. And that is why his coming is the gift of eternal life—he shows us how to live the way God intended us to live in this world. Faced with a world in which “kingdom of God” sounds oppressive, followers of Jesus Christ need to relearn and live the story of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.

We can begin to learn and live the good news of the kingdom of God by looking at four characteristics of the kingdom in Jesus’ words and deeds: the reality, perfection, value, and openness of the kingdom.[5] Of course, these characteristics are an interpretation of what Jesus said and did concerning the kingdom. They are meant to give you some structure and some rules for learning and living the good news of God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ. My hope is that this presentation will drive you back to Scripture to see whether these things are so.

This chapter is no substitute for reading the New Testament. But the New Testament is not meant to be read by an individual for himself or herself; it is meant to be read by the church for the church. When Philip met the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, the Ethiopian recognized that he needed an explanation in order to understand Scripture. Philip represented the church’s understanding of Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of what the Ethiopian was reading. The Ethiopian’s understanding was enlarged by Philip’s explanation so that he became a believer in Jesus Christ. My exposition in this chapter is my way of participating with you in the life of the church and offering to you an explanation that has enlarged my understanding and deepened my life as a believer and as a participant in the kingdom of God.

THE REALITY OF THE KINGDOM

In Jesus’ words and deeds, the kingdom is not an ideal for which we are to strive; it is not an ideology by which we are to live; nor is it a promise for which we are to hope. Rather, in Jesus’ words and deeds the kingdom of God is a reality in which we are to live.

If the kingdom were an ideal, an ideology, or a promise, then Jesus’ message would not be the good news that it is. An ideal, although it may cause us to work hard, ultimately oppresses us, due to its very nature of being ideal rather than real. An ideal is beyond our grasp, always teasing us and always far from us. An ideology, although it may give meaning to a life, depersonalizes its followers; they become mere instruments of the ideology. Ideologies are not made to fulfill human beings; rather, human beings are made to fulfill ideologies. Therefore, ideologies are fundamentally anti-human; they are bad news. A promise, although it may be a source of hope and a w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 STORY
• Part 2 IMAGES
• Part 3 PRACTICES
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• About the Author