The Preaching of Jesus

Gospel Proclamation, Then and Now

William Brosend

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780664232153
• eBook ISBN: 9781611641837
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Using the findings of historical Jesus studies, William Brosend asks, what is the rhetoric that characterized the preaching of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels, and how may today's preaching benefit from it? This book for preachers and students of preaching helps the reader see four distinct aspects of the rhetoric of Jesus: dialogical (preaching in response to challenges and questions); proclamatory (making bold and authoritative statements); occasionally self-referential (though less so than in the Fourth Gospel); and persistently figurative (illustrating his message through metaphor). Brosend spends one chapter on each of these methods, closing each chapter with a sermon that models that approach and his analysis of it. Sample sermons are by well-known preachers including Fred Craddock, Michael Curry, Tom Long, and Barbara Brown Taylor. Brosend concludes with the implications for modern preaching and a sermon of his own.

1
Jesus the Preacher / Preaching Jesus

Jesus came preaching. Mark told us as much from the beginning: after baptism, temptation, and the Baptist’s arrest, “Jesus came to Galilee, preaching [kēryssōn] the Gospel of God” (Mark 1:14 AT). A few verses later, in typical Markan brevity and without bothering to tell us more about the content of Jesus’ message, we learn the reaction: “They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (1:22). Authoritative and astounding! Not exactly Sunday morning’s “Nice sermon, pastor.”

Jesus came preaching. Charles Campbell, echoing John Howard Yoder, has challenged us to account more fully for this simple statement in our homiletic and in our preaching, and he is right.¹ What does it mean that Jesus chose preaching as his primary means of ministry, and of resistance to empire, temple, and adversary? What does it mean that Jesus chose preaching not only for our understanding of him, but also for our proclamation of him? That is the essential question of this chapter and the chapters to follow.

Jesus came preaching. Not the most obvious strategy, then or now. Matthew’s and Luke’s account of the temptation show Jesus’ rejection of what many would consider more promising approaches.² They were not, however, more faithful approaches, and the choices Jesus made invite us to consider our own choices in preaching Jesus. Are we to be effective, or faithful? Or might we be both?

Jesus came preaching, and he came to a particular time and place, one suited for the strategy he chose. Military resistance to empire was foolish, as the Jewish War would prove a generation after the crucifixion. The adversary had stepped aside, if only for a season: “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). And the temple? Its fate was soon enough sealed: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down” (Mark 13:2). Words made sense. They were, after all, only words, at least as far as empire and adversary were concerned. Temple knew better, but in debate after debate it proved phenomenally powerless to resist the resister. “Then some of the scribes answered, ‘Teacher, you have spoken well.’ For they no longer dared to ask him another question” (Luke 20:39–40).

Jesus came preaching, in particular, and we will also want to be as particular as we can. Jesus came preaching “the Gospel of God.” He preached the present moment; he preached that God’s reign is here. Jesus preached repentance; he preached faith. Good stuff all, but to tell the truth, this study is not as interested in what Jesus said as it is interested in how Jesus is depicted in the Gospels as having said it. Not that what and how are ever unrelated.³ This chapter begins with a reconstruction of Jesus within history, so that Jesus’ rhetoric is placed within some sense of its historical context. That rhetoric, as evidenced by Mark, Matthew, and Luke, is analyzed in the hope of determining its dominant characteristics. Finally, attention turns to contemporary preaching about Jesus, and suggestions are made for how the rhetoric of Jesus might be more fully employed in preaching about Jesus.

As soon as someone says “the historical Jesus,” someone else says “the Christ of faith”; then the debate, at least since Bultmann, is on. As far as I have been able to tell, it rarely gets anywhere. Because the distinction, and many others like it (Borg’s “pre” and “post”-Easter Jesus, for example), are overwhelmed by the formulations, and by the implications read into them by frequently unsympathetic audiences. What was intended as a designation for the sake of precision becomes a label for use in political/religious/theological debates. The “historical Jesus” was, in the foundational uses by those engaged in the renewed quest, meant to distinguish at least the following: Jesus as he could be known from multiply attested sources, biblical and otherwise (Crossan); Jesus as he could be known “scientifically” by reliable historical evidence, biblical and otherwise (Wright and Meier); Jesus as he can be known to believers before and after Easter (Borg); Jesus as he “really” was (Johnson).⁴ These in themselves are caricatures, but they are not tendentious nor highly polemical. It is when one moves from, say, the “real” Jesus to the “only” Jesus, when reconstructions of Jesus within history are presented as historical and/or biblical absolutes, that a line has been crossed. And it has been crossed.

It is better, I have come to believe, to speak of our reconstructions as presenting Jesus “within history” rather than “the historical Jesus.” The former formulation admits to distinction between the biblical and historical, without claims to whole or simple truths. All believers have, to varying degrees, some idea or a set of ideas about who Jesus was and is for them. This is especially true for preachers. To speak and write of Jesus “within history” is to make explicit that understanding, without making claims for Jesus “as he actually was,” which is an unrecoverable reality from a historical perspective, and a not necessarily helpful one from a homiletical perspective. All this suggests the second reason I prefer to write of Jesus “within history” rather than “the historical Jesus.” This is finally a work of homiletics, not history, and the Jesus we here seek to recover is Jesus the preacher, in order to better understand how the preaching of Jesus may inform our preaching about Jesus. In this sense history is secondary to rhetoric, which is not to say that history is unimportant.

Reading, teaching, and writing about Jesus the preacher has convinced me that my own reconstruction of Jesus within history is a dialogue between rhetoric and Scripture, homiletics and history, and that it is important to be explicit about that reconstruction, its sources, and its implications. So before outlining the central rhetorical claims about the preaching of Jesus, and the implications that rhetoric has for contemporary preaching about Jesus, I share my own understanding of Jesus within history. It is not an understanding that has emerged in a vacuum, but through years of study, teaching, writing, preaching, and ministry. Thus it is a little messy and also unabashedly informed by the wisdom of many others.

Over the last two generations of New Testament scholarship, scores of authors—in articles, monographs, books, and multivolume studies—have presented reconstructions of Jesus within history of varying degrees of rigor, complexity, and persuasiveness. What these reconstructions have in common, without exception to my knowledge, is an almost complete disregard for the rhetoric Jesus used (or is said to have used) in his preaching and teaching. With the singular exception of Amos Wilder, to a scholar they make the following two claims as if the claims were self-explanatory and there was little more to be said on the subject: (1) Jesus was a teacher/preacher. (2) Jesus’ favorite mode of preaching was the parable. Marcus Borg, in developing his understanding of Jesus as a teacher of “alternative wisdom,” is representative:

The forms of speech most frequently used by Jesus as an oral teacher were aphorisms and parables. Aphorisms are short, memorable sayings, great “one-liners.” Parables, of course, are short stories. Together aphorisms and parables are the bedrock of the Jesus tradition, and they put us most directly in touch with the voice of the pre-Easter Jesus. Strikingly, the most certain thing we know about Jesus is that he was a storyteller and speaker of great one-liners.⁵

Jesus as after-dinner raconteur is not what Borg means; yet after only a few additional comments about form, he moves on to content. But if the wisdom of Craddock noted in the introduction (above) is correct, and it most certainly is, that what and how, content and form, can never be separated, must it be left to the homiletician to consider both? Apparently so. My own effort will first outline my understanding of who Jesus was, followed by a summary of my analysis of the rhetoric of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels.

JESUS WITHIN HISTORY

Sanders began his 1985 study with a list of eight “almost indisputable facts” about Jesus.⁶ My list in this study makes four claims:⁷

1. Jesus was a Galilean Jew.

2. Jesus was a preacher who proclaimed a kingdom and resisted a crown.

3. Jesus was a teacher actively reshaping a tradition for a new day.

4. Jesus knew the probable outcome of his ministry of resistance and transformation, and he did not capitulate to empire, temple, or adversary.

Jesus Was a Galilean Jew

That Jesus was fully and faithfully Jewish is as certain as it is often forgotten, and our collective debt to scholars Jacob Neusner, Geza Vermes, E. P. Sanders, A.-J. Levine, and others is great. I hold Sanders’s 1985 study Jesus and Judaism as especially pivotal, and my own reconstruction is as indebted to Sanders as to anyone. Here we want to recognize two facts: Jesus was Jewish, and he was a Galilean, not a Judean Jew. Having quoted Borg with tongue in cheek, it is only fair to let him have a second say:

Jesus would have participated in the practices of “common Judaism.” He would have learned the stories, hymns, and prayers of the Jewish tradition. He would have observed and celebrated the great Jewish holidays, three of which were pilgrimage festivals, ideally to be spent in Jerusalem [Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles]. … It is reasonable to think that Jesus at least occasionally went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to observe these festivals. Though we do not know much about daily and weekly religious practices at the time of Jesus, it is probable that he, like most Jews, prayed the Shema twice daily, upon rising and going to bed. He no doubt observed the sabbath, which included attending the synagogue for Torah study and prayer.⁸

This sketch, though not universally shared, is generally accepted by most biblical scholars. Meier is even more detailed, and focuses on the practice of Judaism in Galilee in particular:

The Jewish faith that was shared by pious Galileans in the countryside would have been, for all its fervor, fairly simple and straightforward. Like most traditional religion handed down by largely uneducated groups in rural areas, it would have focused more on basic practices rather than theoretical details debated by the religious elite. In the case of Judaism, the basic practices included circumcision of infant males, kosher food laws, the main purity rules, sabbath rest, and, when possible, pilgrimage to the Jerusalem temple on the great feasts to take part in its sacrifices. … The oft-repeated assertion that Galilean Jews were lax in their practice, alienated from the Jerusalem temple, and constantly rebellious does not seem to have held—if it ever held—during the adult life of Jesus.⁹

Three points from Borg and Meier merit further attention. First is the question of Jesus’ understanding and practice of Torah, something that his teaching and frequent controversies with the “scribes and Pharisees” call into question. Second is the oft-repeated assertion about lax Galilean religious practice, and third is the matter of Galilee as a seat of rebellion and resistance, and the impact such activity may have had on Jesus and his followers.

How do we best understand the relationship of Jesus to the tradition in which he was raised and formed? Though my answer to this question is already implicit in my third claim (Jesus was a teacher actively and intentionally reshaping a tradition for a new day), it must be addressed in the first claim as well. Matthew, as an example, is well and rightly understood to have in part shaped his telling of Jesus’ story with a keen eye for that tradition, with frequent references to Jesus’ acting, or others acting upon him, as it was “spoken” or “written.”¹⁰ Jesus himself says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Matt. 5:17). Yet it is also in this same chapter of Matthew that we encounter the six antitheses, “You have heard it said. … But I say to you …” (5:21–48). Is not this Jesus echoing prophetic and wisdom critique, if not of the Torah itself, then of its interpretation and application? Thus even the disputes and controversies are consonant with the tradition. For example, is the “Powers’” (Wink¹¹) attempt to silence Jesus’ followers (Luke 19:39) not unlike the Powers’ attempt to silence the prophet Amos (Amos 7:12–13)? Sanders has concluded that though there were at least two points of clear conflict (Sabbath and temple),

the setting of Jesus’ work within Judaism, therefore, is not to be understood as one of polar opposition between a man of good will and men of bad intent. It is not reasonable historical explanation to say that Jesus believed in a whole list of non-controversial and pleasant abstractions (love, mercy, grace) and that his opponents denied them. … Jesus does not “fit” into Judaism as its moral and spiritual antithesis (as some polemical passages have led some to think). There was, rather, a firm context of agreement, and within that context a conflict.¹²

One cannot overstate the importance of understanding this “firm context of agreement,” not only for Sanders’s work, but also for any reconstruction of Jesus within history. Jesus was Jewish, and there is no basis inside or outside the Gospels for claiming that he ever understood himself or his mission apart from his Jewishness. We have learned not to collapse first-century Palestinian Judaism into a singular reality, but that does not change the point. Jesus was Jewish. This is where we start.

Yet Jesus was also Galilean, and the differences between Judean, Galilean, and Samaritan, who all shared an Israelite history, are of at least biblical proportions (John 4:9b). The place and relationship of Samaritans within Palestine generally and vis—à-vis Judean and Galilean Judaism in particular are problematic, but not of real concern to this study. The conclusion of Meier may be affirmed: “We can already exclude one popular presentation of the Samaritan religion in the 1st century A.D.: namely, that it was a type of syncretistic polytheism combined with Jewish elements. Far from being polytheistic in practice or belief, the Samaritans tended to represent a rather conservative expression of Israelite religion, more rigorous than many Jews in their observance of the Sabbath and more wary of religious innovations.”¹³

The relationship of Galilee to Jerusalem and Judea is more critical for this study, and fortunately not as widely disputed as Samaritan religion and culture, though agreements are not unanimous. As observed, two issues pertaining to Galilee are important for my argument: Was Galilee “Jewish”? To what extent was it a seat of rebellion and resistance? Meier has already declared the inappropriateness of assertions about lax religious practice in Galilee, but there are historical issues as well. While we will not join the debate between Horsley, Freyne, and others,¹⁴ the question of whether or not Galileans were of non-Jewish descent is significant, even if Jesus’ own family had recently migrated to Galilee, something presumed by Luke 2:4. If the ancient Israelite population of Galilee had been exiled by the Assyrians (2 Kgs. 17) so that the residents approximately one hundred years before Jesus’ day needed to be circumcised when the Hasmonean king Aristobulus I gained control of the territory (Josephus, Antiquities 13.318), did Jesus grow up in a truly Jewish milieu?

Recent archaeological findings challenge Josephus, as well as Freyne and Horsley. Dunn, drawing on Reed, summarizes:

All these data refute Horsley’s idea of a Hasmonean aristocracy imposing themselves over a continuing Israelite population and point clearly to a wave of Judean settlements spreading over a depopulated territory.

To this has to be added what Jonathan Reed calls four indicators of Jewish religious identity: stone vessels (chalk or soft limestone), attesting a concern for ritual purity, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Marcus Borg
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Jesus the Preacher / Preaching Jesus
• 2. Dialogical Preaching
• 3. Proclamatory Preaching
• 4. Self-Reference in Preaching
• 5. Persistently Figurative Preaching
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes