Jesus, Paul and the Mission of God — Part II

III. The Mission of Jesus: Restoration and Prolepsis

A. Jesus in Narratival Perspective

If the story of creation from the Divine perspective is one of Trinitarian love, the story of creation from the human perspective is one of rebellion and death. Some narratival approaches to the Bible suggest that the diversity of the scriptural canon frames an overarching, unifying narrative of creation, fall, complication, cross, and consummation.[1] This is a helpful approach, which enables us to understand that Jesus’ mission during his first advent represented a sort of climax in the drama of redemption.

This narratival structure views the drama of redemption from the human perspective: how do we find ourselves in the current broken mess of the world, and how can this mess be fixed? Jesus is the answer to these questions, which burn through the pages of the Hebrew Bible. After humanity’s fall into sin, God takes the initiative to “clothe” the man and the woman.[2] He continues to pursue and preserve humanity in the covenant with Noah, and He calls a particular people to experience and spread His righteous fellowship in the covenants with Abraham and David.

By the close of the Hebrew Bible, however, God’s chosen people, His putative agents of redemption, have rebelled against God and have suffered the judgment of defeat and exile at the hands of Assyria and Babylon. The holy city of Jerusalem and its Temple, the place of God’s presence, have been destroyed. When the exiles are permitted to return to Jerusalem, the hope of Israel’s prophets turns towards a deliverer, a Messiah, who will restore the nation and the Temple.

During the “intertestamental” period, the hope of restoration becomes ever more pregnant as the remnant of Israel experiences Greek and Roman rule. The Roman puppet ruler Herod rebuilds a magnificent Temple in Jerusalem, but for many zealous Jews, this represents an abominable counterfeit of God’s holy purposes. Some of these Jews, including the Maccabees, attempt military rebellion, only to be crushed by Rome. Others, particularly the Pharisees, attempt to practice holiness within the daily context of Roman oppression, while yet others, such as the Essenes, withdraw into chiliastic communes; and still others, particularly the Sadducees, attempt to reach some accommodation to Hellenistic culture. Jesus steps into this milieu of “restoration eschatology” and both fulfills and upsets this hope. In this sense, we can say that the mission of Jesus is to inaugurate the Kingdom of God by restoring God’s reign over humanity through a people called to be God’s own holy people. N.T. Wright and others have helpfully situated Jesus’ frequent teaching about the “Kingdom of God” within this framework of the Second Temple Jewish hope of restoration.[3] Jesus, however, reframes Second Temple restoration eschatology by suggesting that the hope of redemption will extend beyond the Jewish people and that the power of redemption lies in his own person rather than in a revitalized Temple.

These themes are particularly poignant in the events and teachings of Matthew 20-24. In the parables of the laborers in the vineyard and the marriage feast, Jesus suggests that the Kingdom of God relates to a person’s disposition towards God and results from God’s broad and generous grace, rather than deriving primarily from a national identity. In Matthew 21, Jesus is hailed as a Messiah, consistent with restorationist expectations, but his action of “cleansing” the Temple is an unexpected symbol of the Kingdom’s extension to the “outer courts” of the Gentiles. In Matthew 24, Jesus somewhat obliquely predicts the destruction of Jerusalem, which eventually occurred in A.D. 70 under the Roman Emperor Titus.

The synoptic Gospels each in their own way conclude with the theme that will be picked up in Paul’s epistles: not the restoration of the Temple, but the death and resurrection of Jesus, represent the inauguration of the hoped-for “age to come.”

B. An Excursus on Proleptic Eschatology and the Drama of Scripture

In my view, the five or six-act narratival structure of the Bible, with the death and resurrection of Jesus as a climactic point in the story, is helpful, but ultimately insufficient. From the divine perspective, the story of redemption proceeds proleptically. For God, the story in a sense starts at the end and is told backwards. The “sixth” act of the drama, that of consummation, was God’s purpose from “before the foundation of the world.”[4] The “new heavens and new earth” and “new Jerusalem” of Revelation 21 are not things God improvised in order to fix a mistake. The heavenly city is rather the telos of which Eden, the Tabernacle, the Temple, and the Church are beginnings.[5] If we fail to emphasize the “divine,” proleptic side of the Biblical narrative, I fear that we lose something important about the Trinitarian shape of the missio Dei.