Bible Stories

Mark’s Gospel summarizes the theme of Jesus‘ preaching when he returned to Galilee after Herod had thrown John in prison: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’

This summary gives us three main themes in Jesus‘ preaching.

• First there is the theme of fulfilment, of the coming of the long-awaited time of God’s salvation. For so long the Jews had expected. God to step in and bring to pass all that he had promised through his prophets of the Old Testament. The time, said Jesus, had now come. This was the climax of the long time of preparation.
• This fulfilment is summed up in the phrase the kingdom of God — Jesus‘ ‘campaign slogan’. It occurs throughout his teaching and he uses it in many different ways. It is impossible to tie it down to a single clear situation or event. It means that God is king, that he is in control, that his will is being worked out — an idea which can have many different practical applications. But it shows us that the aim of Jesus‘ mission is nothing less than the total achievement of God’s purposes, the assertion of his rightful sovereignty in his world.
• Such preaching demands a response. It is good news (which is what ‘gospel’ means), but only to those who respond personally to the challenge it brings. So Jesus calls people to ‘repent’ and ‘believe’ — a complete turnaround which will affect both their relationship with God and their dealings with one another. It is as men and women respond with this decisive repentance and faith that God’s will is worked out, in their lives and in the society of which they are part. In other words, that is how the ‘kingdom of God‘ is established.

We can now look in closer detail at these three themes in turn.

The time of fulfillment

The Jews were full of hope. The Old Testament told them in many ways that God had better things in store for his people. It spoke of a coming ‘day of the Lord’, and it presented a number of figures through whom God would one day fulfil his purpose: a great king of the line of David, a prophet like Moses, a priest like Melchizedek, a humble shepherd, a rejected servant, and many others. By the time of Jesus some of these ideas, but especially that of the king in David’s line, were being referred to by the title Messiah, the Lord’s anointed. The political circumstances of the first century made it inevitable that most ordinary Jews linked such hopes with Israel’s subjection to Rome. They saw the coming of God’s Messiah as the means of national restoration and independence.

Jesus hardly ever spoke of himself as the Messiah (or ‘Christ‘ — the Greek word for it). If he had done so, his hearers would almost certainly have seen his role in a political or nationalistic light, which he was anxious to avoid. Jesus did not back those who favoured armed rebellion against Rome. He frequently discouraged his followers from having political hopes for his mission.

So Jesus could not freely use politically loaded terms such as ‘Christ‘ and ‘Son of David‘. But he made no secret of his belief that he had come to fulfil the Old Testament’s promises of a God- sent deliverer. Bypassing the passages on which political hopes might be based (those which spoke of a king in David’s line), he explained his purpose by using some of the less prominent ‘messianic’ themes. Significantly, they all focus on peace, righteousness, humility— even suffering and death.

The two passages to which he referred most often were:

• The description of the suffering and death of God’s servant for the sins of his people in Isaiah 53.
• The vision in Daniel 7 of ‘a son of man‘. When this figure was vindicated and raised to the throne of God, it would spell salvation for God’s holy people.

These two passages, which had never been brought together in this way before, were basic to the way Jesus understood his mission. He was to suffer and die for his people’s sins, and then, vindicated and raised to God’s presence, receive an everlasting dominion in which his people would share.

It was from Daniel’s vision that Jesus drew his own strange name for himself, turning Daniel’s ‘son of man‘ (which means simply ‘human being’) into a specific ‘title’, ‘the Son of man‘. It was not a title with which anyone would be already familiar, and so Jesus could use it for his own unique role without fear of misunderstanding.

But Jesus did not see his mission merely in the light of a few selected ‘messianic’ passages. When John the Baptist questioned whether he really was ‘the one who was to come’, Jesus pointed out how closely his ministry corresponded to passages from the book of Isaiah. Jesus is quoting two passages here. One talks about the coming of God’s anointed servant to preach deliverance, but the other is simply about what God himself will do for his people. Often Jesus explained his work in the light of such passages. So not only were the prophecies of a Messiah fulfilled in his mission, but also the whole range of hopes of the ‘day of the Lord’, when God would finally bring salvation. It is a claim of breath-taking boldness, the more remarkable because as well as spelling it out in his more formal teaching, Jesus almost casually assumed it in many incidental remarks.

If that were not enough, we find another remarkable pattern in Jesus‘ references to the Old Testament. Sometimes he spoke of himself in ways which suggested that he corresponded in some sense to the great figures.

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