Quotes About Jesus

The sixth stroke of my sketch is therefore as follows: Jesus was a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequences if they did not. His agendas led him into a symbolic clash with those who embraced other ones, and this, together with the positive symbols of his own kingdom agenda, point to the way in which he saw his inaugurated kingdom moving toward accomplishment.

The conflict among Christians about whether or not Jesus was God is grounded in two different understandings of the Gospels—and the New Testament and the Bible as a whole.

We can see that growth by arranging the gospel material chronologically, from earlier to later writings. As the decades passed, the early Christian movement increasingly spoke of Jesus as divine and as having the qualities of God, a development

Then it became a biological metaphor in the birth stories: Jesus as Son of God was conceived by the Spirit of God, not by a human father. Ultimately, it became a metaphysical or ontological claim: Jesus as the only begotten Son of God is of one substance with God. But initially, to see Jesus as the Son of God points to a relationship of special intimacy and agency.

To see Jesus as "the Wisdom of God" and "Son of God" and "messiah" means to take very seriously what we see in him as a disclosure of God.

As early Christianity developed, the post-Easter Jesus increasingly functioned as a divine reality within the community. Even before the gospels were written, prayers were addressed to Jesus as if to God, and hymns praised Jesus as divine. By the early second century, Ignatius could speak of "our God, Jesus Christ.

If they mean, "Do you think Jesus saw his own death as a sacrifice for sin?" or "Do you think that God can forgive sins only because of Jesus' sacrifice?," my answer is no. But if they mean, "Is the statement a powerfully true metaphor of the grace of God?," then my answer is yes. Let me explain.

When we emphasize his divinity at the expense of his humanity, we lose track of the utterly remarkable human being he was.

South African Jesus scholar Albert Nolan makes the same point when he says in a quotation that I've grown very fond of: "Jesus is a much underrated man. When we deprive him of his humanity, we deprive him of his greatness.

the classic and traditional Christian affirmation about Jesus, namely, that Jesus is for us as Christians the decisive revelation of what a life full of God is like.

The human Jesus is the Word made flesh. The human Jesus is the wisdom of God. The human Jesus is the Spirit of God embodied in human life. In short, the meaning of all the statements about Jesus show us what a life full of God is like.

To put that threefold summary into three phases, there was to Jesus, first, a Spirit dimension, second, a wisdom dimension, and, third, a justice dimension.

Jewish mystic and Christian messiah describe how I see Jesus before and after Easter. To use language from my previous chapter, I see the pre-Easter Jesus as the former and the post-Easter Jesus as the latter.

The pre-Easter Jesus is dead and gone; he's nowhere anymore. This statement does not deny Easter in any way, but simply recognizes that the corpuscular Jesus, the flesh-and-blood Jesus, is a figure of the past.

So when Paul and other early Christians proclaimed "Jesus is Lord" (and the Son of God and the savior who brings true peace on earth), he and they were directly challenging Roman imperial theology and the imperial domination system that it legitimated.

To shift to a voice metaphor, the gospels contain two voices: the voice of Jesus and the voice of the community. Both layers and voices are important. The former tell us about the pre-Easter Jesus; the latter are the witness and testimony of the community to what Jesus had become in their experience in the decades after Easter.5

The possibility that Jesus didn't think he was the messiah has often seemed to threaten the truth of Christianity itself. Could Jesus be the messiah if he didn't think he was?

Jesus courageously kept doing what he was doing even though he knew it could have fatal consequences. So we do not think Jesus saw his purpose as dying for the sins of the world. Rather, this interpretation, like the others in the New Testament, is post-Easter and thus retrospective. Looking back on the execution of Jesus, the early movement sought to see a providential purpose in this horrendous event.12

First, the healings and exorcisms of Jesus are associated with the coming of the kingdom of God and a time of deliverance.

Another Q saying uses language from the prophet Isaiah to signal that the activity of Jesus points to a time of deliverance.

In particular, healing as practiced by Jesus and his itinerant followers pointed to an unbrokered relationship to God, apart from institutional mediation.38 In short, Jesus' healing activity flowed out of and affirmed the immediacy of access to God.

Jesus also offers an alternative wisdom. As a wisdom teacher, he is more like Lao Tzu or the Buddha than he is like a teacher of conventional wisdom.39 The basis for my judgment is twofold. The first is the sheer weight of wisdom teaching attributed to Jesus. Most of his teaching is in the form of memorable short sayings (aphorisms) and provocative short stories (parables), both classic wisdom forms.

But "redemption" in the Bible and in Paul is not about the forgiveness of sins. Rather, it is a metaphor of liberation from bondage—from life in Egypt, from a life of slavery. "The redemption that is in Christ Jesus" would be better translated "the liberation that is in Christ Jesus." We are liberated through him.

He points beyond himself to God—to God's character and passion. This is the meaning of our christological language and our credal affirmations about Jesus: in this person we see the revelation of God, the heart of God. He is both metaphor and sacrament of God.