The Relevance of the Colloquy for the Current Quest for Jesus
(Originally published in Jesus
and the Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 and Christian Origins, ed. William H. Bellinger, Jr. and William R.
Farmer. 1998, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity
Press International. 281–297.
Reproduced by permission of the author.)
N. T. WRIGHT
I am enormously
grateful for the chance to take part in this colloquy. I have caught up with some old friends and
made some new ones. I have greatly
enjoyed listening, in particular, to scholars in a field that fascinates me but
that I don’t normally have time to attend to, namely, the study of Isaiah in
its original setting(s). But I am
particularly grateful because my own work has brought me back again in recent
weeks, for the ninety-ninth time, to the great question of Jesus’ attitude to
his own death; and I suspect that, in the providence of God, I am here to learn
and think, first and foremost, rather than to teach or admonish.
I am in fact
in a strange position in terms of my personal history of interaction with
issues of this seminar. I read Morna
Hooker’s book Jesus and the Servant before I read anything of Jeremias;
from the beginning of my theological research, the question she so sharply
raised has been with me as part of my own mental furniture, challenging the
sloppy thinking that so often characterized the would-be biblical background in
which I grew up. Morna’s own view of
the book’s reception is, I know, rather less optimistic; all I can say is that
when I began reading theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, in 1971 her work was
regarded as the thing with which one had to come to terms. Some would have said, no doubt, that we all
knew it was wrong but we couldn’t quite say why. All I know is that when I came to do my final examinations in
June 1973, and discovered that Dr. M. D. Hooker was to be one of the examiners,
I resolved that, unless I were really stuck for a question to answer, there was
one topic that I would be wiser to steer away from. (I have to say, however, that my Old Testament examiners gave me
a treat: the first question I answered in the first exam was a discussion of
the sentence, “The Servant Songs can only be understood in the light of Second
Isaiah as a whole.” What a gift.)
At the same
time (though this has been a subtext of this colloquy, rather than an explicit
theme for discussion), it may be of interest that I read Bill Farmer’s book on The
Synoptic Problem before I read B. H. Streeter’s massive book The Four
Gospels, and was thus inoculated in advance against swallowing its
conclusions whole. As a result, I have
never completely caught the disease called Q, though from time to time I have
experienced that shivery feeling, and the concomitant double vision, that those
who have a chronic case of the Q disease reveal as their normal state. I have experienced, though, an interesting
phenomenon: my inability to make up my mind on the synoptic problem has not, I
think, in any way impaired my ability to read Matthew, Mark, and Luke as
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, nor indeed my ability — though some would no doubt
question this — to think and write about this historical Jesus. But more of this anon.
Our discussion in these three days has, of course,
ranged much wider than the question of Jesus; and to that extent my official
subject for this article is somewhat narrower than any attempt to draw together
the threads of the colloquy as a whole.
Nevertheless, as we have looked at wider questions — notably those of
Pauline theology and echoes of scripture, and those in particular of the
original meaning of Isaiah itself — we have been looking at issues which do in
fact relate quite closely to the question of Jesus. Studying Paul, despite what you might think from some recent
work, is in fact closely related to studying Jesus. Paul, after all, is our earliest Christian writing, and to ignore
him in favor of other purely hypothetical sources is sheer folly. The original meaning of Isaiah, and its
re-use in subsequent Old Testament writing such as Zechariah, does tell us
something about the range of available options for subsequent readers; though
it is clear to me that if there is a lacuna in this conference it is at the
point of discussing how Isaiah might have been read by Jesus’ own
contemporaries. This is not at all to
deny that Jesus and his first followers were great innovators; we cannot study
Jesus simply as the product of blind religionsgeschichtlich
forces and influences. It is simply to
say that if we are to understand Richard Hays’s criterion of “availability”
there is a lot more to be said than merely discussing what Isaiah 53 meant four
hundred years earlier, fascinating and important though that is.
The current state
of play in the study of Jesus is notoriously difficult to describe. The roll call of recent writers in the
United States alone shows the range of different options available: from
Sanders to Borg, from Charlesworth to Crossan, from Meier to Mack, from Johnson
to the Jesus Seminar. My own reading of
this confused state of play is that we have reached again, by a circuitous
route, the question that was posed by Schweitzer a century ago, as being
reflected in the clash between his own work and that of William Wrede. Skepticism faces eschatology. Either you say, with Wrede and the Jesus
Seminar, that Jesus was a teacher of timeless truths, into whose pure early
teaching his first followers injected a quite unwarranted note of eschatology,
resulting in Mark and his successors being theologically motivated
fictions. Or you say, with Schweitzer
and Sanders, that Jesus does indeed belong with the Jewish eschatology of his
day; and that, though of course the evangelists have their own reasons for
arranging things the way they have, and though of course the tradition has been
shaped by the interests of the early church, the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus as
the eschatological prophet of the Kingdom of God is substantially on target.
This is a
gross oversimplification, of course, and there are numerous important
variations on either side. I said to
Dominic Crossan last year that we needed to revise Norman Perrin’s dictum of
thirty years ago, that the Wredestrasse had become the Hauptstrasse;
and he replied that it wasn’t a Strasse any longer, but an autobahn,
with lots of intersections and a good deal of traffic going in various
directions. I agree; but I think, in
fact, that there has been so much heavy traffic on the Wredebahn in
recent years that it is time to rebuild properly the old Schweitzerbahn,
which always offered a quicker route and a better view. But, again, more of this anon.
On both
routes, however, there is a railway crossing that cannot be avoided.
Did Jesus believe that he would die a violent death, and, if so, did he
give that death any meaning, not least in relation to the aims which had governed
his life and work up to that point?
Schweitzer, of course, said that Jesus did come to believe it was part
of the divine plan that he should die violently, and offered as a hypothesis a
way of construing that belief which fitted Jesus closely to what Schweitzer had
reconstructed as a first-century eschatological worldview. Wrede and his followers, of course, deny all
this. Within the current state of
scholarship there is, as on everything else, a wide range of opinion.
What I shall do, therefore, in order to be as faithful as I can to the brief I was given, is to set up some Jesus-questions as they appear to me in current study, with an eye to our present debate; and then to ask what contribution our own discussions might have to make to them. And I begin with some important questions of method.
To begin with, we
must beware of false antitheses. It
really does not help to play off history against theology, as though history
could be done without presuppositions and without an overarching worldview, or
as though Christian theology had only a loose connection with history. Nor does it help to play off the Jesus
Seminar against other writings as though the Seminar represents history, or scholarship,
and the other writings theology, or orthodoxy.
Life just ain’t that simple. Nor
will it do to invoke giants of the past either as heroes or as villains, such
that to label something Bultmannian becomes a way of condemning it before we
start, or such that to link something with the Reformation becomes a way of
endorsing it before we start.
Rather, we
must embrace wholeheartedly the historical task as a matter of hypothesis and
verification. Methodological skepticism,
as practiced by Wrede, the Jesus Seminar, and thousands in between, is not the
same thing as serious historiography.
Serious historiography proceeds by the disciplined and controlled use of
historical imagination, the reconstrual of a world other than our own, and the
testing of that, as a hypothesis, by a fresh and further reading of all the
evidence. It does not proceed by
examining little bits of evidence piecemeal and forcing them, one by one, to justify their existence. That is in fact a combination of positivism
and phenomenalism, two somewhat discredited epistemologies. The positivist insists that we need proof,
copper-bottomed, cast-iron proof for everything: we only know what we can
prove. The phenomenalist insists that
seeing things tells you about your own eyes and sense-data, not about the
things you are seeing; historically applied, this means that Mark’s account of
something tells us about Mark, not about the event. In combination, the positivist insists that we must have proof,
and the phenomenalist insists that it isn’t available. Nobody would conduct their real life like
that for half a day; yet this pseudoscientific combination has been powerful
enough to make whole generations of scholars and students think things about Jesus
and the Gospels that no serious, hard-nosed historian of other subjects and
periods would allow for a moment. John
Roberts, one of the best-known English historians at the moment, says in his
monumental history of the world that historians of other peoples and periods
are often happy to make do with far more fragmentary and puzzling texts than
the Gospels, and that the serious historian has no need to be unduly skeptical
of them.
We may note
one spin-off of this problem. Gospel
scholars often operate a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose policy with regard to
biblical quotations in the Gospels. If
Jesus is not portrayed as referring to a biblical idea or theme, well, that
proves he wasn’t interested in it, perhaps that he didn’t even know it. If he is portrayed as referring to a
biblical idea or theme, well, that only proves that Mark or Matthew, or
whoever, wanted to saddle Jesus with it.
If there is a reference to prophecy, that is the cunning work of later
historicizers; if there isn’t, that proves that Jesus was a nonprophetic
sage. Frankly, if life was like that,
all gamblers would be millionaires.
In particular,
history cannot be reduced to the history of ideas. We have done so much of our scholarship under the shadow of the
Enlightenment that we have reduced historiography to the tracing of lines of
ideas, of who thought what, who was influenced by what, who read which texts in
what way. That is, of course, very
important, but it is only part of the whole.
By itself, it reduces human beings to brains attached to eyes, tongues,
and hands that hold pens. Human beings,
in fact, live in a much richer world than that: a world where what is done not
only matters as much but often speaks more powerfully than what is said or
thought; a world where the symbolic
ordering of life carries meanings that may be hard to articulate, for those
involved and for the historian, but are nonetheless vital and nonnegotiable as
part of the whole package. We live in a
world in which stories are far more powerful than abstract thought, creating
worlds and subverting them, changing the course of lives and communities. This is the real world that historians ought
to study. Until we lift our eyes beyond
the horizons of questions and answers and examine praxis, symbol, and story we
will be condemned, if I may borrow the language of American cultural symbols,
praxis, and story, never to get beyond first base.
Within
historiography in general, and the study of Jesus as one example of it, it is
also important to insist that we can in principle study human
intentionality. Of course, there is
often not much material available, and we thus often have to admit defeat. But serious historians have never confined
themselves to asking “what happened”; they also regularly ask “why did so-and-so,
or such-and-such a community, behave in the way they did?” Human motivation, including that vital but
elusive category, human awareness of vocation, is a proper subject of
historical study. This is not a matter
of psychology. We can say, beyond reasonable
historical doubt, that Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul, believed he had a
vocation from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to announce to the pagan
world that this God was now offering salvation to the whole world in and
through Jesus Christ; in other words, we know as historians that Paul believed
he was called to be the apostle to the Gentiles. We know, likewise, that John the Baptist believed he was called
by this same God to prepare people for the great coming day in which this God
would act to judge and save his people.
If we can say that sort of thing about the two figures who stand closest
to Jesus on either side, what is to stop us in principle from asking the
question: what did Jesus think he was supposed to be doing? What was motivating him? We who think we don’t live out of a
metanarrative — though that merely reveals our own self-induced blindness — may
find it odd to think of somebody, not obviously megalomaniac, seriously
pondering the unique role that he or she might be called upon to play. In our world, people talk like that when
they are founding a new cult, or perhaps a new seminar. First-century Jews would not have found it
odd at all.
One final note about method. Here I am between Scylla and Charybdis. If I talk about source criticism, I risk offending Morna Hooker, who is convinced it isn’t relevant to the issue of Jesus and Isaiah; if I fail to mention it, I risk offending Bill Farmer, who is convinced that it is. I fear I shall end up being smashed by the rock and drowned by the whirlpool, because I do want to say something about it, but not exactly what Bill would like to hear. I understand that if we use the Two Source Hypothesis the apparent references to Isaiah in the Gospels may seem as though they are endangered; Q_does not encourage us to think that Isaiah was important for Jesus. If, however, we use the Two Gospel Hypothesis, we appear to get Isaiah thrown into more prominence. I have to say that I think this is more of a chicken-and-egg question than synoptic puzzlers usually admit. There is no such thing as a neutral, objective source theory. Streeter and his forbears advocated Mark and Q not least in order to shore up a somewhat truncated orthodoxy against the ravages of D. F. Strauss and the rest. The current Q school, at least in America, has a very different agenda: to subvert orthodoxy by playing off an isolated Q against Mark and the others — though this can only be done, as we see taken to absurd lengths in Koester and Mack, by arbitrary and fanciful subdividing of Q into layers and strata. In fact, as even the Jesus Seminar and Crossan bear tacit witness, and as the whole of what I have called the Third Quest takes for granted, source theories are not in fact the way to do historical-Jesus research. They are a fascinating and vital part of the study of the early church, which is of course integrated with historical-Jesus research in all sorts of ways. But they do not offer us a high road back to Jesus. Life, again, just ain’t that simple. You cannot first work out the synoptic puzzle and then assume that the earliest sources give the most direct access to Jesus. That’s not how history works; nor is it how those I regard as the most serious recent writers on Jesus actually operate. And now, as Herodotus would say, so much for source criticism; and so much, too, for method.
Well, what then
about Jesus? The question that is
currently posed as between those on the Wredebahn and those on the Schweitzerbahn
has to do with the basic persona of Jesus: was he a sage, a teacher of wisdom, a cynic wordsmith, or was he a prophet,
the announcer of the long-awaited Kingdom of God? Does Jesus stand in the wisdom tradition or the apocalyptic
tradition? Is Jesus the teacher of an
atomized and ahistorical wisdom, or is he conscious of being part of the great
on-going Jewish story and drama? Here I
have to say that the dominant voices in the Jesus Seminar have skewed the issue
radically. They have insisted that
apocalyptic is of necessity bombastic, dark, and threatening, a bullying and
dualistic worldview — which happens to have been held by Jesus’ Jewish
contemporaries, by John the Baptist, by Paul, by all the early church except
the noble Q people and the Thomas Christians, but not by Jesus himself. (That’s a great piece of nineteenth-century
liberalism, isn’t it?) They have
rescued Jesus from apocalyptic by rescuing him, more or less lock, stock, and
barrel, from Judaism itself. In
particular, they have insisted, astonishingly, that Jesus did not make use of
the Hebrew scriptures in his teaching.
From this point of view, the question of Jesus and Isaiah is stillborn;
Paul, once more, is the inventor of Christianity. This is sometimes reinforced, as in Crossan, by the suggestion
that Jesus may not even have known or used the Hebrew scriptures at all; that
he was either illiterate or at least not interested in texts, which were a
later scribal preoccupation. At this
point, most of us round this table, whatever our other differences, seem
clearly to believe that Jesus did know the Jewish scriptures, and did regard
them as important for himself and his followers; the only question is, which
ones did he make central and thematic?
I regard it,
in fact, as historically certain that Jesus regarded himself, and was regarded
by his contemporaries, as a prophet, like John the Baptist only more so. Moreover, I regard it as overwhelmingly
historically probable that Jesus regarded himself as, intended to act as, and
was perceived to be acting as, an eschatological prophet, announcing the
Kingdom of God. The stories he told,
the praxis in which he engaged, and the symbols of his work all combine to say:
the Kingdom of God is happening here and now.
It is a false antithesis, for all its frequent repetition, that Jesus
preached about God and the church preached about Jesus. The whole point of Jesus’ work was that he
believed that the God of Israel was acting uniquely in the events he was
initiating. (That doesn’t make Jesus
odd; it puts him firmly on the first-century map, where dozens of groups
believed the same thing, ending up anathematizing and often murdering each other as the terrible story of
the Jewish War wound to its close.)
But what,
then, does this eschatological Kingdom of God mean? Forget the caricatures of Kingdom theology perpetrated by a good
deal of scholarship, not least but not only in the Jesus Seminar. A good many of them are simply retrojections
of a shabby pseudoapocalyptic which characterizes some fundamentalist
preaching. Grasp instead the story, the
praxis, and the symbols of first-century Judaism, within which there was a
sustained longing for Yahweh, Israel’s God, to act within history to save
Israel from the pagans, and to restore her kingdom, her temple, her law, and
her land as they had been in the great days of the past. They were living in a story in search of an
ending, and the differences between Jewish groups can be plotted in terms of
how they thought the story would end, what role they would take in that ending,
and what variations within the symbolic world of Judaism would flag up both
that ending and their role within it.
But the overall belief may be described as follows. They believed that Yahweh would become King;
in other words, they believed that the exile would end at last (or, if you
like, the New Exodus would occur); that evil, by which they would mean paganism
and the debased forms of Judaism, would be defeated; and that Yahweh himself
would return to Zion.
Central to
this whole expression of Jewish hope, not as a set of isolated texts but as
part of the controlling element of the story, is of course the whole prophetic
corpus. Even the Torah itself could be
read, and indeed seems to have been read, as story and as prophecy, the story which
includes the promise to Abraham, the Exodus, and the approach to the promised
land, and the prophecy that the scepter shall not depart from Judah and that a
star shall arise from Jacob — Genesis 49 and Numbers 24, as we now know, being
quite important at least for Qumran.
Within the whole prophetic corpus stand several passages which seem to
have been important for Jesus’ self-understanding. Zechariah is clearly of
great significance; Malachi, arguably so too.
Daniel, controversially but I think crucially, was central to the
expectation of the first-century Jews, particularly the revolutionaries; Jesus
made it central in his own understanding of his own vocation. But when we ask where, in scripture, we find
the clearest statements of a coming time when messengers would announce the
Kingdom of God, we turn to Isaiah, and to chapters 40-55 in particular.
I think, in
fact, that we have been too shortsighted in focusing on the fourth Servant Song
and on the precise meaning of various phrases within it. We have reminded ourselves tirelessly that
first-century readers were ignorant of Duhm’s analysis and all that has
followed it, and yet we have failed to take seriously, I believe, the very
passage that sums up the whole of Jesus’ public ministry, Isaiah 52:7-12. “How lovely upon the mountains are the feet
of the mebasser, the herald of good tidings, the one who publishes
salvation, who says to Zion, Your God reigns!”
Astonishingly, the concordance worship that has characterized so much
New Testament scholarship has sometimes meant that this passage hasn’t been
considered relevant, because it doesn’t use the phrase “Kingdom of God”;
but that is obviously what it means.
And when Zion’s God becomes king, three things will happen, according to
this short and pregnant passage. The
exile will end at last, with a purified people returning home; evil will be
defeated, as Babylon falls at last; and, most important, Yahweh himself will
return to Zion. Again, I find it
astonishing that the theme of Yahweh’s return to Zion has been so largely
ignored in New Testament scholarship, though it is assuredly one of the two
great themes of Second Isaiah as a whole, announced in chapter 40 as the main
message of good news, and reinforced here in particular.
The other
great theme is, of course, forgiveness of sins. Here I want to stress a point which seems to me vital, and
regularly overlooked. From the exile to
Bar Kochba, and arguably beyond, exile itself was seen as the punishment for
sins; so forgiveness of sins was another way of saying “end of exile.” We who live in the shadow of the medieval
church, of Martin Luther, of soul-searching pietism, and now of navel-gazing
self-help spiritualities, have to make a huge historical effort of the
imagination to get this right. Read
Daniel 9, Ezekiel 34-37, Jeremiah 31, and above all Isaiah 40-55, and you will
see that if exile is the result of sin, return from exile simply is the
forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness, in
other words, in this period isn’t first and foremost a matter of private piety,
of the individual wrestling with a troubled conscience. If you’re in prison, being granted an
amnesty doesn’t mean you can feel good inside yourself. It means you are free to go home. This is all summed up in a little verse in
Lamentations, 4:22: “The punishment of your iniquity, O daughter Zion, is
accomplished; he will keep you in exile no longer.”
Jesus’
announcement of the Kingdom, therefore, and his regular offer of forgiveness of sins, mean, in effect: this
is how exile is ending! This is how God
is becoming King! This is how evil is
defeated! This is how Yahweh is
returning to Zion! This, I submit, is
thoroughly historically grounded and believable within Jesus’ world. Lots of other first-century Jews thought
they knew how God was becoming King, and thought they themselves would be key
instruments of that kingship. Jesus
belongs on that map.
But, just as Israel’s story as a whole was, from the first-century point of view, a story in search of an ending, so Jesus’ own story of the wandering Galilean prophet announcing the Kingdom of God was a story in search of an ending. What did Jesus think would happen next? Would he be content to heal a few more people, teach some more how to pray the Lord’s Prayer, tease a few more with parables and aphorisms, hope that his timeless message of the love of God would spread to a wider audience? If that were really so, as Sanders argued a decade ago, it is very hard to see how Jesus could have been an important historical figure. Rather, I believe, and have argued in detail elsewhere, that Jesus understood his vocation in terms of establishing a following of sorts in Galilee, and then going to Jerusalem to force a showdown with the authorities. His claim could never be that he had access to a secret wisdom which could make individuals feel better about themselves, and order their lives more satisfactorily. His eschatological message, his way of peace and salvation, had to be announced to Zion.
What then did Jesus
think would happen when he got there? Let us stress once again: this is not a
matter of isolated proof texts or allusions to particular passages. It is a matter of the whole story of what
Jesus was deliberately doing, of the whole complex praxis in which he had been
engaged, and at last of the whole symbolic universe which he both invoked and
subverted. His actions spoke louder
than his words (footnotes, if you want, to Austin, Searle, Thiselton, and other
philosophers of language who have struggled to say in the post-Enlightenment
world what was blindingly obvious to everyone in Jesus’ world). His action in the temple functioned like
burning a flag, or like tearing up a contract.
His action in the upper
room functioned like running up a new flag, like writing a new contract; or, in
his language, like establishing a new covenant. This was how the exile would end. This was how evil would be defeated. This was how Yahweh would return to Zion. This was how the Kingdom of God would
come. This was how sins would be
forgiven. If we look, as the
post-Reformation and post-Enlightenment world has taught us, for biblical texts
that will give us an intellectual grid on which we can plot and perhaps
domesticate these actions, we are looking for the wrong thing and will get into
great problems, as our debates have borne witness. If we look at Jesus’ acted parables, his symbolic praxis, his
encoded meta-narratives, we will find his understanding of his own death
looming up out of the mist like a great and ugly mountain where we were
expecting a small and climbable hill.
It is not,
perhaps, surprising that scholarship has tried to make the mountain less
daunting by reducing it to terms of this or that theory, this or that
text. But it isn’t a matter so much of
text as of texture; and history demands that we take seriously the richly
textured symbolic universe in which Jesus lived. He believed that the great crisis of Israel’s history was fast
approaching, the crisis through which Yahweh would become King, the crisis as a
result of which exile would end, sins would be forgiven, the Gentiles would be
judged and saved, evil would be defeated at last. And, as Schweitzer saw so clearly a century ago, he believed that
this would come about through the messianic woes bursting upon Israel — or
rather, upon Israel’s representative, the human figure who stands in for the
people of the saints of the Most High.
He would suffer at the hands (or should it be the paws?) of the beast,
and be vindicated. In his vindication
Israel would receive the Kingdom; Yahweh would become King at last, and evil
would be defeated once and for all.
I believe,
therefore, that Jesus did not consider his own death in terms of an abstract or
ahistorical atonement theology. He did
not think of himself going to his death in order to set in motion a piece of
celestial mechanics whereby a timeless system of purely spiritual salvation
would be set up. He saw himself as
possessed of the awesome vocation to bring Israel’s history to its climax; to
be the means of ending exile at last, of defeating paganism as a good Messiah
should do, and of overturning the renegade and faithless Judaism that was still
occupying center stage. He saw himself
as being called upon not merely to announce, but more importantly to enact, the end of exile, the
return of Yahweh to Zion, in other words, the forgiveness of sins. This was a wager, a terrifying Pascalian
wager. He knew he might be wrong. Others made great claims and were shown to
be charlatans. And the irony was, of
course, that the sign of their mistake, of their being self-deceived, was that
they ended up on crosses. The problem
with a crucified Messiah is not that there happens to be one text in
Deuteronomy which says a hanged man is accursed. That could only be imagined when we have left history behind and
entered into a world of pure abstract ideas.
The problem with a crucified Messiah is that the true Messiah was
supposed to defeat the pagans, not to be executed by them.
It is within this
world, I suggest and propose, that we must ask the question of Jesus’ relation
to Isaiah 53. Of course, if we are
looking for a bit of detached teaching with an Old Testament background in
which Jesus will say “look, I am the Servant of Isaiah 53,” we will look in
vain. Of course it will always be open
to the historian to try to reduce the matter to things that can be proved by a
complex web of allusion and echo. But
in the middle of the picture is a hypothesis that can be stated as follows:
Jesus made Isaiah 52:7-12 thematic for his Kingdom announcement. He lived within the controlling story
according to which Israel’s long and tangled relationship with her God, and
with the gentile world, would reach a great climax through which exile would be
undone, so that Israel’s sins would be forgiven at last, and the whole world
would see the glory of God. He spoke of
this in terms of Daniel, Zechariah, and other passages. But if we ask how the message of Isaiah
52:7-12 is put into effect, the prophecy as Jesus read it had a clear
answer. The arm of Yahweh, which will
be unveiled to redeem Israel from exile and to put evil to flight, is revealed,
according to Isaiah 53:1, in and through the work of the Servant of Yahweh.
Now let us be clear. Jesus did not speak of this when faced with Caiaphas: the trial setting called for the judgment scene of Daniel 7, and the question about the temple called for a statement of messianic enthronement (because of the nexus between king and temple). He did not speak of it directly when instructing his puzzled disciples; if they had understood it, they would not have followed him to Jerusalem. He spoke of it in his actions, in the temple and in the upper room, and in his readiness to go to the eye of the storm, the place where the messianic woes would reach their height, where the peirasmos would become most acute, and in bearing the weight of Israel’s exile, dying as her Messiah outside the walls of the capital city. We catch echoes of this, rather than direct statements, as Jesus’ words cluster around his actions. To give his life as a ransom for many; my blood of the new covenant, shed for you and for the many for the forgiveness of sins, in other words, for the end of exile. In terms of the controlling metaphor we have used during the time of the colloquy, Jesus was not pussyfooting around Isaiah 53, refusing to put his head in the bowl and drink the cream. He was himself, if I may put it like this, both cat and cream: the cup that my father has given me, shall I drink it? Only, as we study the history of his last actions, and let those actions resonate within the symbolic universe which he inhabited, we discover here something greater than a cat, and in the cup something stronger than cream.