Holiness and Mission. Morna D. Hooker
– are witnesses to the fact that men and women are failing to implement them. If men and women were truly obedient – if they loved God and their neighbour, if they were truly ‘holy’ – then the city would not be a byword for evil, but would embody what God had planned for his world. Our task, then, is not to despair of this world, and dream of a future utopia, but to endeavour to make this world what God intended it to be. True, the task is an impossible one: in spite of all our endeavours, we are not going to build the kingdom of God on earth. But for those of us who live in cities, or who work in cities, as most of us do, the biblical vision of a new Jerusalem is not just a promise, but a summons to action. The task of God’s people is to witness to what the city could be: a just society, a caring society, where every individual has his or her place, and where all live in harmony. Holiness is about transforming this world.
Jesus
But what can we learn from the New Testament about mission to the city? According to the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus came to Jerusalem only a few days before his death: the rest of his ministry was spent in Galilee, or in the surrounding regions. In spite of the saying in Matthew which we noted earlier denouncing Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum, the response to Jesus at this time is depicted as overwhelmingly positive. Crowds flocked to him from all the villages and the whole countryside. To be sure, there was opposition. Nazareth could not believe that the man next door could be anything special. Scribes and Pharisees objected to his teaching. Significantly, however, the most vocal of these are said to have come from Jerusalem.13
And it is when Jesus reaches Jerusalem that he confronts real opposition. The evangelists all tell us that Jesus was aware of what was likely to happen. Jerusalem had a long tradition of opposing the truth. Luke records Jesus as saying:
I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets, and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wing, and you were not willing.
(Luke 13.33–34)
Nevertheless, Jesus was determined to go to Jerusalem. Matthew tells us that immediately after Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah at Caesarea Philippi,
Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and endure great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes.
(Matthew 16.21)
Luke tells us that from this point on, Jesus ‘set his face towards Jerusalem’ (9.51).
For the evangelists, the reason that Jesus went to Jerusalem was simply in order to die. His death and resurrection were the great transforming events in their lives, and they had taken place in Jerusalem. But there was surely more to it than that. Jerusalem was the seat of authority – of religious authority – the place where Jewish priests, scribes and Pharisees were to be found. Jesus’ message, ‘Repent, and believe the good news’, had to be addressed to them. But Jerusalem was also a city where Jesus was bound to come into conflict with the Roman authorities. By his presence there, Jesus not only confronted the challenge of the city, but presented a challenge to the city. And it was because he challenged the authorities there that he was put to death.
All the Gospels tell us that Jesus entered Jerusalem as a king, riding on the back of a donkey, much as his ancestor Solomon had done.14 Matthew and John point us to the words of Zechariah 9.9,15 which suggests that Jesus was entering Jerusalem in peace, an idea picked up by Luke.16 But Mark, who emphasizes that Jesus rides into Jerusalem (an extraordinary thing for a pilgrim coming to a festival to do!) depicts his entry as that of a triumphant king.17 Here is a challenge to the people to accept Jesus as God’s representative – and a challenge, also, to the Roman authorities, to recognize another king beside Caesar. His first action in Jerusalem is to enter the temple and inspect what is happening there. He creates havoc by driving out those who were selling animals for the sacrifices, and by overturning the tables of the money-changers, sending their piles of coins flying. Why? The answer is given in the quotation from Isaiah:
‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations,’
But you have made it a den of robbers.
(Mark 11.17)
The temple needed to be cleansed because the worship that was offered there was hollow. The religious authorities were more concerned to make money from the sale of sacrifices than to worship God: they did not truly love God – and instead of helping others to worship God, they were preventing them from doing so. The temple had been built as a place where not only Israel but all the nations could pray, and it was not fulfilling its purpose. No wonder Jesus’ action was seen as a sign of the temple’s coming destruction! What he was doing was to challenge people to repent and to worship God with heart and soul and mind and strength;18 but they failed to do so.
In the days that followed, Jesus taught in the temple. Once again, he challenged the religious authorities, this time in a parable about a vineyard, whose tenants refused to give the owner the produce that was his share, and who, when he sent servants and even his son to collect it, killed each of them in turn. The chief priests, scribes and Pharisees, listening to him, realized that he had told this parable against them.19 They were the tenants who were rebelling against God, refusing to give him the love and obedience they owed him, killing his messengers, the prophets, and plotting to kill his Son.
And now, some Pharisees and Herodians challenge Jesus. The extraordinary alliance of Pharisees, whose concern for purity separated them from those Jews who were less strict in their observance of the Law, with Herodians, political supporters of the Roman puppet king, is extraordinary, and demonstrates the danger that Jesus posed. ‘Should we pay taxes to Caesar?’ they ask. The tax to which they were referring was the poll-tax, and the question was a burning one. The Romans were a foreign power – what right had they to be in Jerusalem? Yet they did maintain law and order. In time, resentment about the tax would result in open rebellion against Rome. But the question posed by Jesus’ opponents proves to be a boomerang. ‘Show me a coin’, he says, ‘Whose image is on it?’ Jesus’ final words, ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God’, is a challenge to his interrogators, and one they are not prepared to meet.20
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.