A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [63]
The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…. Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. (Luke 4:18–19, 21)
My faithful critic’s statement is even more amazing in light of the rest of the New Testament, where concern for the poor and oppressed remains strong page after page (see, for example, Gal. 2:10; Philem. 16; 1 John 3:17–18; James 1:27; 2:2–17). Yet for him, the only way we can understand Jesus is as the one who saves from hell (a subject to which we will return in a later question). For him, Jesus is not the one who saves from poverty, captivity, blindness, or oppression, even though these are Jesus’s very words (borrowed from Isaiah) to describe his mission. I think you’ll agree, my faithful critic’s statement can only make sense, first, if we interpret Jesus within the confines of the Greco-Roman six-line narrative; second, if we predetermine to read the Bible as a constitution; and third, if we construct and solidify our understanding of God before seeking to understand Jesus, rather than letting Jesus serve as the Word-made-flesh revelation of God’s character.
In contrast, our quest allows us—and requires us—to put these precritical presuppositions aside and approach Jesus differently. Our quest invites us to understand Jesus in terms of the three-dimensional biblical narrative we introduced earlier—to see him in terms of the Genesis story of creation and reconciliation, the Exodus story of liberation and formation, and the Isaiah story of new creation and the peace-making kingdom. We could choose any of the four gospels to illustrate this alternative view, but let’s choose the least likely of the four, John.3
John’s gospel is the one most often used to buttress the Greco-Roman story. Verses like John 3:16; 5:24; and 14:6 are routinely interpreted to address a set of problems defined by the six-line narrative, namely, how to remedy the “ontological fall” and legally avoid eternal conscious torment, which you’ll recall is the punishment for “original sin” required (I suggest) by the Greco-Roman god Theos. But these verses and all the others in John’s gospel look very different when we read them in the three-dimensional biblical paradigm (creation, liberation, peace-making kingdom) rather than the six-line paradigm, starting with the gospel’s first words:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him…. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people…the true light, which enlightens everyone. (1:1–4, 9)
With those first words—“in the beginning”—John clearly evokes the Genesis story. The story of Jesus is identified with the creative Word, the “Let there be” by which all things are created. He is associated with light, the first thing that God “lets there be.” He is associated with life, the life that God breathes into the clay of humanity. The Psalmists tell us that all creation—the heavens and earth and all they contain—reflects the glory of God, and similarly John tells us, “We have seen [Jesus’s] glory, the glory as of a father’s only son” (1:14). Later, we see Jesus creating wine from water, a creative act with clear echoes of the Genesis story. In fact, just as Genesis begins with the Holy Spirit “sweeping over” or “hovering over” the waters, throughout John we have interwoven references to the Spirit and to water, most obviously when Jesus walks on (hovers over) the water, when he tells the woman at the well or the crowd in Jerusalem about the living