Sublime

Peace, Walter Brueggemann

Certain basic questions emerge: Jesus’ message is evaluated, not for its timeless significance, but for the meaning it must have had for the audience of his own day, who had their minds full of poverty and politics, and would have had little time for theological abstractions or timeless verities.

The crucial question, then, is this: Is there any help to be found in the religion of Jesus that can be of value here? It is utterly beside the point to examine here what the religion of Jesus suggests to those who would be helpful to the disinherited. That is ever in the nature of special pleading. No man wants to be the object of his fellow’s pit

the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that

Like Schweitzer, we shall be met by the anxious demand for relevance: how can a first-century apocalyptic prophet have anything to say in the twentieth century?

I conclude that Jesus’ action in the Temple was intended as a dramatic symbol of its imminent destruction; that this is supported by the implicit context of Zechariah’s prophecy, and the quotations from Isaiah and Jeremiah; and that Jesus’ specific actions of overturning tables, forbidding the use of the Temple as a short-cut, and the cursing of th

One well-worn traditional Christian position is to say that the Jewish background is a mass of legalism and formalism, and that Jesus came to teach a different sort of religion, namely, an interior spiritual sort. This is clearly no good.32 If it were true, Jesus would have been simply incomprehensible, a teacher of abstract and interior truths to

The Bible is replete with the scathing indictments of those who wept over oppression. Recall Jeremiah: “Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his own people work for nothing, not paying them for their labor” (Jeremiah 22:13); and Amos, decrying those who “trample on the heads of the poor as on the