There are three chapters dealing with the ‘stories of the kingdom’, categorizing them as follows: announcement; invitation, welcome, challenge and summons; and judgment and vindication. The overview of these chapters will be somewhat cursory in places.
Wright’s aim in these chapters is, at the level of theory, to challenge the view that the non-parabolic teaching of Jesus is something other than ‘story’, and at the level of content, to put forward a new reading of what Jesus meant by Israel’s god becoming king. This ‘new reading’ of the story relies on two main contentions:
first, that when Jesus spoke of the ‘reign’ or ‘kingdom’ of Israel’s god, he was deliberately evoking an entire story-line that he and his hearers knew quite well; second, that he was retelling this familiar story in such a way as to subvert and redirect its normal plot. (199)
At this point Wright summarizes the argument of chapters six to ten:
First (the present chapter), Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom is best seen as evoking the story of Israel and her destiny, in which that destiny was now rapidly approaching its fulfilment.
Second (chapter 7), the story therefore summoned Israel to follow Jesus in his new way of being the true people of god.
Third (chapter 8), the story included a great, climactic ending: judgment would fall upon the impenitent, but those who followed the true path would be vindicated.
Fourth (chapter 9), the story generated a new construal of Israel’s traditional symbols. Like all readjustment of worldview-symbols, this was seen as traitorous, and involved Jesus in conflict with those who had alternative agendas, both official and unofficial.
Fifth (chapter 10), this retelling of the story, and readjustment of the symbols, betokened Jesus’ fresh answers to the key worldview questions. Behind his conflict with rival agendas, Jesus discerned, and spoke about, a greater battle, in which he faced the real enemy. Victory over this enemy, Jesus claimed, would constitute the coming of the kingdom. (200, paragraph breaks added)
We are also offered a ‘preliminary version’ of the full narrative that results from Jesus’ subversive retelling of the basic Jewish story:
We may anticipate here the completion of this Part, and set out a preliminary version of the full narrative that results from it all. Jesus was announcing that the long-awaited kingdom of Israel’s god was indeed coming to birth, but that it did not look like what had been imagined. The return from exile, the defeat of evil, and the return of YHWH to Zion were all coming about, but not in the way Israel had supposed. The time of restoration was at hand, and people of all sorts were summoned to share and enjoy it; but Israel was warned that her present ways of going about advancing the kingdom were thoroughly counter-productive, and would result in a great national disaster. Jesus was therefore summoning his hearers to be Israel in a new way, to take up their proper roles in the unfolding drama; and he assured them that, if they followed him in this way, they would be vindicated when the great day came. In the course of all this, he was launching the decisive battle with the real satanic enemy – a different battle, and a different enemy, from those Israel had envisaged. The conflicts generated by his proclamation were the inevitable outworking of this battle, which would reach its height in events yet to come, events involving both Jesus himself and the Temple. (201)
The rest of this chapter considers Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom in relation to Jewish expectations regarding the kingdom of God, the use of the term in the early church, and modern views on the matter, both scholarly and popular.
1. Jewish expectation consisted of three basic elements: Israel would ‘really’ return from exile; YHWH would return to Zion; and Israel’s enemies would be defeated. Wright here repeats the argument about apocalyptic: many of Jesus’ contemporaries were expecting a major upheaval in the world and a radical change of circumstances, but not ‘cosmic meltdown’ (Borg’s phrase). Eschatology in this context has in view ‘the climax of Israel’s history, involving events for which end-of-the-world lnaguage is the only set of metaphors adequate to express the significance of what will happen, but resulting in a new and quite different phrase within space-time history’ (208). The view of Mack and Crossan that Jesus proclaimed a non-apocalyptic, Hellenistic sapiential ‘kingdom’ is dismissed.
2. In the early church the phrase ‘kingdom of God’ retained the major features that it had in Judaism, but ‘a substantial redefinition has taken place within this basic Jewish framework’ (215). Wright lists four main modifications: i) the kingdom is now said to belong not only to God but to the Messiah; ii) a significant alteration in the chronology appears here in that the kingdom of the Messiah is already established while the kingdom of God is yet to come; iii) Judaism never came to the belief that the kingdom was already present; and iv) at the level of worldview ‘the regular Jewish symbols are completely missing. The explanation for this last point lies in the fact that a new phase or ‘Act’ has been introduced into the story that makes the old markers in appropriate.
Specifically, the new Act self-consciously sees itself as the time when the covenant purpose of the creator, which always envisaged the redemption of the whole world, moves beyond the narrow confines of a single race (for which national symbols were of course appropriate), and calls into being a trans-national and trans-cultural community. Further, it sees itself as the time when the creator, the covenant god himself, has returned to dwell with his people, but not in a Temple made with hands. Once we understand how the whole story works, we can understand how it is that the actors have been given new lines to speak, that new praxis is now deemed appropriate, and that new symbols have been generated which perform, mutatis mutandis, the equivalent functions within the new Act to those performed by the former symbols within the earlier Act. (219)
3. Some consideration is given to the views of other scholars (Schweitzer, Bultmann, Dodd, Jeremias, Ladd, et al.) regarding politics, timing, distance, christology and ecclesiology as focal points in the debate over the meaning of ‘kingdom of God’.
Wright concludes this section first by noting the particularity and contingency of the summary announcements of the kingdom of God in the gospels, then by demonstrating how many of the parables should be understood as a retelling of the story that is implicit in the summaries. So, for example, he argues that the parable of the sower (Mk.4:1-20) does two things:
Using imagery and structure which evoked ‘apocalyptic’ retellings of Israel’s story, the parable tells the story of Israel, particularly the return from exile, with a paradoxical conclusion, and it tells the story of Jesus’ ministry, as the fulfilment of that larger story, with a paradoxical outcome. (230)
Three pieces of evidence are given to support the argument that this parable is a retelling of the story of Israel: i) its narrative mode is apocalyptic (the particular parallel is with Dan.2); ii) there is a ‘fairly close parallel’ with the parable of the wicked tenants; and iii) within second-temple Judaism the ‘seed’ is a figure for the ‘remnant’ who will return when the exile is finally over. So a story about the sowing of the seed is a story about a remnant that is now returning. The sowing of the seed creates the true Israel: it is the word described in Is.55:10-13, which will cause the people to be ‘led back in peace’ (Is.55:12). Much of the seed will go to waste, many people will remain in exile – like the wicked tenants, subject to judgment; but the eventual harvest will be abundant.
Wright offers a similar treatment of the shorter parables in Mark 4:21-34, arguing that they should also been seen as dependent upon the larger narrative structure of Jesus’ retelling of Israel’s story (239-243).
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