Those who subtract from Jesus’ present eschatology are therefore in great danger of minimizing the mystery of Jesus’ person. It is no accident that it is John’s gospel, which contains the statement “I and the Father are one” (10:30)—note: it does not say “I and the Father are identical,” but “I and the Father are one”—that represents the clearest and most unconditional present eschatology in the New Testament. Thus the “not yet” of the reign of God is brought about not by God’s hesitation but by the hesitance of human beings to turn their lives around. People prefer not to let God get too close. They would rather dance at their own weddings than at the one to which God is inviting them.
Honorable Excuses
So Jesus had to tell in a parable (Luke 14:15-24) how a man prepared a banquet, taking care to provide a fine meal and doing everything to make his guests happy. Finally it was ready—and the guests did not come, even though they had long since been invited. Instead, one excuse after another arrived: I have bought a farm, please excuse me. I have bought five yoke of oxen, please excuse me. I have just gotten married; alas, I cannot come.
The parable is neither about the salvation of individuals nor about joy beyond this world. It is about God’s feast with his people, which is to happen now, in the hour of Jesus’ appearing. That feast is as much in question today as it was then. Those invited continue to find new excuses to shield themselves from the God who is near and from the gathering of the people of God.
For the most part the excuses are honorable. They almost always end with: “I would like to. But at the moment it is not possible!” But Jesus’ “today” says: you have no more time, because the world is burning down. You have to act now, for you have encountered God’s cause. You have to put your whole existence in play, right now—now, because you have received God’s invitation.
Not a Kantian Ethics of Duty
But—when we put it this way, we see immediately that this “you must!” cannot stand in isolation, or it will fall short of Jesus’ proclamation. In such a case Jesus would be nothing but the holiest of all moralists. Jesus’ aim, with his “today,” is not primarily duty, the imperative, the moral “must,” but the jubilee over the feast that is offered, the joy at the treasure and the pearl we can find already.
The parable of the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price (Matt 13:44-46) will be treated at length later in this book (cf. chap. 14). Here I want only to point out the uncompromising present eschatology of the parable. It does not say: “It is with the reign of God as with a treasure someone found. He buried it again, went home rejoicing, and lived afterward with the happy thought that the treasure existed and at some time in the future he would hold it in his hand.” No, the parable tells how the man obtains the treasure, on the spot: “in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matt 13:44).
So the hidden treasure of the reign of God is already dug up, and the pearl of great value has already been acquired. The feast is ready to begin, and everything depends now only on whether those invited will come.
Theological Avoidance Maneuvers
This chapter has been about Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God. The focus was quite clearly on the present aspect of the reign of God as proclaimed by Jesus. There is a reason for that: it is just this present aspect in Jesus’ preaching that is repeatedly softened, both in theology and in teaching and preaching.
It is true that biblical scholars constantly emphasize that in the interpretation of the reign-of-God texts surrounding Jesus the tension between present and future, or between “already” and “not yet,” cannot be resolved in favor of either pole. But this insight, correct in itself, is then for the most part not maintained. The principle has scarcely been established when the present character of the reign of God is soft-pedaled again. This means, for example, that the reign of God is only present in Jesus’ own person, or it is only present in Jesus’ symbolic actions, or it is only present in Jesus’ words, or it is dynamic, proleptic, anticipative, punctually-situationally present, or—here the analysis is highly refined—it is present in the mode of its expression. I can’t help it: the real result of such restrictions after the fact is that the reign of God is forced farther into the future. One need have no respect for such linguistic artistry; we can simply regard it as a set of classic avoidance maneuvers.
Not only Protestant theology but Roman Catholic as well has been laden with such evasive maneuvering for centuries now. Neoscholasticism made of Jesus’ eschatology a tract on “the last things.” Paul’s theology of the Spirit suffered a similar fate. In Paul’s writing, Jesus’ present eschatology is contained in the theology of the Holy Spirit, who has taken up residence in the baptized and is changing the world through them. But what has happened to Paul’s talk about the presence of the Spirit? All this is why it is the present aspect of Jesus’ proclamation that has to be kept in the foreground if we want to speak adequately about his idea of the reign of God.
The Humble Form of the Reign of God
Certainly this chapter has omitted another aspect of Jesus’ appearance that must be included here; otherwise all that he said about the reign of God in his preaching would have been one-sided and even distorted. Everyone who reads the gospels and lets them affect him or her has the impression that a marvelous glow lay on the beginning of Jesus’ work, a kind of bright morning light. Think, for example, of the Baptizer’s question in Matthew 11, the one Jesus answered with the jubilant cry: “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Matt 11:5). Or consider the wedding at Cana, which the Fourth Evangelist concludes with the statement: “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him” (John 2:11).
Jesus must have received an amazing amount of attention in Israel. People ran after him. They brought their sick. They came with their cares and concerns. They hoped for the messianic turning of events. They sensed the new thing, something enormous, something that would surpass everything else. They said: “A new teaching out of sovereign power!” (Mark 1:27).7
Jesus found disciples who followed him. They, too, were fascinated by his message and awaited the great overturning of things. Some biblical scholars speak of this as Jesus’ “Galilean springtime.”
There was much that was right in the way people in Israel reacted to Jesus, and much that was false. Jesus did, in fact, proclaim an overturning, a revolution. He spoke of an action of God that changed everything. But he did not have a political revolution in mind, one that would drive the Romans from the land, nor was he thinking of a messianic fairytale time in which roasted doves flew onto people’s plates. The turning of which he spoke was something different. It presupposed faith, joy in God, becoming his followers, discipleship, a radical understanding of Torah, a new community, new family. Still more, the turning of which he spoke presupposed surrender to the will of God, unto death.
The whole of Mark’s gospel has a substructure whose purpose is to show this “other,” strange, alienating, resistant aspect of Jesus’ message. In Mark the corresponding instructions to the disciples are, in fact, central—and, of course, so are the misunderstandings on the part of the disciples that precede each of them. The whole of Mark’s gospel progresses with a terrible goal-directedness toward Jesus’ passion. And it is not very different in the other gospels.