I was raised and schooled in a strand of Protestant evangelical Fundamentalism known as "Dispensationalism," a method of reading Scripture popularized in the late 19th century by lawyer/politician-turned-Congregationalist pastor and Bible teacher C. I. Scofield, whose immensely popular Scofield Reference Bible was published by Oxford University Press in 1909. What distinguished old school Dispensationalism was its relentlessly literalist hermeneutic, which insisted that Old Testament promises and prophecies―even of the apocalyptic variety―should be understood "normally," i.e., literally, precisely the way 20th century readers in Britain and America would do by default. Thus YHWH's covenant promises to Abraham (Genesis 12, 15), David (2 Samuel 7), and to Judah mired in Babylonian captivity (Jeremiah 31) were yet to be fulfilled for the ethnic people of Israel and not―in conscious distinction from historic Christian tradition, not least of the Reformed tradition―in the context of the church, except insofar as additional aspects of the promise were, in the "progress of revelation," made clear via the authors of the New Testament.
Hence, the promise to David of a "son" who would reign over a "forever" kingdom (2 Samuel 7:11-16) referred to kingdom that was, as was David's, both earthly and political, a static realm more than it would be a dynamic reign or kingly rule. Thus, when John the Baptist and then Jesus began proclaiming an imminent kingdom of God/heaven in 1st century Palestine, the referent was, to the old school Dispensationalists, clearly to this promised and long-awaited political kingdom. And, as we saw in our previous post, this was certainly the understanding of Jesus' first hearers, some of whom, according to the Fourth Evangelist, intended to install him as king by force after they witnessed the staggering "sign" of his multiplying the loaves and fish along the shores of the Sea of Galilee (John 6:15). It was also obviously the understanding of the bemused, not-worried-at-all Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate who, after hearing Jesus' claim to a kingdom "not from this world" (John 18:33), nonetheless cynically identified Jesus as "King of the Jews" in a sign placed on the gibbet over Jesus as he was crucified as a Messianic pretender (John 19:19).
The problem is, of course, that this political kingdom never materialized. The explanation offered by the old school Dispensationalists was that "the Jews"―an unwitting assimilation of John's use of the expression hoi ʼIoudaioi throughout his Gospel―by rejecting Jesus' offer of this kingdom, missed out on their window of opportunity, as a result of which this kingdom was "postponed" until Jesus' second advent, at which time it would be set up and last for 1000 years with Jesus reigning in person from Jerusalem. On this reading, in terms of God's ultimate, eternal purposes, in 5/4 BCE Jesus did not come in order to serve in the capacity of king, but rather as the "suffering servant" of Isaiah 52:13-53:12. His offer of the kingdom (and its preordained rejection) was the divinely-ordained way to get Jesus to the cross in order to fulfill his role as the Suffering Servant.* Jesus is both Suffering Servant and Messiah-King, to be sure, but these roles, though performed by the same person, are done so at different times and in different contexts.
Such an inelegant "solution" to the vagaries of salvation-history betrays the good theological instincts that many of the old Dispensationalists had. But the problem isn't mere inelegance. More problematic is that it runs aground on the jagged rocks of Scripture itself, in our case Jesus' claim to be the "Good Shepherd" in John 10. Indeed, as we have seen, Jesus is the "Good Shepherd," that is, the promised Davidic shepherd-king of Ezekiel 34, precisely because he "lays down his life" for the sheep in the exercise of his role as shepherd. In other words, for John, Jesus' death by crucifixion on a Roman cross was a royal/messianic act.
This immediately raises the question of where John, and the early Christians more generally, got this notion of a suffering/dying king. Of course, at a general level one can say that it was Jesus' resurrection-vindication that precipitated a re-thinking and reinterpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus' putative relation to, and claimed fulfillment of, them. Indeed, twice in John's Gospel, the author claims that after the resurrection the disciples "remembered" what had been written beforehand in Scripture and now believed had reference to events in Jesus' ministry. The first occurs in the context of Jesus' so-called "cleansing of the temple," front-loaded in John's telling of the story (John 2:17a, 22a), where the text at issue is Psalm 69:9: "Zeal for your house will consume me." The second is at the close of John's "Book of Signs" (John 12:16), where the disciples' are said to have retrospectively remembered Psalm 118:25-26 and Zechariah 9:9 with reference to Jesus' meek and not stereotypically king-like entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
John nowhere argues that Jesus, despite his rejection by the Jewish leaders and execution by the Romans, was the king or "Messiah" promised in the Hebrew Scriptures. Rather, it is for him a matter of presupposition, and thus the claim lies implicit in the substance of his narrative. Indeed, as Richard Hays reminds us,* John 12:12-16 is the only place where John ties Jesus' kingship/Messiahship to any particular Old Testament texts. By adding the expression "even the king of Israel" to the Psalm quotation and appending the quotation from Zechariah, John skillfully hints at the radical redefinition of kingship precipitated by the historisch events of Jesus' life more than a half century prior to his writing.
More telling, however, are the various texts in John's passion narrative which are said to have been "fulfilled" in Jesus:
- Psalm 41:9 ― A close, trusted friend would betray him (John 12:37-40)
- Psalm 69:4 (cf. 35:19) ― The "world" has "hated" both Jesus and his Father "without a cause" (dōrean) (John 15:24-25)
- Psalm 22:18 ― Soldiers divided up Jesus' clothes (John 19:23-24)
- Psalm 69:21 ― Jesus, upon claiming thirst, was offered vinegar to drink (John 19:28-29)
- Psalm 34:20; Zechariah 12:10 ― Jesus' legs were not broken, but his side was pierced (John 19:36-37)
Significantly, Jesus' last words on the cross in John are not, as the Markan tradition has it (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46; quoting Psalm 22:1), "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" but the single word tetelestai, "It has been completed" (John 19:30), which fits well with his relentless emphasis on the "fulfillment" of Scripture in these events (hina hē graphē plērōthēi). It is not so much a matter of predictions of what would eventually happen to Jesus, but of patterns that would find their climax, as designed, in the events of Jesus' life as he, through his death, brought God's purposes for his people to fruition.
That is why it is so important that, apart from the prophecy from Zechariah cited in John 19:37, all the Scriptures "fulfilled" in these events come from Davidic lament psalms, which of course had reference, at the most basic level, to experiences in the psalmist's life, which made him the paradigm of the "righteous sufferer." Particularly important is the two-fold reference to Psalm 69 in view of Jesus' reported use of the same psalm, noted above, in John 2 in connection with the identification of Jesus as the new Temple. By applying the psalm's first person utterance to Jesus, John thereby points to Jesus as the de facto speaker of the psalm;*** and by doing so makes the theological point that the sufferings of the psalmist are epitomized in the (greater) sufferings of Jesus. And when one considers that each of these psalms was traditionally attributed to David, the greater theological point, by no means limited to John, was this: Jesus, far from attaining his kingship and exercising its prerogatives in traditional fashion, fulfills the role of Messiah-King precisely through his embodiment of the role of the righteous sufferer adumbrated by David himself.
Thus far John, though perhaps significant for the relentlessness of this emphasis, is not unique in his conviction. After all, the Markan tradition, quoted above, quotes Psalm 22:1 as the content of Jesus' last words before "breathing his last."**** John, however, goes beyond this to make a staggering theological claim. Elsewhere in the New Testament it is routinely assumed that Jesus was enthroned as King―to use the language of the classic coronation Psalm, when the Father said to him, "You are my son; today I have become your father" (Ps 2:7)―at his resurrection (e.g., Romans 1:4) or ascension (with Psalm 110:1; Hebrews 1:5, 13). For John, however, as New Testament scholars uniformly recognize, the moment of Jesus' enthronement is brought forward temporally precisely to the moment of his crucifixion.***** At many spots he locates Jesus' "hour" (cf. John 2:4; 7:30; 8:20; 12:23, 27; 13:1; 17:1), that is, the hour of his "glorification" (John 12:23; 13:31), at the climax of his ministry, in particular his death at Passover in Jerusalem. He reinforces this with an idiosyncratic usage of the verb hypsoō to refer, in a classic case of double entendre, to Jesus' being "lifted up" both in terms of the method of his death by crucifixion and to the symbolism this method of death conveyed: Jesus' crucifixion was the moment of his being "lifted up" or exalted as Israel's king (John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32, 34).
But how did John come to this apparently outrageous conclusion? The answer lies at the intersection of John's totalizing Christology, in which the Hebrew Bible in its entirety, both in its personages and in Israel's prescribed liturgical calendar, points forward in anticipation of Jesus and his work at the climax of salvation-history, and in his use of the classic rabbinic exegetical tool known as gezerah shavah. The key text is John 3:13-15, at a point where Jesus' conversation with the Pharisee Nicodemus imperceptibly glides into a Johannine message directed to readers of a later generation and cultural location:
And no one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so also must the Son of Man be lifted up, in order that every one who believes in him might have eternal life. (trans. JRM)
John's text clearly alludes to the story found in Numbers 21:4-9, where Moses erected a bronze snake to ward off death for those bitten by the poisonous snakes sent by God in response to the people's impatient grumbling. Interestingly, however, instead of the Torah's "put it up on a pole," John substitutes the verb "lifted up" (hypsōsen). Why? Because the latter verb is used in the opening words of the Fourth Servant Song of Isaiah 40-55:
Behold, my servant will understand, and will be exalted (hypsōthēsetai), and will be glorified (doxosthēsetai), and will be raised up on high exceedingly. (Isaiah 52:13, LXX [trans. JRM]).
By implicitly bringing these texts together in conversation, John does two things. First, he thereby interprets Jesus' death by crucifixion in terms of the work of the Isaianic servant, who made his life a guilt offering (Isaiah 53:10; MT ʼāšām; LXX peri hamartias, "sin offering" [cf. Romans 8:3]) and who, by bearing the sin of "many," justified them (Isaiah 53:11-12). In other words, Jesus' death is being portrayed as an atoning death, and those who "believe" in him receive eternal life as certainly as the Israelites who looked on the serpent in the desert had their lives preserved. Second, John's use of the verb hypsoō as the keyword uniting the passages indicates that he likewise views Jesus' death paradoxically as his exaltation.
There is one further text which completes the picture. This is the famous Daniel 7:13-14, from where the figure of the "Son of Man," Jesus' favorite, enigmatic self-referent, is derived:
I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
and was presented before him. To him was given dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one
that shall never be destroyed. (NRSV)
In Daniel's vision, the "son of man" figure is, as the language would suggest, a human figure in contrast to the beasts who represented the Gentile nations who had held Israel and Judah under their thumbs for centuries. This figure, in Daniel's interpretation, refers to the nation of Israel, "the people of the Most High" (Daniel 7:27), who ultimately would be vindicated after their suffering. The significant point, for our purposes, is that this "son of man" ascends to the throne to be given dominion, the "glory" associated with the kingship granted to him. In John's interpretation of this vision, it is Jesus, the "Son of Man" and thus Israel's representative who, having descended from heaven in his incarnation (John 1:1-18), will thus ascend and be given this dominion and kingship by God precisely through his being "lifted up," exalted, in death on a Roman cross.******
Thus Christ's dual vocations as King and Suffering Servant are not to be artificially separated, let alone separated by 2000+ years. They may be notionally differentiated, of course, but it is good Johannine theology to understand that he is King precisely because he is the servant, that his messianic enthronement occurred at the very time he was apparently defeated by the Romans for the world to see. Going back to John 10, Jesus makes it clear that the beneficiaries of this death are his sheep. Who are these sheep? It is to that question that we turn in our next installment.
*Those who have studied the so-called "Quests of the Historical Jesus" will notice more than a hint of similarity between this and Albert Schweitzer's view of Jesus the apocalyptic prophet and "Messiah-designate" during his ministry on earth prior to his future return as Messiah-King, though Schweitzer, of course, believed Jesus was ultimately mistaken in his belief. It appears that theology as well as politics makes for strange bedfellows.
**Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2016) 325.
***Cf. esp. Hays, "Christ Prays the Psalms: Israel's Psalter as Matrix of Early Christology," in Hays, The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005) 101-18.
****The sensitive reader, knowing his or her Bible, will remember the close of this classic lament psalm, in which the psalmist makes a vow of praise in confident expectation that the Lord would "listen to his cry for help" and looks forward to the time when "all the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD" (Psalm 22:22-31). By metalepsis, one can be confident the New Testament authors expected this undercurrent to be implied by the reference to verse 1 in Jesus' cry.
*****Raymond E. Brown prefers to see this exaltation as a 3-stage process, beginning with the crucifixion, continuing with his resurrection, and concluding with his ascension to God's right hand (The Gospel According to John I-XII [AB 29A; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966] 145-46.
******Much ink has been spilt over the years by New Testament scholars in the attempt to clarify the origin of the Gospels' portrayal of the so-called "Suffering Son of Man," and how this figure is to related to, or indeed reconcilable with, the so-called "Apocalyptic Son of Man" prominent in Jesus' Eschatological Discourse, which is more transparently related to the Danielic vision of Daniel 7.
The classic text relating to the "Suffering Son of Man," of course, is the so-called "Ransom Logion" of Mark 10:45 (//Matthew 20:28): "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." Despite the best efforts of the late, estimable C. K. Barrett (“The Background of Mark 10.45,” in New Testament Essays: Studies in Memory of Thomas Walter Manson [ed. A. J. B. Higgins; Manchester: MUP, 1959] 1-18), it remains implausible to see Daniel 7:13-14 as the sole background for this logion. For, while it may be plausible to see suffering in the background of the "one like a son of man" figure (representative of the suffering and exiled covenant people of Israel [7:27]), at best this suffering should be viewed as the pre-existing condition, as it were, of the figure's ultimate vindication/exaltation. Certainly there is no hint that suffering is the means by which this deliverance/exaltation is achieved. Indeed, in a bit of deliberate irony, Jesus' Son of Man is explicitly said to have come, not to be served (diakonēthēnai), but rather to serve (diakonēsai), further defined in terms of "giving his life as a 'ransom' (lutron) 'in the stead of many' (anti pollōn)." Daniel's representative human figure, by contrast, is said to be "served" (LXX douleusousin) by all peoples, nations, and people of every language (7:14). What explains this ironic reversal? One must look elsewhere.
That place, I suggest, is the text traditional exegesis always assumed it to be, namely the 4th Servant Song of Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), i.e., Isaiah 52:13-53:12. In the middle years of the 20th century, this identification was challenged by a number of prominent British scholars such as C. F. D. Moule, Morna Hooker, and the aforementioned Barrett (see now also Hays, Echoes, 86-87) on the basis of the dearth of clear verbal links between the passages. However, even though the Markan "for many" certainly looks like a deliberate echo of the striking, idiomatic Isaian use of polys twice in 53:11-12, and elsewhere in the New Testament Isaiah 53 is clearly alluded to, not least in the probably pre-Pauline tradition quoted in Romans 4:25, the paucity of clear verbal allusions is hardly probative. What Oscar Cullmann wrote years ago remains valid to this day: “It is as if Jesus said, ‘The Son of Man came to fulfill the task of the ebed Yahweh” (The Christology of the New Testament [trans. Shirley C. Guthrie and Charles A. M. Hall; London: SCM, 1959] 65. This is most striking in terms of the narrative structure of Isaiah 40-55 itself, which is concerned with announcing the coming return of Israel and Judah from exile in terms of a Second Exodus, a redemption (e.g., Isa 41:14; 43:1, 14; 44:22-24; 52:3) patterned after the original deliverance of the people from Egypt. Rikki Watts (Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark [WUNT 88; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997] 277-80) perceptively notes the following structure:
- 52:1-12 — Exhortation to prepare for/participate in the New Exodus
- 52:13-53:12 — Fourth Servant Song
- 54:1-17 — Song of Zion’s Restoration
The point is clear: In Isaiah 40-55, the means by which the hoped-for Second Exodus would come about was through the suffering and death of the "servant of YHWH," who bore the guilt the people had incurred and the consequent covenant curse that had been imposed (cf. also the same logic used by Paul the Apostle in Galatians 3:13),and thereby redeemed the people by that suffering. If this line of reasoning is correct, it becomes clear that Mark 10:45 is of a piece with the implied logic of John 3:13-14, namely, that the New Testament authors used Isaiah 52:13-53:12 as the lens through which to reinterpret Daniel's vision of the exaltation of the "one like a son of man." Jesus, the representative ("Messiah"-king) of the covenant people, would only attain to his "exaltation" and "dominion" by means of his undergoing a representative, atoning death on the people's behalf.
For a more detailed discussion of Mark 10:45, chock full of references to the scholarly literature through 2012, see my earlier post here.
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