Curtis A. Bronzan

Two thousand years after the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth, the itinerant Jewish rabbi remains one of the most influential – and misunderstood – historical figures. The countercultural message of this “carpenter’s son,” as he is called in the Gospel accounts (see Matthew 13.55) has been softened by the religious institutions founded in his name and exploited by political authorities that claim to enact his justice.J

Therefore, in seeking to retrieve his message, we must reexamine the mission of Jesus in light of first century Jewish culture, uncovering the inherent meanings behind his teaching, healing, feasting, and community, which will, interestingly, expose the grounds for his death.

While New Testament scholars nearly unanimously agree that Jesus’ death was the catastrophic consequence of his symbolic action in the temple, these “prophetic demonstrations in the Temple and against Jerusalem’s ruling institutions were all perfectly consonant with his larger vision of a Renewed Israel,” (The Message and the Kingdom, 73) which ultimately led to his untimely crucifixion.

N.T. Wright similarly argues, “Healing, forgiveness, renewal, the twelve, the new family and its new defining characteristics, open commensality, the promise of blessing for the Gentiles, feasts replacing fasts, the destruction and rebuilding of the Temple; all declared, in the powerful language of symbol, that Israel’s exile was over, that Jesus was himself in some way responsible for this new state of affairs, and that all that the Temple had stood for was now available through Jesus and his movement.” (Jesus and the Victory of God, 436) As such, throughout this – and two forthcoming posts – I will seek to uncover the revolutionary practices through which Jesus of Nazareth sought to reform God’s chosen people.

We begin by examining Jesus’ teaching, taking account of both the style and content of his communication. N.T. Wright asserts, “that Jesus was an itinerant prophet meant, clearly, that he went from village to village, saying substantially the same things wherever he went.” (Wright, N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God, 170) Indeed, we are presented with this reality early in the gospel accounts; after being interrupted in prayer by his disciples with the exclamation, “everyone is looking for you,” Jesus responds, “Let us go somewhere else – to the nearby villages – so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” (Mark 1.38) Note further this tension in Luke’s account, wherein seemingly unlikely friends warn Jesus of his impending arrest: “At that time some Pharisees came to Jesus and said to him, ‘Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.’” (Luke 13.31)

It is apparent then, even in briefly alluding to these passages, that Jesus’ message was upsetting the dominant social order. Instead of blithely writing off his teaching as inconsequential, pithy spiritual jargon, we must recognize that Jesus’ teaching was purposely communicated to and with language of the empire. John Howard Yoder notes, “The language ‘kingdom,’ ‘evangel,’ is chosen from the political realm.” (The Politics of Jesus, 28) Indeed, “[t]he fact that he was not arrested sooner was due to his itinerant style, and to his concentration on villages rather than major cities, not to anything bland or unprovocative about the content of his message.” (John Howard Yoder notes, “The language ‘kingdom,’ ‘evangel,’ is chosen from the political realm.” The Politics of Jesus, 28) While his habit of itinerant preaching may have kept Jesus’ adversaries at bay, we must ask, what was the content of this subversive message? And what was his means of communicating it?

The Sermon on the Mount functions as Jesus’ longest teaching, though the majority of New Testament scholars agree that the gospel writer assembled it in an attempt to summarize Jesus’ iterant teaching. Donald A. Hagner notes, “The ‘sermon’ is clearly a compilation of the sayings of Jesus by the evangelist, rather than something spoken by Jesus on a single occasion.” (Hagner, Donald A. Word Biblical Commentary: Matthew 1-13, 82.) The Sermon’s antitheses, wherein Jesus asserts, “you have heard that it was said… but I say to you,” (See Matthew 5.21-48) reveals that Matthew’s sermon functions for his readers – and Jesus’ followers – as a renewal teaching upon which they are to base their lives.

This is further explicated by Jesus’ assertion, “in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7.12) Note also John Howard Yoder: “[a]s soon as it was a matter of accentuating the humanitarian prescriptions of the law of Moses, Jesus became more radical than the Pharisees.” (The Politics of Jesus, 65.) Thus, the content of Jesus’ teaching is joined by the Gospel’s overall five-fold structure to be interpreted as the replacement for Torah. (See Ehrman, Bart D. A Brief Introduction to the New Testament. New York; Oxford, 81.)

Therefore, if it is true that “[t]he temple was to Judaea what the Torah was to Galilee,” we can look backwards from Jesus’ symbolic temple action, seeing that

Jesus’ actions and words in the Temple thus functioned symbolically in more or less the same way as his actions and words concerning the Torah. In neither case was there a denial that the institution itself was good, god-given, and to be respected. In both cases there was an assertion that the time had come for the institution to be transcended; in both cases there was an accusation that the institution was currently operating in a way that was destructive both to those involved and, more importantly, to the will of YHWH for his people Israel. (Wright, N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God, 433)

Jesus’ teaching, then, as well as Matthew’s purposeful five-fold structure, clearly reveal the powerful implication that Jesus’ subversive proclamation sought to wholly reform first-century Jewish faith.

Before addressing the means by which Jesus communicated his Kingdom message, we must briefly note the revolutionary conclusion of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Jesus states,

Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash. (Matthew 7.24-27)

An individualized, Western reading of this passage can miss its powerful meaning, though, N.T. Wright invites us to remember that

within [Jesus’] culture, the word ‘house’ could easily evoke the idea of ‘Temple’, and that the ‘rock’ or ‘stone’ would readily be identified as the foundation-stone of that Temple… Jesus, like some other Jewish sectarians, was inviting his hearers to join him in the establishment of the true Temple. The Jerusalem Temple was under judgment, a judgment that would fall before too long. (Wright, N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God, 334)

This insight helps us see the inherent connection between Jesus’ “ethical” teaching and his enacted, prophetic judgment of the Temple system and his envisioned replacement by the Kingdom community.

The means by which Jesus most commonly communicated was not, as I alluded to above, extended speeches, but rather the telling of short, seemingly inconsequential stories known as parables. Again, instead of being understood simply as spiritually charged advice, Jesus’ parables “are themselves front and center bearers of the message of Jesus.” (Hultgren, Arland J. The Parables of Jesus: A Commentary, 8) N.T. Wright puts it this way: “The parables are not simply information about the kingdom, but are part of the means of bringing it to birth.” (Jesus and the Victory of God, 176)

These terse kingdom-stories “made it clear that all and sundry were potential beneficiaries, with the most striking examples being the poor and the sinners,” (Wright, N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God, 245) who were most often excluded from the Temple cult, due to their economic inability – or refusal – to adhere to the strict regulations of the religious authorities. Many of these stories, it seems, were well known to Jesus’ hearers, though what he meant by them was quite different. N.T. Wright asserts, “[s]omeone who is telling strangely familiar stories and meaning the wrong things by them will land up in trouble.” (Jesus and the Victory of God, 179)

In this way, Jesus’ reappropriation of such parables functions as a form of “violence,” as explicated by David Toole:

The practice of discourse is a ‘violence’ done to things, not by virtue of men’s ideas nor though the grammatical systems of language, but by a set of rules that determine what can be stated at a particular time and how these statements are related to others. (Toole, David. Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypses, 161) Toole later argues, “discourse is ‘a violence we do to things, or in any case a practice we impose on them,” 190.

Indeed, Jesus’ use of familiar stories serves as a dis-course, challenging the common meaning of such parables in hopes of bringing about his countercultural Kingdom. “Jesus made a regular practice of retelling the story of Israel in such a way as to subvert other tellings, and to invite his hearers to make his telling of the story their own.” (Jesus and the Victory of God, 174)

One of Jesus’ most familiar kingdom stories, The Parable of the Sower, for instance, is based on a common scene from first century Galilean life. It is similar to a passage from 2^nd Esdras 8:41:

For just as the farmer sows many seeds in the ground and plants a multitude of seedlings, and yet not all that have been sown will come up in due season, and no all that were planted will take root; so also those who have been sown in the world will not all be saved.

In Mark 4, Jesus retells this common story, subversively equating it with his own kingdom-inaugurating mission. N.T. Wright asserts that Jesus’ activity is thus revealed as

a plan of judgment and mercy; a plan to be put into operation, not through the Herodian dynasty, nor though the Pharisaic movement, nor through the high-priestly activity in the Temple, nor yet in the plottings of the holy revolutionaries, but in Jesus’ own proclamation and activity. As Mark indicates, this parable is thus itself about parables. (N.T. Wright. Jesus and the Victory of God, 238)

Of course, it is this retelling which arouses the suspicion of the religious authorities.

I suppose it’s been a while since I’ve written anything substantial here, which I hope to change after this quarter’s TA duties are completed. Until then, check out a couple excerpts of a rather brilliant transition from Foucault to Yoder, in David Toole’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse, (originally his PhD dissertation from Duke, under Stanley Hauerwas):

Perhaps the first indication that Foucault and Yoder share a vision or a style, if not exactly a method or a politics, comes in Yoder’s insistence that an apocalyptic style will “free us to live without the myth of a complete systemic causal overview of how all that we do will work out for the best, because we see things whole and intervene ‘responsibly’. The axiom of systemic causal perspicuity is part of the legacy of the enlightenment in its most sanguine phases.” Like Foucault, Yoder argues that we need to resist this legacy, for precisely in it’s “sanguineness” it has proved to be a legacy of violence driven by an overly confident sense of the direction history needs to take. The apocalyptic style, says Yoder, “does us the service of ignoring and thereby striking down our confidence in our system-immanent causal explanations for the past, and, even more in system-immanent causal descriptions of how the future is sure to unfold from the choice we are just now making.” In other words, the apocalyptic style is something of an exercise in skepticism, as it seeks to destroy our confidence in traditional historical narratives…

Both Yoder’s apocalyptic historiography and Foucault’s archaeological/genealogical method assume that history is the realm of the unique and the impossible. Foucault calls this impossibility “chance”; Yoder calls it “God.” Of course, to suggest this similarity between Foucault and Yoder is not to conflate their understandings of history. The difference between “chance” and “God” is significant, since to say “God,” for Yoder at least, is to invoke the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Hence, as we will see in the next chapter, Yoder finds his account of a counterhistory upon a particularity missing in Foucault. Still, for both Foucault and Yoder, this assumption of the irruption of an impossible event into the series of events makes a politics of resistance thinkable – a politics that we now need to call, taking our cue from Yoder, the art of the impossible.

Yoder says of the relationship between an apocalytic reading of history and an impossible politics that “what the apocalyptic perspective enables the believing community do is ‘deconstruct’ the self-evident picture of how things are which those in power use to explain that they cannot but stay that way.” A community playing the victim role within a society,” Yoder continues, “needs first of all to know not what they would do differently if they were rulers, nor how to sieze power, but that the present power constellation which oppresses them is not the last word.” Like Foucault, Yoder understands that politics as the art of the impossible requires the construction of a counterhistory that deconstructs the “self-evident picture of how things are.” And like Foucault, Yoder links the demands of producing a counterhistory to the necessity if rethinking power, as will be apparent if we consider first Yoder’s analysis of the link between history and politics and then the metaphysical background of this link, as we find it portrayed in the New Testament. (210-212)

In The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder states:

Jesus was not just a moralist whose teachings had some political implications; he was not primarily a teacher of spirituality whose public ministry unfortunately was seen in a political light; he was not just a sacrificial lamb preparing for his immolation, or a God-man whose divine status calls us to disregard his humanity. Jesus was, in his divinely mandated (i.e., promised, anointed, messianic) prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships. His baptism is the inauguration and his cross is the culmination of that new regime in which his disciples are called to share. Hearers or readers may choose to consider that kingdom as not real, or not relevant, or not possible, or not inviting; but no longer can we come to this choice in the name of systematic theology or honest hermeneutics. At this one point there is no difference between the Jesus of Historie and the Christ of Geschichte, or between Christ as God and Jesus as Man, or between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus (or between the Jesus of the canon and the Jesus of history). No such slicing can avoid his call to an ethic marked by the cross, a cross identified as the punishment of a man who threatens society by creating a new kind of community leading a radically new kind of life. (52-53)

I’ve been meaning to see Gran Torino for a while now, though not out of a desire to actually see the film – instead just to see what all the hype was about. Clint Eastwood has never been too convincing an actor for me; his whole persona is in the same category as Schwarzenegger’s “I’ll be back” schtick.

As far as I’m concerned, Gran Torino continues that tradition, and includes others into it as well. For all the rave reviews the film has recieved, the acting was terrible. The story line, however, was fairly good – and made up for where the acting fell short.

A number of juxtapositions occur throughout the film, including the main character being called by his first name by nearly everyone he wishes would call him Mr. Kowalski. This somewhat recalls the symbolic nature of one’s name being changed following a “conversion” of sorts.

The town’s young priest is included in those who cannot seem to give him enough respect, and struggles to help him become a part of the church. Walt Kowalski’s neighbors, however, continually embrace him in tangible representations of love, despite his continually apparent – and rather flagrant – racism.

Gran Torino presents Mr. Kowalski as someone who had taken life in a time of war, but ultimately lays down his life in an effort to end the cycle of violence in his neighborhood, in order to “set others free.” René Girard (and, for that matter, John Howard Yoder) would be proud of Gran Torino’s concept of sacrifice, as one of Wally’s final lines is

I finish things.

And notice how be lies dead in the middle of the neighborhood.