Where do the Gospels fit in the big story? (Original Jesus, Chapter 9)

The Gospels should not be taken as free-standing compositions, to be read as though nothing else existed. They only make sense as the completion, the final chapter, of a great drama that had been running for two millennia.
(Original Jesus, 119)

As we explored in chapter 3, the Jewish world -- in which Jesus lived, the Gospels were written and out of which the church was born -- was a storytelling culture. Stories were not just creative ways of illustrating or explaining abstract truth. Stories meant business.

There were lots of little stories (from the Old Testament and other Jewish literature) that can be summed up into one basic story: "The pagan nations would trample upon Israel, enslaving and oppressing the people. Then Yahweh, her God, would remember the promises that he had made, and would act dramatically within history to rescue Israel, to set the people free, to show the world that he was the true God and they were his true people." (p. 111) The most famous of these stories was the Exodus. Then, there was also the story of Esther, and of Judas Maccabeus. They celebrated feasts every year (still observed by many devout Jews today) to help them remember these stories: Passover for the Exodus, Purim for Esther, Hanukkah for Maccabeus.

And they told the stories in such a way to remind themselves that God would again act in history. They saw themselves in the stories, and God coming again to rescue and liberate once more. Different groups put their own spin on the story. We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls writings that the Essenes retold this story of God and Israel so as to include themselves (and really, only themselves, not those "other" Jews) in it -- as the true Israel through which God would fulfill prophecy. Other groups had their own way of telling it.

The way that God would come and act would often be stated through powerful apocolyptic imagery (example: description of Ancient of Days in Daniel 7) -- a new world order was coming, in which God himself would come and sort things out.

Jesus (in his life, death, resurrection) was the fulfillment and climax of all those stories and prophecies. The Gospels, according to Wright, tell "how the scriptures were fulfilled, how the story reached its climax, how God's long and chequered relationship with Israel, and with the world, was finally sorted out." (p. 120). This is a big story. Jesus' telling of it made those around him uncomfortable. And if we let it, it will make us uncomfortable as well. We listen by engaging the Gospels, finding that our worldview may need some adjusting. We may even find that our "would-be Christian worldviews" need to once more be remade around him (see p. 124). Not around the Jesus of our imagination or whim -- but the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Jesus of history. Yes he is alive and present in our experience today. But our religious experience is rooted in what we know of him from the Gospels. This Jesus stands at the turning point of history beckoning us to follow him, to join him in bringing the story, the good news, to the present.

Embedded Questions:

• What do the Essenes have in common with early Christianity?
• Where do we fit within the "big story" of God at work, in the cosmos, in the world, in Israel, in Christ?
• In what ways is the Jesus we find in the Gospels different than the Jesus we hope to find in our culture? In our churches?
• What does it mean to "remake our worldviews around Jesus"?