Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§ 12.6 The Kingdom of God
What emerges from this is the possibility that the understanding of time informing
the eschatology of the Jesus tradition should not be conceived as simply
linear. A tradition which could use the language of 'end' as flexibly as we have
seen in writings of the time of Jesus should not be boxed into a mathematical image
of a straight line between two points. Typology was evidently a hermeneutical
device much used by teachers of Jesus' time — that is, the recognition of
patterns discernible in God's past dealings with his people and thus enabling an
informed expectation regarding God's dealings with his people in the future. To
locate one's time and audience within the time-frame of an ancient narrative, as
Hebrews does with the wilderness wanderings of Israel (Hebrews 4) and as
preachers have done before and since, bespeaks an awareness that time need not
be regarded simply as the unbroken onward sequence of events. Is it then simply
the case that strong affirmations regarding the 'end' attest more the prophet's
conviction and assurance in God and in the future as God's, as taught from the
past, than any clarity of perception regarding the 'end' itself? The prophet expresses
his or her trust in God for the future with an intensity of faith which
makes her or him sure it will come tomorrow. 475 The prophet still 'gets it wrong'
in temporal terms, but the tradition does not value the prophecy simply for its
chronology.
What probably needs to be stressed in all this is that both Jesus' contemporaries
and the first Christians could live with the disappointment of failed prophecy
without that failure disturbing the core faith which found expression in the
prophecy. Every so often, when the strain became too much, or in particular writings,
they cried out, 'How long, O Lord?'. But for the most part they simply got
on with living. The prophets turned from contemplating the future and in the
same breath addressed the pressing issues of the present. Even writers of apocalypses,
while writing and having written their apocalypses, no doubt continued to
do Torah, to pray, and to live out lives of obedience as they saw it. The Qumran
covenanters seem to have lived constructively out of a tension of prophecy fulfilled
in their community and eschatological climaxes yet awaited. 476 If Paul is in
any degree typical, the first Christians certainly lived in and from the tension between
the already of eschatological hope fulfilled and the not yet of what was
still worked for and awaited. 477
Was it different for Jesus? It is worth noting that Matthew's tradition of the
Lord's Prayer seems to have added the third petition ('May your will be done, as
475. Cf. McKnight, New Vision 12, 129-30, 138-39.
476. Schwemer notes that 'the juxtaposition of present and eschatological understanding
of God's kingship receives fresh illumination through the Sabbath Songs: the eschatological
expectation of God's kingship on earth has its basis in the present cultic celebration of the
kingship of God in heaven' ('Gott als König in den Sabbatliedern' 117).
477. See, e.g., my Theology of Paul chapter 18.
483