Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS §13.1
hope to accomplish by his mission? 1 However difficult it is to achieve an answer
to that question, it simply will not go away. Human curiosity will demand an answer.
A crucial test of any large-scale contribution to the quest is how well it handles
that question and whether the answer offered makes good sense of the evidence
available.
13.1. Hearing Jesus
The first of these subset questions (For whom did Jesus intend his message?),
like the others, poses an immediate challenge. For our approach throughout has
stressed the impossibility of our getting back to Jesus himself. All we have in the
Jesus tradition is the deposit of how he was heard by those who responded positively
to his message (Jesus remembered). Our opening question, therefore, is
unavoidably transposed into: How was Jesus' intention heard by those who followed
him? Which also means that this chapter could easily be retitled 'The call
to discipleship', since that was how Jesus' preaching was in the event heard by
those from whom the Jesus tradition stemmed. 2
But to tackle the question that way, even if invited to do so by the tradition
itself, leaves too many other issues untouched. Did Jesus address himself only to
a small group within first-century Galilee? Did he intend or hope to call out only
a remnant within Israel? 3 How was he heard by those who did not respond positively
to his message? Was his mission successful in achieving its desired response?
Or did Jesus fail in that he won so few disciples? These are less comfortable
issues for faith to ask, but they are also issues which will not go away and
cannot be ignored.
Such issues, in fact, are posed from within the Jesus tradition itself. The
early tradents and compilers of the Jesus tradition were evidently exercised by
similar questions, and their own retelling of the Jesus tradition attests similar concerns.
These concerns come to clearest expression in an important motif in the Jesus
tradition which is too often ignored. I refer to the emphasis on hearing what
Jesus said, or, perhaps more accurately, on hearing appropriately, on right hearing.
Each of the Synoptic Evangelists independently has Jesus emphasizing the
importance of hearing one of his parables. 4 In Q, Jesus highlights the privilege of
1. See above, §4.2. It has provided the main item on the agenda on the so-called 'third
quest' since Meyer, Aims of Jesus, and whether acknowledged or not provides the principal motivation
for more or less every attempt to reconstruct 'the historical Jesus'.
2. Hence my earlier, more popular treatment using that title — Jesus' Call to Discipleship
(Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1992).
3. Jeremias, Proclamation 170-73.
4. Mark 4.3; Matt. 21.33; Luke 18.6.
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