The Canonical Christ

Finding Jesus Again in the Gospels

In a pivotal place in Mark’s gospel, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” In Mark, Peter confesses Jesus as “the Christ,” but not the Son of God as in Matthew and Luke. Moreover, not only is Peter’s confession only half right but the half confessed is misunderstood. Jesus rebukes Peter for his misapprehension. “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind on human things and not on divine things” (Mark 8:28, 32b). 

Jesus’ identity, it seems, is not an easy thing to see clearly even by those who follow him closely. In fact, Jesus functions for many as a “personal Jesus,” shaped to a large extent by the desires of our own dimmed hearts. I think often of the meal scene in “Talladega Nights” when Ricky Bobby (played by Will Ferrell) directs grace to “sweet baby Jesus.” This is his favorite view of Jesus and the one he prays to. Cal (played by John C. Reilly) prefers “tuxedo t-shirt Jesus” who is both classy and ready to party. Only slightly less far-fetched is the massive sign on my drive north on the interstate in which “Anglo” Jesus looks over travelers with a white paternalism. These portraits of Jesus might be easy for us to critique as uninformed and unserious, although the “Anglo” Jesus certainly presents temptations for those who associate Jesus with America. (I think I prefer tuxedo t-shirt Jesus). The point is it is all too easy to make Jesus into our own image.

This is not a new problem. The church has always struggled to name Jesus’ identity. The early creeds fended off various Christological heresies by insisting on Jesus’ Trinitarian identity and his dual nature, both fully human and divine. Still, one can accept these confessions and still misplace Jesus somewhere along the way. 

I suppose there is a sense in which Jesus’ identity cannot be exhausted in our theological imaginations. This seems to be a point made with the canonical acceptance of four different accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus. After all, John suggests, all the books in the world could not contain the stories about him. There is a sense in which Christ exists in mystery and eludes our full comprehension. Also, the fact of the resurrection means the living Christ is still among us making himself known. Still, this does not dismiss the church from the task of seeing Jesus as clearly as possible. 

I want to suggest that a commitment to the canonical gospels in their uniqueness is indispensable to seeing Jesus, which is in turn at the very heart of what it means to be Christian. I also want to highlight a few aspects of our understandings and practices of mission that these gospel portraits might challenge.

I read the manuscript of a book on Christology several years ago in which the authors spent a great deal of time on the incarnation. Their focus was on the implications of God being found in human form, certainly an important topic. What was missing though was any specificity related to the gospel accounts of Jesus. It only mattered that God became human. The incarnation became an abstract principle. Missing was any sense of how or where God lived in the flesh. Little attention was paid to the accounts of Jesus’ birth, his origins in Nazareth, the emergence of his ministry in Galilee and not Judea, and his death outside the city gates in Jerusalem. Missing was a discussion of the nature of his miracles or the eschatological importance of healings and exorcisms. Absent were his notions of the kingdom of God—the ways he embodied and taught about God’s reign. Gone were any indications of Jesus’ Jewishness, his identity as Israel’s messiah, the way his life is recounted in the traces of stories like the Exodus and the Exile, or his relationship to the law and the prophets. Apart from these details, the bare fact of the incarnation becomes an empty bucket in which we might be tempted to assign our own meanings.

This essay does not provide the space to touch on all the aspects of Jesus’ life traced above, so I will highlight only a few:

1. The primary backdrop for understanding Jesus’ ministry as presented in the gospels is a combination of the Exodus and the Babylonian exile. There are certainly other stories or themes that are alluded to in these accounts: Davidic kingship, wisdom, and sacrifice. The primary narrative framing, however, is the end of exile and the possibility of a new exodus for God’s people, especially as presented in the synoptics. For instance, Matthew tells the infancy narrative in ways that mimic the story of Moses and the Exodus. Luke introduces all the main characters by way of Isa 40-66, the part of Isaiah that deals with the end of the exile and the return of God’s people to Zion in a new exodus. Similarly, Mark introduces John the Baptist using language from Exodus and Isa 40. The baptism of Jesus features Exodus language from Isaiah and moves Jesus from the waters of baptism and into the wilderness, reminiscent of the Exodus. 

   These echoes of the Exodus and exile could be multiplied, and have occupied the attention of scholars like NT Wright, Richard Hays, and Rikk Watts.¹ Seeing Jesus in this light might alter our typical language about Jesus which tends to limit his significance to sacrificial images. Jesus is not presented by way of Leviticus, but Exodus. As Joel Green points out, the salvation imagery that runs throughout Scripture is primarily expressed as liberation and healing.²

2. Jesus proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom of God. Unfortunately, a poor translation of Luke, “the kingdom of God is within you,” left many to think of Jesus’ kingdom as spiritual as opposed to physical. This, however, is not the correct distinction to be made. The true contrast is not between physical and spiritual, but between how God would arrange the world and how humans do. God’s kingdom brings both material and social differences when compared to the kingdoms of Cesar, Herod, or any other human sovereign. The reign of God is certainly spiritual, but the spiritual includes how you treat those at the margins and who is welcome at your table. God’s kingdom also includes forgiveness of sins by virtue of the fact that this is God’s reign and God desires mercy, not sacrifice. Jesus forgives sins, not as a result of appeasing the wrath of God by his death, but because he has the authority to do so, even as he has authority over demons and diseases. 

   It should also be noted that the language of the coming of the kingdom of God indicates the end of exile. God has come in Christ to rule over his people and to restore Israel to its vocation to be a blessing to all nations. Jesus, as Israel’s anointed—the one who bears God’s Spirit—is calling Israel to live in fulfillment of God’s covenant expectations. This is not a story that circumvents Israel in favor of “Jesus and me.” Rather, Jesus is Israel’s messiah who mediates God’s blessings to all nations.

3. Jesus’ life is located at the margins. He is born in questionable circumstances to unlikely parents far from the halls of power and influence. He is baptized in the muddy Jordan River, surrounded by those who know they are sinners. He emerges, not from Jerusalem or Judea, but from lowly Galilee. He lives as a wandering itinerant without a place to lay his head. He proclaims good news for the poor, eats with tax collectors and sinners, heals the unclean on the Sabbath, and welcomes women and children into his circle. He suffers the shame of capital punishment on a Roman cross outside the city gates. The challenge Jesus presents for those who would follow him is to believe that the reign of God is present in these surprising details. This “marginal Jew” is the one vindicated by God in the resurrection. Learning to view the world from this angle of vision is part of the salvation offered by Jesus. 

   Matthew characterizes this as a commitment to mercy over sacrifice. In Mark, it is the way of the cross where the least are the greatest. In Luke, this is expressed as a great reversal in which the lowly are exalted and the powerful are brought low. In John, this is the crucified one being lifted up as a demonstration of God’s love. It is the consistent testimony of the four-fold gospel, that God is in Christ sharing in the plight of those at the margins.

So much more could be said, but I have highlighted these three aspects of the canonical witness to Jesus because I believe them to be central to who Jesus is, and because they address what I see to be aspects of Christian mission that are misplaced. I want to turn my attention now to these aspects of mission.

Douglas John Hall suggests that there are two fundamental ways to view the Christian story: theologia gloria (theology of glory) and theologia crucis (theology of the cross). The minority view in Christian history, according to Hall, unfortunately, is the theology of the cross. Christians have been shaped more, he suggests, by the theology of glory in which Christ sits above the world in triumph.³ Hall counters that while the resurrected Lord certainly receives glory from the Father, this is by virtue of his self-offering love. The cross is the glory of Christ and the way of God’s being in the world. And we should be clear about this, the cross is not simply or even primarily a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. Rather, it is the ultimate sign of God’s love for us: namely that there is no human experience –not famine, nakedness, or sword, not height nor depth—that can separate us from God’s love. The cross teaches us that Christ is with us in any human circumstance and in every context. While the death of Jesus is occasionally spoken of in terms of sacrifice, it most often indicates the extent of Christ’s love in which we participate through the Spirit.

If Hall is right that most of Christianity is living out of a theology of glory instead of a theology of the cross, then our practice of mission will be skewed accordingly. A triumphalist view of Jesus—Jesus above the world in glory—will veer, if even unintentionally, into colonial or imperial practices of mission. Christ sits above the world, and the church with him, bringing all the good stuff with them. The risen Christ is not in the world, ahead of the church in the guise of the poor, the prisoner, the hungry, or the overlooked. Moreover, if our view of the death of Jesus is primarily as a sacrifice for sin, our view of mission will be skewed toward personal evangelism, and salvation will be understood in narrow terms around the status, “lost or saved,” of the individual. In turn, this view of individual salvation, which is general and abstract, divides our human experience into “spiritual” and “physical” or “material,” limiting mission to forgiveness of sins and missing the large Exodus and exilic themes of liberation and healing. Once our personal “saved” status is achieved, the material conditions of the world matter less. That Jesus came among and still appears with the marginal is of little missional consequence, the care of the poor being reduced to benevolence or a kind of pre-evangelistic compassion.

Focus on the details of the canonical portraits of Jesus allows other problematic results to be avoided. The theology of the cross would reject any notions of Christian nationalism where the church rules rather than serves the world. Seeing Israel’s messiah as the mediator of our relationship with God and the world blunts any antisemitism. Viewing the kingdom of God as the focus of Jesus’ mission should alert us to the ways that the current arrangements of the world given to us by the principalities and powers of this age are shaping human lives in distorted and diminishing ways. 

Recovery of the canonical Jesus would liberate us from narrow understandings of both salvation and mission, and heal both our theology and our alienation from the world that God loves.

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Mark Love, Ph.D., serves as professor of theology and ministry at Rochester University in Rochester, Michigan where he is also the director of the Masters of Religious Education in Missional Leadership. He worked for seventeen years in full-time congregational ministry and has consulted with congregations and church leaders worldwide.

1. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 2, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997; Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, reprint ed., Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017; Rikki E. Watts, Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark, updated ed., Biblical Studies Library, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001.

2. Joel Green, Why Salvation?: Reframing New Testament Theology, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014.

3. Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.