Crown and the Fire, The

By Tom Wright

Instead of the seven words that Jesus spoke from the cross, Tom Wright invites you to consider seven words that people spoke to the cross -- people like Mary and the Roman centurion who witnessed the crucifixion, and Pontius Pilate, who helped to instigate it. The result is a powerful sequence of meditations that will move you to reassess your own response to Jesus' death, his resurrection, and the continuing influence of his Spirit on those who follow him today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Mar 20, 2009
• ISBN: 9780281067381

Tom Wright

Tom Wright is Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St Andrews. His recent books include Surprised by Scripture, Simply Good News, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, The Paul Debate, God in Public, Advent for Everyone: A journey through Matthew and The Day the Revolution Began (all published by SPCK).

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The Crown and the Fire

Meditations on the Cross and the Life of the Spirit

TOM WRIGHT

First published in Great Britain in 1992

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

36 Causton Street

London SW1P 4ST

Reprinted twice

Reissued 2009

Copyright © N. T. Wright 1992

This eBook has been enhanced with links that include the full text for most Bible references. Due to file size and performance constraints, references to full chapters or multiple chapters are not linked. References to long passages show only the first fifteen verses. The Bible text is from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation, used by permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

SPCK does not necessarily endorse the individual views contained in its publications.

Unless otherwise noted, biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, 1957, 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, and are used by permission.

The author and publishers are grateful to Faber and Faber Ltd for permission to reproduce the extracts from ‘The Rock’ and ‘Little Gidding’ by T S Eliot from The Collected Poems of T S Eliot 1909–1962.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-281-06738-1

For Michael Lloyd

Contents

Preface

Preface to the First Edition

PART ONE

THE CROWN OF THORNS

   1.   ‘If you are the Son of God …’

   2.   ‘Son, we have sought you sorrowing’

   3.   ‘This man has done nothing wrong’

   4.   ‘What I have written, I have written’

   5.   ‘The King of the Jews’

   6.   ‘This man is calling Elijah’

   7.   ‘Truly, this man was the Son of God’

PART TWO

THE FIRE OF LOVE

   8.   The New Creation

   9.   The Call of God

   10.   The World, the Church, and the Groaning of the Spirit

   11.   Eucharist and the Presence of Christ

   12.   The Fire, the Rose, and the Wounded Surgeon

   13.   That the World May be Healed

Preface

The Crown and the Fire remains my own favourite among my various sermon-collections. This is partly because, for whatever reason, it still awakens vivid memories of the original addresses and the places and circumstances of their birth. Partly, too, it is because those sermons marked, as I now realise, a time when I was beginning to lose my inhibitions about saying out loud what I was thinking and feeling as I was reading the Bible, trying to preach it and teach it, and, not least, trying to make sense of things in my own life in the light of it all. Perhaps that’s what theologians are supposed to do in their late thirties and early forties.

In part, though, I am grateful for The Crown and the Fire because of three things that were going on simultaneously through those years, roughly 1983 to 1991, which I now see to have been important for a good deal that I have done since.

To begin with, and most obviously, the first half of the book represents the attempt to say, in popular form, what I was struggling to explore in a more academic context, and which came to full flowering with Jesus and the Victory of God in 1996: that it is not only legitimate but necessary to explore the question of what Jesus himself thought, believed, hoped for, expected, was puzzled by, agonized over, celebrated and finally died for. Growing up, I just assumed that Jesus knew what was going to happen and did it all more or less unreflectively. That changed for me when I listened to the record of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971; I realised then that the questions it raised (‘Jesus Christ, Superstar, do you think you’re what they say you are?’) were important, even if the answers it suggested were inadequate. These questions remained dormant through much of the 1970s as I worked primarily on St Paul (and got ordained, started a family, moved house three times, and so on). They resurfaced not least when I read Ben F. Meyer’s book The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM, 1978): his enquiry as to what Jesus was intending to accomplish had not featured in the theological discussions of my teens and twenties, but could no longer be put off. Here we are called, I believe, to take the full humanity of Jesus utterly seriously, in a way that is not done when Christians answer the question by saying merely that Jesus knew he was divine and had to die for the sins of the world. If that was the answer, why do the gospels insist that he told people that God’s kingdom was coming on earth as in heaven? What does that mean, and how does his death relate to it?

The second point follows from this: the meaning of the cross, in the four gospels, is not to be found by superimposing on them a theory of salvation gleaned from elsewhere, but by paying attention to the actual story, and stories, which they tell. It won’t do simply to quote, say, Mark 10:45 (‘the Son of Man came to give his life a ransom for many’) and then to treat the rest of the narrative as so much theologically and pastorally irrelevant local colour. Mark’s answer to the question ‘Why did Jesus die?’ is not simply contained in that admittedly important verse. It is given in the scheming of the priests, the brutality of the soldiers, the denial of Peter, the betrayal of Judas, the mocking of the crowds, and the final cry of dereliction—and in the accumulated weight of all these and more. And these stories are set within two other vital ones: the overall story of Jesus’ inauguration of God’s kingdom, and the enormous canonical story of God, the world and Israel. We only understand the cross when we see it as the climax of Jesus’ life-work, his kingdom-project; we only understand that life-work when we see it as the climax of God’s plan for Israel and, through Israel, for the world. Reading the gospels in this way, I found, enabled them to speak freshly, vividly and personally, giving a three-dimensional quality to the underlying theology of the cross.

If the first half of the book thus grew out of the questions about what Jesus thought he was doing, the second half was kick-started by the questions people asked me when I tried to say that Jesus’ death and resurrection were the climax of world history, the moment when God rescued the world from sin and death. In what sense could that be true, granted that sin and death seem just as powerful now as they were before? Until the mid-1980s I suppose I had tacitly assumed some kind of answer in terms of ‘well, one day we’ll go to heaven and then we’ll be free of them’, though I had known for some time that this wasn’t good enough, wasn’t biblical enough. God’s kingdom is coming, say the gospels, on earth as in heaven. But how? The New Testament answers its own question: that which was accomplished in the cross and resurrection must now be implemented through the work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ followers are given an awesome responsibility, to struggle and suffer and fail and be frustrated and yet somehow shine the light of the gospel around the world. I put it like that to ward off any suggestion of triumphalism, of the church simply charging off to bring in the kingdom in the manner of human empires. Yet the sovereign rule of Jesus, already inaugurated and to be completed at his return, must have its impact on the kingdoms of the world as well, and the Spirit is given to enable that to happen. The second half of this book thus points forward to what I have been trying to do for the last 15 years or so, working out on the ground what it might mean to say, in the public square, that Jesus is Lord, and to enable those who believe in Jesus to bear faithful and credible witness to him.

This book, then, more than most of my smaller ones, has a central place not only in my affection and memory but in the development of the larger work I have been trying to do. I am delighted to see it back in print, and hope that it will help a new generation to wrestle with the personal and public meanings of the gospel, which pose as urgent a challenge to us today as they did 20 or 30 years ago.

TOM WRIGHT

Preface to the First Edition

During the last decade I have tried many times to think my way through the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the gift to his people of the Spirit. Sometimes this has been done in an academic setting, as I have wrestled with the exegesis of biblical texts or the historical task of reconstructing what actually happened during the last days of Jesus’ earthly life and the first days of the church’s new-found existence. Sometimes it has been done through preaching. I have not been able to keep these two tasks isolated; however, I do not think that either would have profited from my doing so. One reason for this is that throughout this last decade I have been puzzling, often with some pain and difficulty, about what it means, for me and for others, to be Christian in the modern world. I have refused to accept the easy answers offered on all sides, since time and again they have seemed to me both subbiblical and unhelpful. Instead, I have come back to the central events of the church’s faith, and to some of the central passages of the Bible, and have tried to think them through at every level for myself. I am under no illusion that I have now ‘arrived’ at a settled or final understanding, but so many people have urged me to make these reflections more widely available that I am happy to do so now, if only as markers on my own journey and, if it may be, signposts for others.

The first half of the book consists of addresses given, in various shapes and forms, as Good Friday meditations. Good Friday preachers have often spoken on the Seven Last Words from the Cross; I decided to focus instead on seven phrases or sentences that were addressed, so to speak, to the cross—words spoken to, or about, Jesus. One of the things the evangelists manage to do in telling the story of Jesus’ death is to show some of the connections between the cross and what had gone before during Jesus’ life, and I have tried to draw out some of those connections in my exposition. These addresses were first given, in a shorter form, at Hudson, Quebec, in 1983, in the church where my family and I were regular worshippers for four years, and to which we still look back with gratitude. They were developed at the Church of the Advent, Montreal, in 1984, and at Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal, in 1986. I reworked them for All Saints, Headington, Oxford, in 1987, and finally for St Aldate’s, Oxford, in 1991. I am very grateful to the clergy of all these churches for their invitations, and to them and their parishes for their support and kind encouragement.

The second half of the book is more eclectic in background, though setting out (to my mind at least) a fairly tight line of thought. It begins with a sermon preached in St George’s Cathedral, Jerusalem (and again at Tabgha, by the Sea of Galilee, where the incident which it expounds supposedly took place) in Eastertide 1989. It continues with a sermon preached first in Worcester College, Oxford, and then in Christ’s College, Cambridge, in December 1990 and March 1991 respectively. The next chapter consists of a biblical exposition given to the Church of England General Synod in January 1991. This, quite unintentionally, caused something of a stir, and I hope that printing it in full here, in a wider setting which shows where it belongs in my thinking as a whole, will make my meaning clear. The book then concludes with three sermons preached in Worcester College at various times during the last five years. Once again I am grateful to those who heard the addresses and encouraged me to put them into more permanent form.

I have allowed some traces of the original settings to remain, hoping that they will add to, rather than detract from, the continued impact of what was said. I have included the biblical readings that were the basis of my reflections; if not noted otherwise, they are given in my own translation. Perhaps I should also say that I am well aware of the many problems associated with making historical claims about what happened in the life and ministry of Jesus, and am in the process of addressing those issues in other works in a different genre. I have not thought it appropriate to annotate this book with explanatory footnotes on this topic.

My thanks are due, for help with the preparation and printing of this book, to my assistant Kathleen Miles, and to the friends around the world who, in supporting the fund which has enabled me to have such assistance, have made projects like the present one possible. I would also like to record my thanks to Bishop Richard Holloway, of Edinburgh, who read a draft of the material and made helpful and encouraging comments; to my dear wife and family for their cheerful acceptance of my seemingly endless busyness; and to the editors at SPCK for their part in encouraging and enabling me to put the material into its present form. And since, indeed, encouragement is what preachers and theologians so often need and so frequently lack, I am particularly glad to dedicate this book to the Chaplain of Christ’s College, Cambridge, my dear friend Michael Lloyd, from whom I have received so much of that precious commodity over the period of its growth.

TOM WRIGHT

Worcester College, Oxford

Feast of St Peter, 1991

PART ONE

THE CROWN OF THORNS

1

‘If you are the Son of God …’

Those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, ‘You who would destroy the