La creación de la herramienta: INCOTIC-ESO

From all that has been said so far about what Jesus intended and disclosed when preaching the kingdom, we have seen hints of how this story bore a trinitarian face. In a human way he lived his personal identity of being the Son in constant relationship to the Father and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Beyond question, we should not

42 On Jesus as Son of God, see O’ Collins, Christology, 119–40.

43 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), 160.

120 j jesus the fullness of revelation

expect to find anything like a fully deployed revelation of the Trinity in what the Synoptic Gospels recall about Jesus. It would be wildly anachronistic to look for such a clear doctrine in the story of Jesus’

ministry. Nevertheless, there were hints of God’s tripersonal reality in that ministry, hints that (with other sources—e.g. John’s Gospel and the whole experience of the resurrection and Pentecost) provided the starting point for belief in the Trinity which would be elaborated fully in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 that all Christians use when celebrating the Eucharist.

We begin with the baptism of Jesus, related by Mark 1: 9–11 and, with some variations, by Matthew 3: 13–17 and Luke 3: 21–2. John 1:

29–34 refers to the baptism but does not tell the story as such.

The baptism

Mark (followed by Matthew and Luke) recalls some kind of a disclosure of the Trinity at Jesus’ baptism: in the voice of the Father, the obedience of the Son, and the descent of (and anointing by) the Holy Spirit.⁴⁴ The Spirit descended on him ‘like a dove’, and ‘a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased”’ (Mark 1: 10–11). Even if, according to Mark and—

somewhat less emphatically—Luke (3: 22), but not according to Matthew (Matt. 3: 17), the voice from heaven was directed to Jesus, these evangelists (and still less Matthew⁴⁵) do not seem to be thinking of a divine call accompanied by visionary elements. The Gospels do not support the conclusion that the voice from heaven conveyed to Jesus for the first time his divine commission.

The story of the baptism, in particular the earliest version from Mark, functioned (1) to reveal the identity of Jesus (as approved from heaven in his state of being God’s beloved Son), (2) to tell of his consecration for his mission, (3) to introduce his public activity, and (4) to indicate the form that activity would take (as witnessing to the

44 On the baptism of Jesus, see Meier, A Marginal Jew, ii. 100–16, 182–91. On Mark’s version of the baptism, see Marcus, Mark 1–9, 158–67; on Matthew’s version, see Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew, 150–8; on Luke’s version, see Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 479–87; and Nolland, Luke1–9:20, 157–65; on John’s version, see Lincoln, Gospel According to John, 113–15.

45 Matthew depicts Jesus’ baptism as a public manifestation for others, even if it is only Jesus who sees or experiences the descent of the Spirit (Matt. 3: 16).

j e s u s t h e f u l l n e s s o f r e v e l a t i o n j 121

Father and being empowered by the Spirit). The revelatory opening of heaven, the sound of the Father’s voice, and the descent of the (creative and prophetic) Spirit disclosed that with Jesus, the bearer of God’s Spirit, the final time of salvation was being inaugurated. Mark 1: 10 writes of ‘the heavens being torn apart’. The evangelist will use the same verb (schizo¯) about the curtain of the Temple being ‘torn in two’—symbolizing, among other things, the revelation of Jesus’

identity to the centurion and through him to others (Mark 15: 38).

The episode of the baptism assures Mark’s readers that Jesus was related to God in a special, filial way and would initiate a heaven-blessed ministry.

In Mark’s narrative, John the Baptist says of the ‘mightier one’

coming after him: ‘He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit’ (1: 8).

When following Mark at this point, Matthew and Luke add a signifi-cant phrase: ‘He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire’

(Matt. 3: 11; Luke 3: 16).⁴⁶In the event, neither Mark nor Matthew reports any coming of the Holy Spirit, as does Luke (Luke 24: 49; Acts 1: 8; 2: 1–4), who also portrays the Spirit as ‘fiery’ (Acts 2: 3, 19).

Matthew will include a mandate from the risen Jesus to baptize ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit’ (Matt.

28: 19). Where Luke clearly refers the being ‘baptized with fire’ to the fire of the Spirit at Pentecost, Matthew may understand this fire to be the judgement (Matt. 25: 41) facing those who fail to respond appro-priately to the call to repentance (Matt. 7: 19; 13: 40, 42, 50; 18: 9). In any case, the three Synoptic Gospels all envision Jesus being baptized with the Holy Spirit and engaging in his ministry as one empowered by the Spirit. His baptism signifies the arrival of the final age and the fulfilment of God’s promise to pour out the divine Spirit (Isa. 44: 3;

Ezek. 39: 29; Joel 2: 28–9).

According to Mark, the Spirit who had come down on Jesus ‘drove’

him at once into the wilderness (Mark 1: 12). Like Matthew 4: 1, Luke puts this more gently: Jesus ‘was led by the Spirit’ into the desert (Luke 4: 1). For Luke, the earthly Jesus showed himself in his ministry of preaching and healing to be the paradigmatic Spirit-bearer (Luke 4: 14, 18–21; 6: 19). Here Luke approaches the conviction of John 1: 32–3, that Jesus possessed the Spirit permanently and was the source of the

46 On baptism with ‘Spirit and fire’, see Nolland, Luke1–9: 20, 152–3; id., The Gospel of Matthew, 145–8.

122 j jesus the fullness of revelation

Spirit. Unlike Matthew 11: 25, Luke introduces Jesus’ prayer of thanks-giving to the ‘Father, Lord of heaven and earth’ by representing Jesus as ‘rejoicing in the Holy Spirit’ (Luke 10: 21–4). He depicts Jesus as delighting, under the influence of the Spirit, in his relationship to God experienced as his Father.

It is, then, in trinitarian terms that the evangelists depict the start of Jesus’ ministry. But what of Jesus himself and, in particular, his consciousness of sonship and awareness of the Holy Spirit? The Gospel stories of Jesus’ baptism, while based on a historical episode, may not be readily used as sources of information about some deep experience that Jesus himself underwent on that occasion. As John Meier convincingly argues, Jesus’ consciousness of his sonship and of the Spirit could have ‘crystallised’ before, during, or even after the baptism. Although this consciousness may have been developed and confirmed by what he experienced at the Jordan, we cannot be ‘more specific’ about ‘when and how this happened’.⁴⁷ What can we say about Jesus’ experience of the Spirit and consciousness of sonship during his ministry for the kingdom?

The Holy Spirit

Apparently Jesus was aware of being empowered by the Spirit, and deplored the attitude of some hostile critics. So far from acknowl-edging the divine Spirit as being at work in his ministry, they attributed Jesus’ redeeming activity to Satan and so sinned against the Spirit (Mark 3: 22–30). But Jesus never unambiguously pointed to his deeds as signs of the Spirit’s power. Matthew has Jesus say, ‘if by the Spirit of God I cast out demons, the kingdom of God has come upon you’

(Matt. 12: 28; see 12: 16). But we find here an editorial modification introduced by the evangelist. Luke seems to provide the original version of the saying: ‘if by the finger of God I cast out demons . . .’

(Luke 11: 20).⁴⁸

The Synoptic Gospels never credit Jesus with an awareness of the Spirit that had the intensity of his consciousness of ‘Abba’, his loving Father. He never, for instance, prayed to the Spirit: ‘Holy Spirit, all things are possible to you, but not my will but yours be done.’ Rather

47 Meier, A Marginal Jew, ii. 108–9.

48 Ibid. 407–23; see also Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew, ???.

j e s u s t h e f u l l n e s s o f r e v e l a t i o n j 123

he prayed in the Spirit or with the Spirit in him. Jesus seems to have described and thought of the divine Spirit in a fairly normal prophetic way: the dynamic power of God reaching out to have its impact on Jesus and through him on others. It took Jesus’ resurrec-tion and exaltaresurrec-tion to disclose a clearer and fuller picture of the Spirit and the relationship of Jesus to the Spirit.

The sonship of Jesus

It was Jesus’ sonship rather than any theme connected with the Spirit that Mark and Matthew exploit to structure a ‘christological inclusion’

into their Gospels. Mark begins with a double announcement of Jesus as the Son of God in the context of his baptism (1: 1, 11), and via the metaphorical sense of baptism as suffering (10: 38) has the revelation of Jesus’ sonship peak immediately after the crucifixion with the confession of the centurion: ‘indeed this man was Son of God’ (15:

39). Matthew uses a double Christological frame: the theme of ‘God with us’ (1: 23; 28: 20), and that of the obedient Son of God who is tried and tested at the beginning (3: 13–17; 4: 1–11) and at the end (27: 39–54).

The witness from the ministry makes it clear that Jesus himself understood and disclosed his relationship to God as sonship. Because it was/is a relationship with God, this means that we deal with some kind of divine sonship. But what kind of divine sonship did Jesus imply or even lay claim to? Merely a somewhat distinctive one, or a divine sonship intimate to the point of being qualitatively different and radically unique?

First, in an important passage, Jesus referred to the Father, identi-fied as ‘Lord of heaven and earth’, and claimed a unique and exclusive knowledge of ‘the Father’ possessed by ‘the Son’, who was tacitly identified with ‘me’: ‘all things have been delivered to me by my Father and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’ (Matt. 11: 25–30 = Luke 10: 22). This was to affirm a unique mutual knowledge and relationship of Jesus precisely as Son to the Father, a mutual relationship out of which Jesus revealed the God whom he alone knew fully.⁴⁹

49 See Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew, 468–78; Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X–XXIV, 864–70.

124 j jesus the fullness of revelation

Second, Mark 13: 32 (followed probably by Matt. 24: 36) has Jesus referring in an unqualified way to ‘the Son’ and, with respect to the end of the age, (implicitly) acknowledging the limits of his (human) knowledge over against ‘the Father’: ‘of that day and of that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father’.

Third, the Parable of the Vineyard and the Wicked Tenants reaches its climax with the owner sending to the tenants ‘my son’

and their killing this ‘beloved/only son’ (Mark 12: 1–12). Mark or the pre-Markan tradition has apparently added ‘beloved/only’ and almost certainly the tacit reference to the resurrection at the end.

But the substance of the parable, with its allegorical allusion to his own violent death, seems to derive from Jesus himself. A son could act as his father’s legal representative in a way that slaves or servants could not; in the parable this differentiates the son from the previous messengers. Apparently Jesus intends his audience to identify him with the son in the story—the only parable in which he gives himself a more or less clear part.⁵⁰ But neither here nor elsewhere in the Synoptic Gospels does Jesus ever come out in the open and say: ‘I am the Son of God.’ (See, however, Matt. 27: 43, where those who taunt him during the crucifixion recall: ‘He said, “I am the Son of God”’, even though Matthew’s Gospel, despite 26: 63–4, has never previously represented Jesus as saying just that.)

Three times the Synoptic Gospels report Jesus as referring to the divine sonship enjoyed by others here and hereafter (Matt. 5: 9;

Luke 6: 35; 20: 36). All in all, even if every one of the references to his own unique sonship and the participated sonship of others comes from the earthly Jesus himself, we are faced with much less use of this theme than we find in the Old Testament. In a fairly widespread way those Scriptures name the whole people (e.g. Hos. 11: 1), the Davidic king (e.g. Ps. 2: 7), and righteous individuals (e.g. Wisd. 2: 13, 18) as children/sons/daughters of God. The situation is the opposite with God as Father. The Old Testament rarely calls God ‘Father’ and hardly ever does so in any prayers addressed to God.⁵¹Jesus changed that

50 On this parable see G. O’Collins, Salvation for All: God’s Other Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 101–3.

51 For details, see G. O’Collins, The Tripersonal God (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press), 12–23.

j e s u s t h e f u l l n e s s o f r e v e l a t i o n j 125

situation, revealing through his public ministry his dialogue with

‘Abba’ and disclosing how he was humanly aware of his oneness-in-distinction with the Father.

Mark’s Gospel at least five times calls God ‘Father’—most strik-ingly in Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane: ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; take this cup from me. Yet not my will but yours be done’ (14: 36). Even if ‘Abba’ was not a child’s address to its male parent,⁵²Jesus evidently spoke of and with God as his Father in a direct, familial way that was highly unusual or even unique in Palestinian Judaism. ‘Abba’ was a characteristic and distinctive feature of Jesus’ prayer life. In several passages in Matthew (e.g. 6:

9; 11: 25–6; 16: 17), in one passage at least in Luke (11: 2), and perhaps in other passages in these two Gospels, ‘Father’ (in Greek) stands for the original ‘Abba’ (in Aramaic).⁵³The example of Jesus, at least in the early days of Christianity, led his followers to pray to God in that familiar way—even as far away as Rome (Rom. 8: 15; Gal. 4: 6). As James Dunn points out, ‘the clear implication of these passages is that Paul regarded the “Abba” prayer as something distinctive to those who had received the eschatological Spirit’: in other words, ‘as a distinguishing mark of those who shared the Spirit of Jesus’ sonship, of an inheritance shared with Christ’.⁵⁴

Altogether in the Synoptic Gospels (excluding merely parallel cases), Jesus speaks of God as ‘Father’, ‘my heavenly Father’ ‘your (heavenly) Father’, or ‘our Father’ fifty-one times. Sometimes we deal with a Father-saying that has been drawn from Q (e.g. Matt. 11: 23–7 = Luke 10: 21–2). Or else we find a Father-saying which, while attested by Matthew alone (e.g. Matt. 16: 17) or by Luke alone (e.g. Luke 22:

29), seems to go back to Jesus himself. Matthew shows a liking for ‘heavenly’ and may at various points have added the adjective to sayings that originally spoke only of ‘your Father’ or ‘my Father’

(e.g. Matt. 6: 32). The same evangelist may at times have inserted

52 See G. D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of St Paul (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994), 410–12; Meier, A Marginal Jew, ii. 358–9.

53 When reporting Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane, Matthew and Luke do not reproduce the Markan ‘Abba’, just as they drop other Aramaic expressions that Mark records (Mark 3: 17; 5: 41; 7: 11, 34; 15: 34). The only Markan Aramaisms that survive in either Matthew and Luke are ‘Hosanna’ (Mark 11: 9–10 = Matt. 21: 9) and ‘Golgotha’ (Mark 15: 22 = Matt. 27: 33).

54 J. D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making (2nd edn. London: SCM Press, 1989), 27.

126 j jesus the fullness of revelation

‘Father’ into his sources (e.g. Matt. 6: 26; 10: 29, 32–3). Even dis-counting a number of such cases as not directly derived from Jesus himself, we can be sure that he spoke fairly frequently of God as

‘Father’ or ‘Abba’.

Further, Jesus called those who did God’s will ‘my brother and sister, and mother’, but not ‘my father’ (Mark 3: 31–5). He invited his hearers to recognize God as their loving, merciful Father. However, being his brothers and sisters did not put others on the same level with him as sons and daughters of God. Jesus distinguished between

‘my’ Father and ‘your’ Father. He did not invite his disciples to share with him an identical relationship of sonship. If Jesus did say ‘Our Father’ (Matt. 6: 9, unlike Luke 11: 2 where there is no ‘our’), it was in a prayer he proposed for others (‘pray then like this’—Matt. 6: 9).

When he invited his hearers to accept a new relationship with God as Father, it was a relationship that depended on his (Luke 22: 29–30) and differed from his. Was he aware that his sonship differed so much that it was quite distinctive and even unique?

At least we can say this: when Jesus applied the language of divine sonship to himself, he filled it with meaning that went beyond the level of his merely being a man like Adam made in the divine image (Luke 3: 38), or someone perfectly sensitive to the Holy Spirit (Luke 4:

1, 14, 18), or someone bringing God’s peace (Luke 2: 14; 10: 5–6), albeit in his own way (Matt. 10: 34), or even a/the Davidic king (Luke 1: 32) who would in some way restore the kingdom of Israel. He not only spoke like ‘the Son’ but also acted like ‘the Son’ in knowing and revealing the truth of God, in changing the divine law, in forgiving sins (outside the normal channels of sacrifices in the Temple and the ministry of the levitical priesthood), in disclosing himself as the one through whom others could become children of God and who would at the end act as divine judge for all people. All of this clarifies, as we saw above, the charge of blasphemy brought against Jesus at the end (Mark 14: 64); he had given the impression of claiming to stand on a level with God and to enjoy a unique filial relationship with God.

Inasmuch as Jesus experienced and expressed himself as the Son, this means that YHWH of the Old Testament was now revealed to be the Father. The revelation of the Son necessarily implied the revela-tion of the Father.

The highpoint of this chapter has been establishing the trinitarian face of the kingdom that Jesus preached and inaugurated. Once again j e s u s t h e f u l l n e s s o f r e v e l a t i o n j 127

I should warn against being anachronistic and reading the revelation of the Trinity too clearly and too fully into the story of Jesus’ ministry.

Nevertheless, that ministry exhibits him living out in a human way his filial relationship and mission as One sent/coming from the Father and acting in the power of the Holy Spirit.

We must complete our account of the self-manifestation of the tripersonal God in Christ, by reflecting on his crucifixion, resurrec-tion, exaltaresurrec-tion, and sending of the Holy Spirit. But before doing that, we need to reflect on the appropriate language to use about the fullness of revelation in Christ.