‘Something About Jesus’ – The Judaean Ministry and His ‘Last Week’: Gospel Stories.

The Servant King:

Jesus’s close friends and followers from Galilee had great difficulty in getting out of their heads the widespread Jewish conviction that God’s chosen leader when he came would establish some kind of national kingdom, with a king and government. They had grown up with this idea, as Jesus himself had done, and took it for granted. The Zealots thought of God’s chosen leader or ‘Messiah’ as a military ruler, establishing his power by military conquest. Many others who were not Zealots thought much like this, though some believed that God himself would defeat the Romans. But Jesus would have nothing to do with such ideas. He had not come to be that kind of leader or to establish that kind of rule. His friends must have thought Jesus’s talk about suffering utterly impossible to believe – how could God’s chosen leader suffer in any way or die…