John, then, is certainly not an exception to the generalization that all four gospels bring the kingdom and the cross into the closest possible combination. One could in principle go back to the synoptics and show passage after passage in which the same is true. Think of the kingdom agenda of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), which itself points

But the failure of Christianity is a modern myth, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of telling the proper story of church history, which of course has plenty of muddle and wickedness, but also far more than we normally imagine of love and creativity and beauty and justice and healing and education and hope.

Here is the point: “You didn’t know the moment when God was visiting you.”

In fact, the ascension, for many people, implies Jesus’s absence, not his universal presence and sovereign rule.

But—perhaps to our surprise!—many people, reading the gospels today, read them not only as if that backstory did not exist, but as if there was a different backstory altogether.

Mark’s Jesus goes about doing and saying things that declare that Israel’s God is now becoming king—Israel’s dream come true.

The gospel writers saw the events concerning Jesus, particularly his kingdom-inaugurating life, death, and resurrection, not just as isolated events to which remote prophets might have distantly pointed. They saw those events as bringing the long story of Israel to its proper goal,

But there is no sense that this “age to come” is “eternal” in the sense of being outside space, time, and matter. Far from it.

And, to put it the other way around, God rescues his people from their sins, through the work of the Isaianic “servant,” precisely in order to establish his rule, his own very different kind of power, in all the world.