"He must reign"
He Gets Us and How God Became King
“Jesus wouldn’t have spent millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads. He would have used that money to feed some poor people or something. Y’all don’t get Jesus.”
“It’s pushing a universalist agenda.”
“Washing feet is weird and creepy.”
“‘He Gets Us’ ignores our sinful nature. It’s all about love, not a word about repentance—despicable!”
I’m sure you, like me, are experiencing a little fatigue from all the takes on (what I consider) Super Bowl LVIII’s most effective advertising campaign. For your sake (and mine), I’m not going to spend too much time hawking my opinion in an already oversaturated market, but I do have a few thoughts to share.
There’s this phenomenon that used to happen to me nearly every semester in college. I was a journalism major and economics and business minor, so my time on campus was often split between the business school and the college of communications. I liked the interdisciplinarity of it all, and I liked to think then that keeping a foot in both schools would help me become more well-rounded and make me more valuable on the job market one day.
But, no matter what classes I was taking, I would almost always have a moment throughout the semester when the material in one of my communications courses would align perfectly with the material in one of my business courses. They weren’t designed that way—there was no reason, really, that material in business law class should align with what I was learning about journalistic principles in another building down the road—but, it kept happening.
Now I know the term for those coincidences: synchronicity. And although I’m not in classes anymore, it hasn’t stopped happening. So now we finally get somewhere close to my point, and the much-needed context for all the quotes I opened this article with.
My most recent read was N.T. Wright’s How God Became King, a book that sets out to answer the question, “Why did Jesus live?”
So, when I saw the two He Gets Us ads air during the Super Bowl a couple weeks ago, then sat and watched as the opinions from all sides began rolling in during the days that followed, I was analyzing it all with this book’s question at the top of my mind. After all, the campaign is making a very clear statement about that very question, and bringing a few other questions to the forefront in the meantime: Who was Jesus? What was his life about? What was his mission? What does that mean for me?
Part of what made the ad effective was the way it made individuals from every corner deal with these questions, whether they are followers of Christ seeking to vet the claims, people who have never been told the story of the gospel, vehement opposers of religion, or individuals somewhere in between.
So…why did Jesus live? Here’s what Wright had to say.
How God Became King
One of Wright’s central claims in How God Became King is that we’ve “misread the gospels,” setting aside their rich retellings of Jesus’ life in order to emphasize his incarnation and his death and resurrection.
And, you might say, for good reason; isn’t the whole story really about God becoming incarnate to die on the cross for our sins, then be raised to life again in defiance of the powers of death and hell, once and for all?
While these are, obviously, essential elements of the story of Jesus’ life, they’re not the whole thing; Jesus walked on the earth for 33 years in between his incarnation and death, and at least three of those years he devoted entirely to a public ministry. So, what’s the meaning of all that time, so much of which is preserved for us in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Wright says this:
“...Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all seem to think it’s hugely important that they tell us a great deal about what Jesus did between the time of his birth and the time of his death. In particular, they tell us about what we might call his kingdom-inaugurating work: the deeds and words that declared that God’s kingdom was coming then and there, in some sense or other, on earth as in heaven.” (p. 11)
Much of Wright’s task throughout the work is to find balance between the themes of “kingdom” and “cross” in the gospels. One simply can’t exist without the other:
“Sometimes…different Christians have found that they want to highlight one element or the other, whether ‘kingdom,’ to validate a contemporary social agenda (and to leave a question mark as to why the cross existed at all), or the ‘cross,’ to emphasize the mechanism by which God rescues sinners from this world and enables them to go to ‘heaven’ (leaving a question mark as to why either Jesus or the evangelists would think it mattered that much to do all those healings, to walk on water, or to give such remarkable teaching).” (p. 176)
Wright reminds the reader that the story told in the gospels is much larger and much greater than we can imagine: it’s the story of an ancient people longing for redemption from exile; the story of a God who dignified humanity by his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection; the story of a heavenly kingdom that was inaugurated on Easter 2,000 years ago.
As Christians, we tend to think of ourselves moving through the world like I was in college: one foot “here,” and one foot “there.” One foot on the lowly earth; one foot in an unrealized heavenly kingdom. But Wright presents a slight, but fundamental tweak to this formula. Yes, there’s still a dichotomy, but it’s far more hopeful than you might have guessed.
After reading How God Became King, I’d put it this way, instead: We’re living in the reality where Jesus has already claimed ultimate kingship of all creation, even as we speak. We don’t have to leave the earth to find it, because it’s already here. That’s what he spent his life trying to tell us; the first words Jesus speaks in Mark’s gospel are, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1:15)
But, there’s still obviously work to be done. There’s still an ultimate vindication yet to be realized. If you bristled at the idea that the kingdom is, in fact, already here, it’s probably because you know this second proposition all too well.
Wright says that “...the resurrection of Jesus is the launching of the new world in which that justice and new creation have arrived at last, on earth as in heaven.” p. 269
That’s why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:20 that Jesus is the “firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Read below:
“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
1 Corinthians 15:20-26
“He must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” How can this be true unless he is already reigning?
“Victory in Jesus,” indeed!
A recommendation for you:
I have to thank Carson for finding this video initially and sharing it with me so that I can share it with you. No matter your opinion on the He Gets Us campaign, this short interview gives great insight into the heart behind the campaign and the organization. In any case, what a great opportunity we have as believers to pray for the millions of individuals who heard the name of Jesus (some maybe for the first time!) a few weeks ago!