From Individual Salvation to Collective Shalom (Part 2)
Exploring the Bible's comprehensive vision for salvation as the arrival of God's reign "on earth as it is in heaven" in the ministry of Jesus
In the previous post I introduced the concept of shalom, or “well-being” as the lens through which we should view the idea of salvation. Far from the individualistic notion of personal escape from a world heading towards destruction, the biblical concept of shalom embraces the restoration of human dignity, the redemption of the earth, and the establishing of justice as part of God’s reign arriving on earth as it is in heaven. In this post I will discuss how this theme played out in the ministry of Jesus.
The Spirit of the Lord is Upon Me…
The first narrated event of Jesus’s public ministry in the Gospel of Luke occurs in Nazareth. Prior to this event Jesus was baptized “and the Holy Spirit descended on him” (Luke 3:21). Then “full of the Holy Spirit” he “was led by the Spirit into the wilderness” (Luke 4:1) where he overcame the temptations of Satan. After this he arrives in Galilee “in the power of the Spirit” and reads the famous passage from the prophet Isaiah that begins with the words “The Spirit of the Lord is on me” (Luke 4:14-18). This fourfold reference to the Holy Spirit fits with Luke’s wider emphasis on the Spirit in the ministry of Jesus and the life of God’s people. And it is at this pivotal event in the Nazareth synagogue that Jesus defines what the Spirit-empowered ministry is all about:
Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Luke 4:14-21 (NIV)
In this text we see that the Spirit-empowered ministry of Jesus revolved around the theme of “the year of the Lord’s favor,” manifested in the proclamation of good news to the poor, freedom to prisoners, healing for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. Some scholars have proposed that in these words Jesus declared a jubilee year, in which debts were to be forgiven.1 This message is not the privatized view of salvation so popular in much of Protestant Evangelicalism, where God rescues individuals out of a world set on the path to destruction. Instead, it embraces a view of transformative justice that restores those oppressed by Satan and the social systems of the world that he has infected.
Later in the Gospel John the Baptist sends his disciples to inquire as to whether Jesus is truly the Messiah (Luke 7:18-23). John evidently expected something different, believing that the Messiah’s primary work was one of judgment.2 Jesus’s response to this question is telling:
“Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.”
Luke 7:22-23 (NIV)
Here Jesus tells John (and Luke reminds the readers) that Jesus’s messianic ministry was one involving healing and restoration, especially for those often forgotten by the wider society. This work is a component of judgment, of setting wrongs right and restoring shalom in the spheres where it has been lost. In a sense, John the Baptist’s apparent belief that the Messiah would “gather the wheat into his barn” and “burn up the chaff” was correct. Yet like most of his day he was unable to imagine that God’s judgment would manifest in his lifetime in the restorative work that marked much of Jesus’s ministry.
The Prophetic Background to the Ministry of Jesus
Jesus’s declaration that “The Spirit of the Lord is on me” is an excerpt from Isaiah 61. The prophet’s vision was of a time of renewal, rebuilding, and of justice. Tied to “the day of the Lord’s favor” where Jesus stopped reading is “the day of vengeance of our God” (61:2), a time where mourning is exchanged for comfort, where ashes are replaced with beauty, and where despair gives way to praise. In this worldview, shalom is restored in the land both through God’s lifting up of the poor/oppressed, and through his judgment of evil. In the middle of this vision, we see another promise declared: “And you will be called priests of the Lord, you will be named ministers of our God” (61:6). The priestly mission of God’s people is tied up with the promise of shalom in the land and across the earth. This is a promise delivered to all of God’s people, including the poor, prisoners, the blind, the outcast, and the oppressed. “All who see them will acknowledge that they are a people the Lord has blessed” (61:9). This process of making a priestly people is a part of God’s work to establish shalom and justice upon the earth. The conclusion of this vision reads as follows:
“For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.”
Isaiah 61:11 (NIV)
Like shalom, “righteousness” is a more comprehensive concept than we tend to assume, with elements of moral standing, right relationships, justice, and more depending on the context. It is perhaps best to view such language as focused on the restoration of right relationships. These concepts are not always carried through to readers who might view “righteousness” as a sort of abstract quality. But a look at the key terms in the Biblical languages makes clearer the range of potential meanings in Isaiah’s words:
Hebrew term צְדָקָה (tsadaqah): loyalty to a community (of God and of humanity), justice (including the elimination of evil and the preservation of good), justness (setting things to right).3
Greek term δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosune): judicial responsibility, juridical correctness, upright behavior, equitableness, responsibility within a social context.4
As you can see, there are several ways to define these terms. This is why “righteousness”can be used to describe God’s upright character (Romans 1:17) and the act of almsgiving (Matthew 6:1). But in each of these cases, righteousness is not an abstract quality. It is something that is manifested through actions. God is righteous because he simultaneously punishes sin while forgiving sinners. Jesus asks his followers to practice righteousness by giving to the poor.
We do a disservice to the Scriptures when we limit righteousness to abstract concepts of uprightness. In fact, it might be better for us to translate this term as “justice,” a word that has not lost the relational component of its meaning. In his book Justice: Rights and Wrongs, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff dedicates three whole chapters to a discussion of how modern Western audiences have lost the proper framework for biblical concepts of righteousness and justice. Wolterstorff writes:
The New Testament is all about justice. Or to express myself a bit more cautiously and precisely: justice, along with its negative, injustice, is one of the main themes in the New Testament – real justice and real injustice, not some spiritual counterpart thereof. In this world of ours, persons are wronged, justice is breached. That is the ever-present context of the New Testament writings. Sometimes the writers bring this context to the fore; often they take it for granted. From their location within that context they speak about the coming of justice, about the struggle against injustice, about judgment on breaches of justice, and about forgiveness for such breaches.5
We see then that Scriptural language about righteousness and about justice emerges from situations in which shalom, human well-being, has been denied. And so, when we speak of the righteousness that Isaiah foresaw, and which Jesus preached, we speak of the restoration of wholeness and of right relationships, the bringing of shalom into places where the creation has been marred by sin and Satan.
André Trocmé, Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution, pages 13–42.
Earlier in the Gospel John the Baptist describes the Messiah as one who “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:16-17). This fiery imagery reflects a belief that the Messiah’s primary role was to enact justice through the gathering of the righteous and the judgment of the wicked.
The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, 1006.
A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 247-249.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, chapter 4.