(From Your place in God’s world)
‘The time has come.’
These were Jesus’ first recorded words–as we have seen–as he started work on his Messiah start-up project.
He was capping the well of history: everything before was now ‘Old’ testament; from now on it was new.
How to summarize what he so neatly ended? Old Testament history can be read as picking out shapes in a stormy landscape.
The storms are the squalls of judgement and mercy, of alienation and return that sweep across history. The shapes underneath are the outlines of God’s coming kingdom: a King, a Shepherd, a healing of waywardness, a heart transplant, the flow of ‘living water’, peace being made, a people flourishing, a spreading multitude of followers.
Then the storm clears, and Christ, the Kingdom embodied, steps into the waiting sunshine.