Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

that a day would come when the twelve tribes of Israel would be reconstituted
     to once again form a single, united nation. The prophets had predicted it: “I shall
     restore the fortunes of my people, Israel and Judah, says the Lord, and I shall bring
     them back to the land that I gave their ancestors and they shall take possession of
     it” (Jeremiah 30:3). By designating the Twelve and promising that they would “sit
     on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew 19:28 | Luke 22:28–30),
     Jesus was signaling that the day they had been waiting for, when the Lord of Hosts
     would “break the yoke from off the neck” of the Jews and “burst their bonds” (Jeremiah
     30:8), had arrived. The restoration and renewal of the
true
nation of Israel, which John the Baptist had preached, was finally at hand. The Kingdom
     of God was here.
    This was a daring and provocative message. For as the prophet Isaiah warned, God would
     “gather the scattered people of Israel and the dispersed people of Judah” for a single
     purpose:
war
. The new, reconstituted Israel will, in the words of the prophet, “raise a signal-banner
     to the nations,” it will “swoop down on the backs of the Philistines in the west”
     and “plunder the people of the east.” It will repossess the land God gave the Jews
     and wipe from it forever the foul stench of foreign occupation (Isaiah 11:11–16).
    The designation of the Twelve is, if not a call to war, an admission of its inevitability,
     which is why Jesus expressly warned them of what was to come: “If anyone wishes to
     follow me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).
     This is not the statement of self-denial it has so often been interpreted as being.
     The cross is the punishment for sedition, not a symbol of self-abnegation. Jesus was
     warning the Twelve that their status as the embodiment of the twelve tribes that will
     reconstitute the nation of Israel and throw off the yoke of occupation would rightly
     be understood by Rome as treason and thus inevitably lead tocrucifixion. It was an admission that Jesus frequently made for himself. Over and
     over again, Jesus reminded his disciples of what lay ahead for him: rejection, arrest,
     torture, and execution (Matthew 16:21, 17:22–23, 20:18–19; Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:33;
     Luke 9:22, 44, 18:32–33). It could be argued that the evangelists, who were writing
     decades after the events they described, knew that Jesus’s story would end on a cross
     in Golgotha, and so they put these predictions into Jesus’s mouth to prove his prowess
     as a prophet. But the sheer volume of Jesus’s statements about his inevitable capture
     and crucifixion indicates that his frequent self-prophecies may be historical. Then
     again, it does not take a prophet to predict what happens to someone who challenges
     either the priestly control of the Temple or the Roman occupation of Palestine. The
     road ahead for Jesus and the Twelve had been made manifest by the many messianic aspirants
     who came before him. The destination was clear.
    That explains why Jesus went to such lengths to hide the truth about the Kingdom of
     God from all but his disciples. Jesus recognized that the new world order he envisioned
     was so radical, so dangerous, so revolutionary, that Rome’s only conceivable response
     to it would be to arrest and execute them all for sedition. He therefore consciously
     chose to veil the Kingdom of God in abstruse and enigmatic parables that are nearly
     impossible to understand. “The secret of the Kingdom of God has been given to you
     to know,” Jesus tells his disciples. “But to outsiders, everything is said in parables
     so that they may see and not perceive, they may hear and not understand” (Mark 4:11–12).
    What, then, is the Kingdom of God in Jesus’s teachings? It is at once the joyous wedding
     feast within the king’s royal hall, and the blood-soaked streets outside its walls.
     It is a treasure hidden in a field; sell all you have and buy that field (Matthew
     13:44). It is a pearl tucked inside a shell; sacrifice everything to seek out that
     shell (Matthew 13:45). It is a mustard seed—the smallest of seeds—buried in soil.
     One day soon it will bloom into a majestic tree, andbirds shall nest in its branches (Matthew 13:31–32). It is a net drawn from the sea,
     bursting with fish both good and bad; the good shall be kept, the bad discarded