Jesus believed that Israel had been called to be God’s saved and saving nation, the
agent through whom God intended to assert his sovereignty over the rest of the world, and
that the time had come when God was summoning the nation once for all to take its place in
his economy as the Son of Man. His teaching was something more than individual piety and
ethics, it was a national way of life through which alone God’s purpose could be
implemented. The nation must choose between the way of Jesus and all other possible
alternatives, and on its choice depended its hope for a national future. For nothing but the
thoroughgoing change of heart which Jesus demanded and made possible could in the end
keep the nation out of disastrous conflict with Rome. If the nation would not listen to him, it
must pay the consequences; but he at least, and anyone else who would share it with him,
must fulfil the destiny of the Son of Man. But so deeply does he love his nation, so fully is he
identified with its life, so bitterly does he regret what he sees coming upon it, that only death
can silence his reiterated and disturbing appeal. He goes to his death at the hands of a Roman
judge on a charge of which he was innocent and his accusers, as the event proved, were
guilty. And so, not only in theological truth but in historic fact, the one bore the sins of the
many, confident that in him the whole Jewish nation was being nailed to the cross, only to
come to life again in a better resurrection, and that the Day of the Son of Man which would
see the end of the old Israel would see also the vindication of the new (22).One can definitely see why this essay was so formative for Caird' s student, N.T. Wright in his own work, Jesus and the Victory of God. It is one more indication that in biblical scholarship, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
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