In this second live Q&A of our Lent 2025 series Jesus in Galilee, Dom and Tripp work through nearly 40 questions from the more than 2,000 people in the class — and Dom is, as promised, brief. The conversation moves from Cyrus and the economic disruption of Roman Galilee, to the misplaced colon in Isaiah 40 that quietly rewrote John the Baptist’s identity, to why Mark borrowed a Roman horror story about a prostitute at a banquet to tell the story of John’s execution. Dom defends his claim that Jesus underwent a genuine conversion after John’s death — bigger than Paul’s, he says, because it involved a different vision of God entirely — and insists that the apocalyptic tradition of waiting for God to intervene is not just a theological mistake but, after 2,000 years, edges toward something harsher than delusion. He closes with a question Brendan’s question wouldn’t let him escape: if some people are avoiding responsibility by waiting for God, and others are claiming to act as God, are we even talking about the same God anymore? As always, Dom leaves you with more to think about than when you started.
My Lenten Reflection: Are We Waiting for God, or Is God Waiting for Us?
Lent is supposed to be a season of waiting.
That is how we have mostly practiced it — as a long, liturgically sanctioned pause before Easter interrupts. We fast, we pray, we give things up, and we wait for God to do something. We wait for the resurrection to arrive on schedule and remind us that things are not as they appear. We wait for the Spirit to move. We wait for the political situation to turn. We wait for the church to become what it keeps promising to be.
I have prayed the waiting prayer more times than I can count. Lord, show up. Lord, do something. It is not always a comfortable prayer. Often it is honest in the way that only exhaustion makes us honest — I have run out of my own resources, I have done what I can see to do, and now I am telling you I need help from somewhere outside myself.
I still think that is a real prayer. I am not here to talk anyone out of it.
But this Lent, a conversation with the biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan cracked something open that I have not been able to close. He was talking about the difference between John the Baptist and Jesus. He was making what sounded like a historical point. It turned out to be a theological earthquake.
The question it left me sitting with is this:
Are we waiting for God — or is God waiting for us?
This is not a motivational reframe. It is not a way of saying God helps those who help themselves. It is a question about the nature of God, the meaning of the Kingdom, and whether the dominant posture of Christian prayer — and Christian waiting — has been structured more around John the Baptist than around Jesus.
* * *
To understand what Jesus was doing, you have to first understand what John was doing. And to understand what John was doing, you have to understand what was happening in Galilee.
The world Jesus and John were born into was not simply under occupation. It was being restructured. The economy of Galilee — small fishing families, smallholder farmers, people who had managed their own subsistence for generations — was being dismantled by the infrastructure of empire. The Sea of Galilee, a lake where a family could go and pull out enough protein for dinner, was being reorganized as a commercial enterprise. Tiberias was built on its shore. The sea was renamed for the emperor. What had been local and communal became imperial and extractive.
This was not simply poverty. It was the destruction of a way of life. And into that destruction came John the Baptist, preaching at the Jordan.
John’s move was theologically brilliant. He did not tell people to keep waiting. He gave them something to do. Come out to the Jordan — the original crossing point from exile into the promised land — and be baptized. Repentance will wash your soul the way water washes your body. Come through the Jordan purified. Come back as a renewed people. And then God will have to act.
Crossan calls it almost like divine blackmail. Here we are. We have done our part. Now what are you waiting for?
There is something profound in this that gets lost when we caricature it. John was not naive. He was working within the central logic of the Hebrew scriptures: covenant — a two-way operation, a contract. God makes promises; the people hold up their end; God holds up God’s end. The prophets were not making theology out of thin air. They were reading the news, watching history for evidence of how the covenant was or wasn’t being honored. John’s synthesis was simply that repentance was the mechanism for returning to it. Cross the Jordan. Come back purified. And God, who is bound by covenant, will be compelled to move.
People believed him. The crowds that came to the Jordan were not gullible. They were people in genuine crisis responding to a theology that gave their suffering a purpose and their participation a meaning. They were not waiting anymore. They were doing something.
Then Antipas had John killed. And God did not show up.
Can you imagine the shock of that? The crowds, the repentance, the renewed people standing at the Jordan, and then the man who organized all of it executed, and silence. The covenant logic said God would move. The covenant logic failed.
* * *
Jesus started in John’s school. He was baptized by John. He shared John’s urgency. If he had simply picked up where John left off, history would probably have forgotten him. There was even a ready-made script for continuation: when Elijah was taken up to heaven, Elisha caught his falling mantle and carried on the mission. Jesus could have done the same — I am Elisha, I am picking up where John left off, the vision was right, the timing was off, God is still coming. People were already wondering if that was exactly what was happening.
He didn’t do it.
Crossan uses the word conversion, and it is the right word precisely because it is a strong one. A conversion is not a course correction. It is a fundamental reorientation. And the question that forced it was not merely when is God arriving — it was deeper than that. As Crossan puts it: were they wrong on the coming of God because they were wrong on the God of the coming?
That is the question that changes everything. If God did not come when the covenant logic said God should, there are two possible explanations. One is that the timing was wrong. The other is that the model was wrong — that intervention was never the point, and that a people waiting for God to act while God is waiting for the people to act will wait forever, like two people before the age of cell phones who have agreed to meet for dinner but are sitting at different restaurants.
Jesus chose the second explanation. John announced that the Kingdom of God was coming, and would come when the people prepared a path for it. Jesus announced that the Kingdom of God was present, and was present wherever people were living inside it. Not coming. Here. Not intervention. Participation.
You can see the shift in the form of his teaching. John preached. Jesus told parables. A sermon delivers a message. A parable invites a response that completes the meaning. Jesus would spend an hour telling a crowd of farm folk about seeds and soil and birds and thorns — things they had known since childhood — and then stop. What is he talking about? He must be talking about something else. What do you think? The parable only works if you finish it. That is not a pedagogical technique. It is a theological statement. The Kingdom is not delivered to a passive recipient. It is completed by active participation. The form of the teaching is the content of the teaching.
And then there is the line that marks the threshold precisely: the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than John the Baptist. That is not an insult to John. Jesus will never denigrate John. It is a marker. Something changed. On John’s side of the line, you prepare and wait. On Jesus’s side, you are already inside what you have been waiting for.
* * *
Here is where I have to turn the lens on myself. And on us.
After the crucifixion, the early church did not continue Jesus’s collaboration model. They went back to John’s. Now they were waiting for Jesus instead of waiting for God — same structure, new object. The most honest thing you can say about the theology of the Book of Revelation is that it is John the Baptist theology wearing Easter clothes. God is going to come back. God is going to finally act. God is going to intervene dramatically and set everything right. In the meantime: hold on, endure, do not compromise, wait.
I understand why. Jesus was killed. The collaborating God did not stop the cross. And when the people who loved Jesus most stood in the wreckage of Good Friday, the instinct to say God must be coming — more dramatically, more decisively, with armies — was not stupidity. It was grief. It was the only way to make his death mean something other than failure.
But grief is not a complete theology. Two thousand years later, the church is still on the John the Baptist streak. We keep organizing our prayer life, our eschatology, our political theology around the premise that the real work belongs to God and our job is to hold on until it happens. I have done this. When things get bad enough — really bad, the kind of bad that makes the morning news feel like a theological emergency — I want an intervening God and this Process theologian doesn’t even believe in one! That desire is not nothing. But I also know what it looks like when it becomes the whole of a theology. It looks like waiting. It looks like passivity dressed in the language of faith.
The waiting prayer is not always faithful. Sometimes it is the most comfortable posture available.
* * *
There is something important to say here before this becomes a sermon on self-reliance.
Jesus was not taking on Rome in any limited sense. He was taking on the logic that runs every empire — the logic that organizes human life around the extraction of resources from the many for the benefit of the few, and that responds to any serious challenge with violence. That logic does not go quietly. You cannot simply organize your way past it. You need, as Crossan says, the leverage of something transcendental to shift the drive of civilization.
But here is where the prophetic tradition, properly read, has always been more honest than we give it credit for. Isaiah says: they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, and nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. We have read that as a promise about what God will do. It is not. There is no anvil chorus in heaven. The anvil is on earth. They shall beat their swords — we shall, or they will not get beaten. The prophets were not announcing a divine intervention. They were announcing a divine collaboration, and naming what human participation in that collaboration looks like on the ground.
The collaborating God is not a smaller God than the intervening God. A God who is waiting for you to do something is a God who is counting on you. A God who will arrive and fix everything is a God you can afford to disappoint. But a God who is working through the communities you build and the tables you set and the neighbor you actually see — that God’s work in the world is proportional to your participation in it. That is not a comfortable theology. It is a more serious one.
* * *
Which brings us back to Lent — and to something the lecture made me see I had been missing.
In the Q Gospel, the earliest source we have for both John and Jesus, their opponents taunt them differently. John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say he has a demon. The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, look at the glutton and the drunkard, friend of tax collectors and sinners. Strip away the name-calling and what you have left is a precise description: John fasts. Jesus feasts. And the distinction is theological, not dietary. John fasts in preparation for what is yet to come. Jesus feasts in celebration of what is already here. Lent is a fast. Easter is a feast. The question is which one you think you are preparing for, and which one you think has already arrived.
If Lent is practiced in John’s mode, it is forty days of spiritual preparation for a God who has not yet shown up. You fast so that God will finally come. You repent so that you will be ready when the intervention arrives. The practices are a holding pattern.
If Lent is practiced in Jesus’s mode, the fast is not preparation for arrival — it is participation in presence. You fast as a practice of liberation from the habits and appetites that keep you locked inside the logic of the empire you are trying to resist. The repentance is not the old sin-accounting that delays God’s advent; it is the practice of noticing where you have been waiting when you should have been moving. The prayer is not bending God’s arm but attending to what God is already doing, in you and around you and through you, which you mostly miss because you are too busy and too distracted.
In one version of Lent, you are in a spiritual waiting room. In the other, the practices are the main event. You are not preparing for the Kingdom. You are practicing it.
* * *
John the Baptist sent his disciples to Jesus from prison, just before he was executed, to ask: Are you the one, or do we wait for another?
It is the most human question in the Gospels. It is the question of someone who has given everything to a vision of how God works, and who is now, in a prison cell, wondering whether the vision was right. It is the question of exhaustion. It is the waiting prayer at its most honest.
Jesus did not answer by staging a divine intervention. He said: go tell John what you see. The blind receive sight. The lame walk. The lepers are cleansed. The dead are raised. The poor have good news proclaimed to them.
In other words: look at what is happening when people participate in the Kingdom. That is the answer to your question.
The Kingdom is not coming. It is here, whenever and wherever people are living inside it. God is not holding back, waiting for us to get ready. God is already at work, waiting for us to notice and join in.
That is the Lenten invitation I am sitting with this year. Not to wait better. To participate more honestly.
Not to prepare for a God who is coming.
To wake up to a God who is already here.
God of the covenant,
forgive us for waiting when you were working.
Forgive us for praying for your arrival
when you were already here, asking us to begin.
Make us slow enough to notice where you are working.
Make us brave enough to join you there.
Amen.
Join the Online Lenten Class with John Dominic Crossan!
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.
This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message?
Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
Preview Livestream - Watch here!
4 Visual Lectures - Each pre-recorded video lecture features Dr. Crossan’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his many visits across the Holy Land.
5 Livestream QnAs - Each week includes a live question and answer session with Dr. Crossan and Dr. Tripp Fuller—your chance to engage directly with one of the world’s leading Jesus scholars.
Online Group - Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.
Join Us at Theology Beer Camp 2026!
Look—most church conferences can be, let’s be honest, painful. Bad coffee, weird carpet, breakout sessions that make you question your life choices. We do things differently. Theology Beer Camp is three days of incredible speakers, honest conversations, craft beer, and a community of people who actually want to wrestle with the big questions. We laugh, we learn, we argue, we pray—and yeah, (and some of us) drink delicious beer while we do it. This October—the 8th through the 10th—we’re gathering in Kansas City, and I want you there. If you’ve ever wanted to join us—or if you’re ready to come back—this is the time to grab your ticket. Head to TheologyBeerCamp.com and lock in your spot: beer, theology, and some of the best conversations you’ll have all year.
