Jesus as Prophet

Jonny Baker in his blog has the following ..
Walter Brueggemann's Prohetic Imagination has two chapters on Jesus as a prophet. Here are two excerpts.

It is the crucifixion of Jesus that is the decisive criticism of the royal consciousness. The crucifixion of Jesus is not to be understood simply in liberal fashion as the sacrifice of a noble man. Nor should we too quickly assign a cultic, priestly theory of atonement to the event. Rather we might see in the crucifixion of Jesus the ultimate act of prophetic criticism in which Jesus announces the end of a world of death (the same announcement of that of Jeremiah) and takes that death into his own person. Therefore we say that the ultimate criticism is that God himself embraces the death that his people must die. The criticism consists not in standing over against but in standing with; the ultimate criticism is not one of triumphant indignation but one of the passion and compassion that completely and irresistibly undermine the world of competence and competition. The contrast is stark and total: this passionate man set in the midst of numbed Jerusalem. And only the passion can finally penetrate the numbness...

...The cross is the ultimate metaphor of prophetic criticism because it means the end of the old consciousness that brings death on everyone. The crucifixion articulates God's odd freedom, his strange justice and his peculiar power. It is this freedom (read religion of God's freedom), justice (read economics of sharing) and power (read politics of justice) which break the power of the old age and bring it to death. Without the cross, prophetic imagination will likely be as strident and destructive as that which it criticises. The cross is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticised one.