QUOTE : Jesus was challenging his contemporaries to live as the new covenant people, the returned-from-exile people, the people whose hearts were renewed by the word and work of the living God. Call Jesus a “social prophet” if you will; but his social prophecy grew directly out of his sense of what time it was. His critique of, and warning to, his contemporaries, and his challenge to a different way of being Israel, were based on his firm belief that he was charged by Israel’s God with inaugurating the kingdom.