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Jesus also appeared as a teacher or rabbi. His call to repentance and faith was not only made implicitly by proclaiming the imminence of God's reign or rule, and explicitly as an imperative summons, but also – -- and likewise implicitly – -- by definitively interpreting the will of God. "You have heard it said ... , but I say to you."

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The basic motif expressed by Jesus' proclamation and teaching of the reign or rule of God and his summons to repentance and faith, as well as by his implicit claim for their decisive significance, is the motif of God's unconditional love as the gift and demand of authentic existence in faith and in returning love for God and for all things in God. Thus the earliest traditions present Jesus formally as the eschatological kairos and materially as the explicit gift and demand of God's unconditional love. Implicitly, then, they present him as the Liberator of God – -- the one decisively through whom we are explicitly authorized to exist in and for freedom, which is to say, in faith in God's love and in returning love for God and all whom God loves, and thus for the freedom of all others as ourselves.

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