The Surprising Jesus

In the last blog posting I made brief reference to Philip Yancey’s book, The Jesus I Never Knew (Zondervan, 1995). I strongly encourage readers, Christians and non-Christian alike, to pick it up. Ideally one would read this particular book in parallel with one or more of the Gospels. Yancey, a journalist by trade, set out to understand Jesus by comparing the Jesus that he learned about in Sunday School, and how Jesus has been portrayed in movies to a public audience, compared with the Jesus that emerges from the four Gospels in the Bible.

I followed my own advice of reading each Gospel end-to-end so that Jesus’ life would not be a collection of index cards creating a mosaic of Jesus anecdotes and godly sayings. Then I followed with a second read of Yancey’s book. In The Jesus I Never Knew, Yancey zeros in on Jesus profile as it plays out particularly in the narratives associated with the Temptations by Satan in the desert, the Sermon on the Mount (the Beatitudes in particular), a sampling of His miracles, Holy Week, Crucifixion, Resurrection and His Ascension. He discovers, as may you, that Jesus is not nearly as predictable as we have tended to believe or as we would prefer Him to be.

Christians and the Church have often drifted toward the shallow end of the pool by subtly recasting Jesus to fit our needs at the time. When I was a rebellious high school student in the early 70’s I recall defending my new style of dress and my longer hair by declaring to my parents that “Jesus had long hair. Jesus wore sandals.” The Jesus I was conjuring out of the air may well have been all supportive of me, and of course, He would never have confronted me about my lack of respect for my parents or the variety of Pharisaical attitudes and hypocritical behaviors I was cultivating at the time. But the Jesus we find in the Gospels is much more complex and much less accommodating. Yancey summarizes (p. 82):

The personality that emerges from the Gospels differs radically from the image of Jesus I grew up with, an image I now recognize in some of the older Hollywood films about Jesus. In those films, Jesus recites his lines evenly and without emotion. He strides through life as the one calm character among a cast of flustered extras. Nothing rattles him. He dispenses wisdom in flat, measured tones. He is, in short, the Prozac Jesus.

In contrast, the Gospels present a man who has such a charisma that people will sit three days straight, without food, just to hear his riveting words. He seems excitable, impulsively “moved with compassion” or “filled with pity.” The Gospels reveal a range of Jesus’ emotional responses: sudden sympathy for a person with leprosy, exuberance over his disciples’ successes, a blast of anger at coldhearted legalists, grief over an unreceptive city, and then those awful cries of anguish in Gethsemane and on the cross. He has nearly inexhaustible patience with individuals but no patience at all with institutions and injustice.

Yancey explores the ongoing tension played out in Jesus’ ministry. Sometimes it comes out in his character as true Man and true God. In other cases he is frustrated and seemingly inpatient with his closest followers who never seemed to “get it” until after the Resurrection and Pentecost. What seems clear to believers today in reading of the Gospels was apparently not clear to his disciples. How could this be? Did he put blinders on them? Was he not a great communicator? Were they just pathetically dense? Who hasn’t wished that Jesus’ story was just more tightly woven without all the surprises? How appealing it would be to have a story line both predictable and so powerful no one could miss it and not believe. Why not have a story where Jesus utterly triumphs over evil and explains all so that only those truly bedeviled would deny him and turn away? But that’s not Jesus and that’s not His story.

Yancey concludes that it is because God insists on human freedom. “[He] granted us the power to live as though he did not exist, to spit in his face, to crucify him. … Why does God content himself with the slow, unencouraging way of making righteousness grow rather than avenging it? That’s how love is. Love has its own power, the only power ultimately capable of conquering the human heart” (p.78). And as you have heard, God is Love itself.

You will surprise yourself with what you discover about Jesus if you set aside some time to dig back into the Gospels to get reacquainted with Him.

In Jesus name,

Ken Bickel