The following is an excerpt from Besides the Bible – 100 Books That Have, Should or Will Change Christian Culture, which will be released this month by Biblica. The book was authored by Dan Gibson, Jordan Green and John Pattison of the Burnside Writers Collective, and features guest essays from Donald Miller, William P. Young, Jonathan Acuff, and Phyllis Tickle, among many others. You can order the book from Amazon or, our favorite, Powells.com, and you can learn more about the book at BesidesTheBible.com.
What Jesus Meant, by Gary Wills
Essay by Penny Carothers
In college I was drawn to Jesus the radical—the champion of the underdog and the Jesus of liberation theology. Except for one little catch: I wasn’t drawn as much to Jesus as I was to the way he lined up with what I already believed. A theological system is far less challenging than the person of Jesus.
Other people like slogans, too. I know some folks who wear a lot of black who like to say that Jesus was homeless and a vagabond. So, too, are they. Others I know base their life on the belief that the Christian faith is the system by which we should run not only our lives, but our government.
Gary Wills takes issue with all of us.
In What Jesus Meant, Wills repeatedly uses the original language of the text and copious amounts of Scripture to demonstrate that using Jesus to advance a political or religious agenda—even if we believe it’s an agenda God gave us—is nothing less than idolatry. Wills goes deep into the life of Jesus, examining his life, his words, and his radical, anti-hierarchical message. He brings to the page a Jesus who cannot be hemmed in by any theology, political system, or worldview. He brings us the essence of Jesus’s message, and it’s not easy to hear.
“In the gospel of Jesus, love is everything. But this love is not a dreamy, sentimental, gushy thing. It’s a radical love, exigent, searing, terrifying.”
So, too, is Wills’ book. Someone wiser than me said the closer we get to Jesus, the more obvious it is our efforts and our actions may not reflect the vision and life of Jesus. This idea is also the point of Wills’ book, forming the base of his most basic argument: Christ is not a Christian.
But page after page, we can’t help but ask, if he’s not a Christian then what is he?
By quoting Jesus himself, Wills shows us a Savior we can’t easily categorize: Christ is a “divine mystery walking among men” who continually confronted the customs of his day. He is radically anti-hierarchical and egalitarian; he eschews any form of politics or religion. (In fact, it was religion and politics that killed him.) And yet, like us, his followers continually tried to hem him in, to capture a message they could systematize or use to their advantage. Despite our desire for boundaries we can understand, Jesus’ actions went against everything his followers—and their religious and social context—perceived as “normal.” Jesus is continually, in the words of Dostoevsky, “exceptional, vague, and enigmatic.” And so, like the disciples, we find that it is virtually impossible to follow in Christ’s footsteps; as Wills says, “we’d have to act like gods ourselves, which he expressly forbids.”
What then, does it mean to follow Jesus? After Wills strips away so much of what we thought we knew, he offers this example.
“[Jesus] preferred the company of the lowly and despised to that of the rich and powerful. He crossed lines of ritual purity to deal with the unclean—with the lepers, possessed, the insane, with prostitutes and adulterers and collaborators with Rome. . . . He was an outcast among outcasts.”
And this is what leads us to Wills’ most penetrating insight, even though it’s restating a concept we’ve heard a million times before:
“[Jesus] intended to reveal the Father to us, and to show that he is the only-begotten Son of that Father.”
At the end of Wills’ book, we no longer carry our assumptions about justifying ourselves by following in Jesus’ footsteps or doing Jesus’ work, but we do know this: the kingdom is coming—and already is—wherever we find the personal presence of Jesus. Period.
That’s much more radical, searing, and terrifying than a political program, a theology, or a church that was founded on the person of Jesus. What Jesus Meant brings Jesus to life and confronts us with the exacting penetration of his words and deeds. It’s not easy, but that’s the point.
Penny Carothers is the Social Justice Editor for the Burnside Writers Collective. She is a graduate of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and currently lives in Seattle, Washington, with her daughter Quinn and her husband David.
I don’t mind constantly re evaluating and trying to discover Jesus for who he really is, so I think books like this can be helpful. Howevever,there is no mention of the Cross in this review, Paul’s only ground for boasting and the culmination and purpose of Christ’s life on earth. It seems in the culture wars, there is a division based on this question: Was it more important how Christ lived or why he died?