The scandalous gospel of Jesus

The radical nature of the Jesus story is not in the way of his death-- the via dolorosa--nor is it even in his glorious resurrection, to which we instinctively respond when strangers fill the churches on Easter. The radical dimension of the Jesus story has to do with the content of his preaching, the nature of the glad tidings that he announced to be at hand. It would take a miracle and a man of Mel Gibson's genius and chutzpah to make a film about what biblical writer Thomas D. Hanks calls the subversive gospel. This is the good news that was bad news to many in Jesus' time, so much so that at the beginning of his preaching they nearly killed him, and at the end of his ministry they succeeded.

There is a famous New Yorker cartoon that shows plutocrats leaving a church after having said sweet nothings to the preacher at the door. In the caption the wife, swathed in furs and jewels, says to her top-hatted husband, "It can't be easy for him not to offend us." In the wildly popular British import comedy The Vicar of Dibley, the vicar, the bodacious Geraldine Granger, is often accused by her Tory-blue Senior Warden of preaching "socialist twaddle." "Why not stick to the gospel?" he asks; and she sweetly replies that "this is the gospel."

If the focus is nearly always on the man for others who in the short term loses but who one of these days will return in triumph to win, then it is no wonder that so much of the Christian faith is either obsessed by the past or seduced by the prospects of a glorious future. In the meantime, things continue in their bad old way, and we live as realists in a world in which reality is nearly always the worst-case scenario.

The last thing the faithful wish for is to be disturbed. Thus it is easy to favor the Bible over the gospel, because the gospel can somehow be seen as those nice, even compelling, stories about Jesus that have next to nothing to do with us "until he comes."

In my preaching course I assign texts to my students for Sunday preaching. They don't like it, for they would rather choose their own texts or preach their tradition's lectionary, and I understand that. I choose contentious texts, however, passages with which they would never willingly wrestle, and often I choose from the Gospels some of the eschatological stories having to do with justice and the reversal of fortune. One of my favorites is the story of rich man Dives and the poor beggar Lazarus, the terrifying account of the rich man who on earth enjoys good things but in death ends up in hell while Lazarus, the beggar at his gates, ends up in Abraham's bosom. The rich man, even in hell, is accustomed to being listened to and so he asks that Lazarus direct some water to relieve his parched lips. It is not to be. He then asks for his brothers still on earth to be warned to do good and not to follow his example so that they may avoid his fate. Father Abraham declines, however, saying that they have had Moses and the prophets and every opportunity to repent. It is now too late.

My students find this story relatively easy to exegete, but nearly impossible to preach. "Why?" I ask. "Our people wouldn't stand for it," they reply; or "It is not motivational enough"; or "I don't believe God behaves that way." When I suggest that apparently Jesus took the story seriously enough to tell it, and that the evangelists took it seriously enough to record it and ascribe it to Jesus, their best response is, "Well, that was then and this is now." Is there a good word here? Is this a part of the good news? How does this square with so much of the rest of Jesus' preaching and teaching? I think we know the answer. The gospel can easily be lost in the Bible. It was not so with Jesus, for he found the Hebrew Bible--the only one he knew--the means to the gospel. If we look carefully at what constituted his preaching, his definition of gospel, we might be surprised to find how much the gospel is at odds with conventional Christianity. It is very difficult to preach the gospel as Jesus did without giving offense, and the world has been filled with people perfectly capable of being offended.

(This is an excerpt from The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What's So Good About The Good News? The excerpt is reprinted here with the permission of the author.)