new book | the scandalous gospel of Jesus

I'm reading a great book right now, and thought I'd pass it along.  I heard about it in a strange place -- on The Colbert Report -- and perhaps because of this, I was intrigued and lost no time in getting my hands on a copy.  The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus is written by Peter Gomes, a minister and theology professor at Harvard for something like 30 years. 

The basic premise, as far as I can tell: today's church has shorn off the rough edges of the gospel to make Christianity more palatable to the comfortable (a possible example could maybe be the American church.  Possibly.  Sarcasm mine).  In making Jesus warm and fuzzy, we've essentially ignored what it was he actually preached.

Here's an excerpt that's been stretching me:

...what we call "the Bible" is only the means to a deepened understanding of what Jesus called the gospel, or glad tidings, and for us to understand this we have to understand afresh, or perhaps for the first time, the radical nature of the substance of Jesus' preaching.

Early on in their theological studies, seminarians learn that Jesus, who came preaching, became the preached.  It is adequate but not sufficient to say that Jesus is the gospel or the good news.  That is true, but it is not all there is to the matter.  Those who heard Jesus preaching and teaching heard him give specific utterance to a point of view that he himself called the glad tidings.  He came preaching not himself but something to which he himself pointed, and in our zeal to crown him as the content of our preaching, most of us have failed to give due deference to the content of his preaching.

...Jesus came preaching -- we are told this in all the Gospels -- but nowhere in the Gospels is there a claim that he came preaching the New Testament, or even Christianity.  It still shocks some Christians to realize that Jesus was not a Christian, that he did not know "our" Bible, and that what he preached was substantially at odds with his biblical culture, and with ours as well.

Jesus' good news message was that the first will be last, the rich become poor, everything turned topsy-turvy -- and there's nothing comfortable about that if you're on top.  Gomes specifically goes into Luke chapter six, another rendering of the Beatitudes in Matthew, as proof that our religion should not be making us comfortable, but rather the opposite.

Two more bits, and then I'll trust you to read the book if you're so inclined:

Most people do not go to church to be confronted with the gap between what they believe and practice and what their faith teaches and requires.

...When the gospel says, "The last will be first, and the first will be last," despite the fact that it is counterintuitive to our cultural presuppositions, it is invariably good news to those who are last, and at least problematic news to those who see themselves as first.  This problem of perception is at the heart of a serious hearing of what Jesus has to say, and most people are smart enough to recognize that their immediate self-interest is served not so much by Jesus and his teaching as by the church and its preaching.  Thus, it is no accident that although Jesus came preaching a disturbing and redistributive gospel, we do not preach what Jesus preached.  Instead, we preach Jesus.

Ack!  Is this mind-blowing to anyone else? 

This is nothing like what I grew up hearing and I'm glad to hear it.  Its stuff like this that makes me feel as if I might, against all odds, still be following Christ.  I've been seeing myself less and less as the "we" I spoke of in my last post, and have been, more than anything, defining myself by what I am not.  Defining yourself in opposition to something else doesn't exactly help you figure out what the hell you are, however, and I find myself antsy to flesh out what it is I do believe -- about Jesus, about the gospel, about how to live it.

I like this:

Those who appear to win by worldly standards, who are now the haves and not the have-nots, have every reason to be anxious about tomorrow, for if the good news, the gospel, is that worldly victories are only temporary and subject to reversal, then those who win today will lose tomorrow.  Those who have it made today will have it unmade tomorrow.  If you are at this moment at ease and satisfied, enjoy it, for it will not last; now is your reward, but now is not forever.

The gospel message in Luke is simply that knowing this, we now have a chance to do something about it before it is too late.  Thus, in the verses that follow in Luke 6, Jesus tells us to love our enemies, practice the Golden Rule, love those beyond our comfort zone, and be merciful to others as we hope God will be merciful to us.