Continuing with the theme of the first major section of his book, N.T.Wright addresses who Jesus was in this chapter by setting the stage for our understanding the world that Jesus stepped into. To illustrate, Wright uses an actual event from 1991 about which a movie was made entitled, "The Perfect Storm."
This "perfect storm" (in the Atlantic) was created by forces of nature coming from the western wind and and from a high pressure system to the north and from a tropical hurricane blowing in from the southeast; when they all converged on the fishing boat Andrea Gail, the boat was reduced to "matchwood".
The author explains how we find ourselves today in a "perfect storm" related to Jesus. "The very mention of Jesus raises all kinds of winds and cyclones today." The western wind in this storm is that of the western Enlightenment mindset (skepticism about Jesus and the gospel accounts). The northern wind is reactionary conservative Christianity (dogmatic and emotional assertions about God and Scripture in reaction to the skeptics but which are not always correct). The tropical hurricane in this perfect storm swirling around the topic of Jesus today is the "sheer historical complexity of speaking about Jesus."
After elaborating on the errors of the Enlightenment mindset (western wind) and the errors of the reactionary conservative Christian mindset (north wind), Wright spends the larger part of this chapter on the issue of the historical complexity related to Jesus (the hurricane blowing in from the southeast).
Just as today's Middle Eastern problems are very complicated, so they were in Jesus' day. Besides that, trying to piece together what we know about Jesus through the gospels and the few historical writings after His death is like someone centuries later trying to understand the iconic significance of John F. Kennedy's sudden and tragic death for Americans and many others with only 4 short books and a smattering of written material available. In such a case, "there would be plenty of wiggle room for interpretation."
This "tropical hurricane" (the challenge of writing history about Jesus) would be dangerous enough on its own, then add to it the "angry voices from the left, angry voices from the right", and we have a "perfect storm" when it comes to understanding who Jesus was. "If, trying to make things simple, we fail to recognize this multilayered complexity, we will simply repeat the age-old mistake of imagining Jesus in our own image or at least placing him, by implication, in our own culture."
To remain in the "harbor" where we keep telling the story about Jesus the way that we have learned it as western Enlightenment people would be the safe option, but that keeps us stuck in seeing Jesus as made in our image and missing a big part of who He truly is. We who have been shaped by modern western thought insist on asking questions that people in Jesus' day weren't asking..."if we are to do real history, we have to allow people in other times and other places to be radically different from us - even though, in order to do history at all, we have to exercise disciplined imagination and try as best we can to relate to those very different people..."
Wright ends the chapter with the following challenging words:
"...a good deal of the 'methods' developed within professional biblical scholarship over the last two hundred years have been, themselves, the product of a worldview that may not have been truly open to discovering the real Jesus. The worldview of post-Enlightenment Europe and North America was determined, often enough, to see Jesus as a religious teacher and leader offering a personal spirituality and ethic and a heavenly hope. It had no intention of seeing him as someone who was claiming to be in charge of the world..."
In order to see Jesus in a fresh way and ask the right questions, we need to understand the "perfect storm" that Jesus Himself was walking into in His day. We'll take that up in the next two chapters. The Lord bless you!
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