Simply Jesus - Chapters 1 & 2

This week we'll cover the first two chapters of N.T. Wright's book, Simply Jesus. These chapters are part of the first section about who Jesus was.

Chapter One: A Very Odd Sort of King
After giving a short review of his own experience of Jesus in his early years, the author proceeds to share how he began to be challenged to pursue Jesus as Someone much bigger than he had known before. He tells how the popular 1960s musical "Jesus Christ Superstar" raised the question (which Wright believes is the correct question to ask about Jesus): "Who do you say that you are?"
"...Unless you ask this question, your 'Jesus' risks disappearing like a hot-air balloon off into the mists of fantasy..."

In this chapter Wright says that Christians have a choice to either 1) go on talking about "Jesus", praying and worshiping him in formal or informal ways and seeing how that affects our own lives and communities while failing to address the above question that has been in the back of others' minds for the past century; or  2) we can accept the question and attempt to answer it.

The challenge to the churches is to begin to see that the stories of Jesus in the gospels are much more than material for moralizing sermons on how to behave or aids to prayer and meditation or "extra padding for a theological picture"... 

Just as the full potential of the computer remains unrealized by most of us, so the full potential of the gospels remains unrealized by most of us: "It is we, the churches, who have been the real reductionists. We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself."

Wright's key point in this chapter is that the reason Jesus wasn't the kind of king people wanted in His day was that they had gotten accustomed to "the ordinary, shabby, second-rate sort" that they had experienced. Jesus came to redefine kingship around Himself and His works. Wright suggests that we as modern western Christians are the same: "We want a 'religious' leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace...But if Christians don't get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?"

This chapter ends with Wright presenting Jesus as a figure of history as the starting point. He gives a brief summary of the historical Jesus and then proposes that we must get inside the gospels "to discover the Jesus they've been telling us about all along, but whom we had managed to screen out..."

Chapter Two: The Three Puzzles
"Jesus of Nazareth stands out in the middle of history. Tens of millions call him 'Lord' and do their best to follow him. Countless others, including some who try to ignore him, find that he pops up all over the place - a line in a song, an image in a movie, a cross on a distant skyline. Most of the world has adopted a dating system based, supposedly, on his birth...Jesus is unavoidable. But Jesus is also deeply mysterious...and he puzzles us still."

Wright goes on to say that there are 3 reasons why Jesus puzzles us:

1. His world: the people in his day and in his land thought differently and explained their world through stories in ways different than we do. We have to try to get into that world if we are to make sense of Jesus.
2. His God: "Part of the reason why Jesus puzzled the people of his day was that he was talking about 'God' most of the time, but what he was saying both did and did not make sense in relation to the 'God' his hearers had been thinking of."
3. His behavior: he spoke and acted as if he was in charge! "He behaved suspiciously like someone trying to start a political party or a revolutionary movement. He called together a tight and symbolically charged group of associates (in his world, the number twelve meant only one thing: the new Israel, the new people of God)." This kind of behavior by Jesus and his followers' talk about him later was very dangerous and got them all in trouble.

What would it look like for Jesus to be in charge both in his day and today??

We'll continue next week looking at who Jesus was as a man on earth. Grace and peace to you this week!