The Jesus you meet in the Gospels and in worship

Some theologians have rendered Jesus little more than the accidentally crucified socialist, and others as an aspiring head of the RNC. The reality is that Jesus has been lost in the context of our time—reduced to an almost cartoonish amalgam of Cesar Chavez, Mister Rogers and Pat Robertson.—David Kuo

The quote above is from a National Public Radio book review Anne Rice's Jesus Transfixes in 'Road to Cana'. The reviewer, David Kuo, is an author and the former deputy director of the office of faith-based community initiatives in the Bush administration.

Kuo loves famed vampire writer Anne Rice's new book, gushing "The Road to Cana is a masterful book written by an extraordinary writer at the height of her powers." I am prejudiced—so predisposed not to like the book that I can't imagie taking the time to read it. And so this blog post is not about her book so much as my own reticence.

The problem is that Rice's book creates a fictional narrative seeking to show who Jesus is and I know that it can only show me who Jesus is to Anne Rice. That is interesting perhaps, but I feel my time would be better served reading the Gospels. And yet as I write thatm I know only feel like I sound overly pious, but I am also aware of the hypocrisy of those words. I like preaching the occasional sermon which recasts a biblical story with me giving a monologue as a person in the story. So I have been a shepherd at Jesus' birth in Emmnanuel: A Shepherd's Story and a demon speaking of Jesus' birth in Christmas: the counter revolution. I have also been actual characters from scripture as in a man who invited Jesus to dinner in Go in peace to where? and the man to whom Jesus told the parable of The Good Samaritan in Defining Myself. And I created a whole fictional alternative to a Gospel reading in the form of a sermon play The One Who Is to Come: a parable of the old west.

My daughter doesn't like the sermons I just listed as she doesn't understand how I feel I can put words into the mouths of the real people whose stories are told in scripture and she wonders why I would try. So you see the hypocrisy. I like to occasionally do this very thing—crafting stories told through characters in the Bible—that I don't care to read Rice doing. How can I tell my daughter that I am right and Rice is not? I don't think I can.

With that in mind, here is what Kuo says of Jesus in Rice's new book,

He is vulnerable, grasping at the contrasts of his life, the amazing stories of his birth — magi and shepherds and angels. He is an unmarried man "in a worn woolen robe" in a dusty, drought-stricken town.

He is fierce — confronting an accusing crowd and calling down torrential rains from heaven with an unspoken thought.

He is brilliant. An accusing Scribe who had marveled at his theological insights when he was a boy now despises him because he is a carpenter. Jesus reduces him to mere breath by saying a carpenter is exactly who God needs to work in this world of "wood and stone and iron and grass and air."

He is a man in love; in that love, we find the dramatic and theological core of The Road to Cana.

Her name is Avagail. She is the town's beauty, and she is tenderly crafted by Rice.

Jesus dreams of her in dreams he cannot control, dreams "all men dream." Dreams of "lips against lips."

But he cannot have her. This he knows, though he does now know why. The heartbreak over the loss of this very human love is profound. It reintroduces Jesus as a man of sorrows in an approachable way.

But Avagail is more than a love interest. She also serves as a metaphor for our own brokenness and the extent to which Jesus will go to heal that brokenness.

There is a scene that left me gasping at some points and crying at others. Avagail — victimized by the culture's violence and her bitter, broken father — goes out of her mind with grief. She appears in a hidden grove where Jesus rests, pleading with him to take her, to make her the harlot she concludes she must be.

He resists, but not because he is some asexual being. He does not take her because he knows who she really is — a precious and innocent soul in the midst of great anguish — and because he knows who He is: the sacrificial lover. To her, yes, but also to humanity. At tremendous personal cost, Jesus shields and shepherds her through the crisis and into the arms of a man who can give her what she needs and longs for.

We are all Avagail. We spin unaware, lost, reaching for comforts we do not really want. But in the midst of this occasional confusion and panic, Rice reminds us that there is one who knows the way of sorrow and confusion and loneliness and temptation. And who wants to comfort and shield us.

Showing Jesus to have been tempted and not having given in fits with Hebrews 4:15, "For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin."

What Anne Rice is doing then is what we all do. She is constructing Jesus as she understands him from the picture she finds in the Bible together with the Jesus she meets in worship. We all create some internal idea of who Jesus was and is. Rice just takes the natural step for an author and writes this Jesus into the text of a new novel.

So why am I still bothered by Rice's project despite reading of her presenting Jesus in ways that fits with the Jesus I too meet in the Gospels and in worship? I guess because I worry that when a bestselling author starts putting words in Jesus' mouth, others may listen to those words more than those Jesus speaks in the Gospels themselves. Maybe my concerns are unfounded. What do you think?

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor