Jesus

(This was originally a comment attached to the ‘Why the historical Jesus matters’ post.)

Is there an identity crisis for this website? Can’t waste any time here if there is…

The question of whether by historically contextualizing the Gospel story we make Jesus largely irrelevant to the church and the world today has been a recurrent one - indeed, for me something of a thorn in the flesh. It was recently posed rather articulately and forcefully by samlcarr and shiert on the ‘New creation and the kingdom of God’ thread. I realize that I appear to belabour the point far too much, and the impression is easily given that I think that Jesus is of no more than antiquarian interest to us today. That is not the case, and I will try again to explain, too briefly, what I’m getting at and why, because I think we have a lot more to gain than lose by learning to trust the narrative shape of our theology.

I have voiced some reservations in a couple of recent posts about the appropriateness of modelling the life and mission of the church on the form of discipleship found in the Gospels (see ‘Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, and the future of the church in Europe’ and ‘We have to go back, but not to square one’).

There is a fully understandable desire abroad - as a reaction against big church, as a reaction to the distintegation of the Christendom mentality - to recover the immediacy and humanity manifested in the community of followers that Jesus gathered around himself. Sometimes this is expressed as a strong preference for this model of radical, itinerant, liminal community against the seemingly more institutional form of the Pauline churches.

Tonight was the last instalment of four of BBC’s The Passion, showing on television over holy week. It was an unusual departure for the normally resolutely secular BBC, and much talked up by faith communities. I had decided to give it a miss, having been disappointed by previous efforts to represent Jesus on screen or in drama. But I got drawn in – mainly because I wanted to know what people would be talking about.

Over the past several decades, with the aid of media technologies, some Christian pastors have attained a celebrity status. We see this not only with the televangelists of the 1970s and 1980s, but even more recently we see that some Christian pastors have gained followers and advocates, especially through the publication of books and through their use of the Internet. The celebrity pastors and their advocates form quarreling factions of self-declared believers in Jesus the Christ.

A great many years ago there was born, in an obscure village of Palestine, a babe; and its parents were so poor that this little child came into the world among the cattle and was laid in a manger upon a couch of straw.

I think that the word and way of Jesus must be valued more highly than particular “denominational” loyalties. To call Jesus Lord, to identify oneself as a follower of Christ and as an agent of the kingdom of God entails that “denominational” loyalties take a back seat. One may well identify as a Methodist or a Southern Baptist, for instance, but that connection is secondary to following in the way of Jesus—or it should be.

So, part of an emerging faith includes scrutinizing our own “denominational” loyalties and comparing them to the word and way of Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t seem to talk about “hell” as a place. Rather, he describes “hell” as a kind of relationship that one has with oneself, their neighbors and with God. Cultivating neighborly relations among people, disciplining one’s body and harmonizing one’s preaching and practice, and fearfully trusting in God are key ways of keeping oneself out of “hell.”

Jesus didn’t say anything explicitly about economic policy, so as in all things relating to the Bible, there is room for various interpretations.  Below, I read the oft quoted passages in the Gospel of Matthew and suggest what they entail for economic policies for us today.