“Jesus—the Jesus we might
discover if we really looked,” explains the author, “is larger, more disturbing,
more urgent than we had ever imagined. We have successfully managed to hide
behind other questions and to avoid the huge, world-shaking challenge of
Jesus’s central claim and achievement. 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; 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.” As the
church faces the many challenges of the twenty-first century, N.T. Wright has
presented a vision of Jesus that more than meets them.
Christian worship declares
that Jesus is Lord and that therefore, by strong implication, nobody else is.
What's more, it doesn't just declare it as something to be believed, like the
fact that the sun is hot or the sea wet. It commits the worshipper to
allegiance, to following this Jesus, to being shaped and directed by him.
Worshipping the God we see in Jesus orients our whole being, our imagination,
our will, our hopes, and our fears away from the world where Mars, Mammon, and
Aphrodite (violence, money, and sex) make absolute demands and punish anyone
who resists. It orients us instead to a world in which love is stronger than
death, the poor are promised the kingdom, and chastity (whether married or
single) reflects the holiness and faithfulness of God himself. Acclaiming Jesus
as Lord plants a flag that supersedes the flags of the nations, however so
"free" or "democratic" they may be. It challenges both the
tyrants who think they are, in effect, divine and the "secular
democracies" that have effectively become, if not divine, at least
ecclesial: that is, communities that are trying to do and be what the church
was supposed to do and be, but without recourse to the one who sustains the
church's life. Worship creates—or should create, if it is allowed to be truly
itself—a community that marches to a different beat, that keeps in step with a
different Lord.
Ideally, then … the church,
the community that hails Jesus as Lord and king, and feasts at his table
celebrating his victorious death and resurrection, is constituted as "the
body of the Messiah." This famous Pauline image is not a random
"illustration." It expresses Paul's conviction that this is the way
in which Jesus now exercises his rule in the world—through the church, which is
his Body. Paul, rooted as he was in the ancient Scriptures, knew well that the
Creator's plan was to look after his creation through obedient humankind. For
Paul, Jesus himself is the Obedient Man who is now therefore in charge of the
world; and the church is "his body, the fullness of the one who fills all
in all" (Eph. 1:23). It is this vocation that gives the church courage to
stand up in the face of the bullying self-appointed masters of the world, to
resist them when they are forcing their communities to go in the wrong way,
while at the same time demonstrating, in its own life, that there is a different
way of being human, a way pioneered and now made possible by Jesus himself.
The Author
Bible scholar, Anglican
bishop, and bestselling author N. T. Wright summarizes a lifetime of study of
Jesus and the New Testament in order to present for a general audience who
Jesus was and is. In Simply Jesus, we are invited to hear one of our leading
scholars introduce the story of the carpenter’s son from Nazareth as if we were
hearing it for the first time.
In the tradition of C. S.
Lewis’s Mere Christianity and his own classic book Simply Christian, N. T.
Wright invokes 200 years of Biblical scholarship to show us how we should best
retell the story of Jesus today. For believers confronting the challenge of
connecting with their faith today, and for readers of Timothy Keller’s The
Reason for God, Wright offers a provocative new picture of how to understand
who Jesus was and how we should relate to him today.
We have grown used to the
battles over Jesus—whether he was human or divine, whether he could do miracles
or just inspire them, whether he even existed. Much of the church defends tradition,
while critics take shots at the institution and its beliefs. But what if these
debates have masked the real story of Jesus? What if even Jesus’s defenders
have been so blinded by their focus on defending the church’s traditions that
they have failed to grapple with what the New Testament really teaches?