THE SCANDALOUS GOSPEL OF JESUS What's So Good About the Good News? PETER J. GOMES HarperOne An Imprint of HarperCoIlinsPwWishers <9 HarperOne THE SCANDALOUS GOSPEL OF JESUS: What's So Good About the Good News? Copyright © 2007 by Peter J. Gomes. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatso­ ever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promo­ tional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, Harper­ Collins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. HarperCollins Web site: http://www.harpercollins.com HarperCollins®, g| ®, and HarperOne™ are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers. FIRST EDITION Designed by Joseph Rutt Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 978-0-06-000073-8 08 09 IO II RRD (H) IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 To Pelham Wilder Jr. 1920- and Sterly Lebey Wilder 1921-1998 Splendid partners Wonderful friends Contents Introduction I PART I The Trouble with Scripture ONE We Start with the Bible 9 TWO An Offending Gospel 25 THREE The Risks of Nonconformity 45 FOUR What Would Jesus Have Me Do? 65 PART 2 The Gospel and the Conventional Wisdom FIVE The Gospel and Fear 89 six The Gospel and Conflict 109 SEVEN The Gospel and the Future 137 Vlll Contents PART 3 Where Do We Go from Here? EIGHT A Social Gospel 161 NINE An Inclusive Gospel 187 TEN A Gospel of Hope 209 ELEVEN Conclusion 231 Acknowledgments 247 Notes 249 Index 253 Introduction The great principle dominating the composition of Scripture is that of the ascent towards discovery. —Henri Daniel-Rops, What Is the Bible? When I remember that the literal translation of the term gospel is "good news," I recall a wonderful encounter with her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. In the summer of 2001, I found myself at divine service in the parish church in Windsor Great Park, where the royal family attends Sunday worship when in Windsor. The parish church is tiny, Victorian, and Gothic, com­ plete with a choir composed of estate workers, and on the Sunday in question both Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother were in attendance. lb my great delight, immediately following the service I was in­ vited to join mother and daughter for drinks at Royal Lodge, the Windsor residence of the Queen Mother. Then in her one hundred and second year, she was holding court in the form of a splendid 2 THE SCANDALOUS GOSPEL OF JESUS pre-luncheon party in a setting worthy of a Merchant and Ivory film, and eventually I was summoned into the royal presence, where Her Majesty maintained a lively conversation. Among other obser­ vations, the Queen Mother remarked on how excellent the sermon had been. "Don't you agree?" she asked me, which is a difficult question for an honest clergyman to answer, so I did what anyone would do under the circumstances: I agreed. Then, with that world- class twinkle in her eye, the Queen Mother remarked, "I do like a bit of good news on Sunday, don't you?" To that declaration I gave hearty assent, for the great gift of the Christian faith is the proclamation of good news even in bad or dif­ ficult times. To be reminded of the good news is to be reminded of the real gospel, and in some sense I owe what follows here to that casually accurate remark of the Queen Mother, who unknowingly serves as the inspiration for these thoughts on the substance of Jesus' preaching and teaching. I cherish her remark as a reminder not only of a delightful and memorable morning, but of why Chris­ tians continue to be sustained by the real gospel message of Jesus Christ. For that small insight into a great truth I shall always be in happy debt to her late Majesty. For many years now I have preached and taught from the Bible. As an ordained Christian minister I am expected to do so, and as a uni­ versity preacher and professor I regard this task as one of my greatest and happiest responsibilities. It is not, however, easy work. The Bible itself is a complicated collection of books, written by many hands over many years and in a wide variety of media, including poetry, history, parable, theology, and apocalypse. To say that the books are inspired or written according to a theory of divine dictation does not make them any easier to read or understand; if the Bible were simple to understand and easy to appropriate, then preachers and theolo­ gians would have nothing to do and there could be no excuse for the spiritual and moral chaos in which the world habitually finds itself. Introduction 3 To some degree, one more book on the Bible is always justified, for if we honestly search the scriptures and live honestly in our own time and not in some other, we are likely to discover something new or hear something old afresh. We can appreciate the enigmatic truth in the title of one of Marcus Borg's most successful books of biblical scholarship, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. So I venture one more book on the Bible, and presume to add to the groaning shelves on this seemingly inexhaustible subject. This, however, is a Bible book with a difference. When in 19961 wrote The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, I did so with the assumption that the most popular bestseller was not necessarily the best-read book, and I wanted the average person to be able to read the Bible with the benefit of a century of the best critical schol­ arship. My hope was that people would pass beyond their reverence for scripture and actually see what it had to say. In my second book in this series, The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need, I hoped to make it possible for the faithful and intelligent reader of the Bible to apply it to that which helped make a good life, rather than just a good living. I wrote in the heated aftermath of the terrible events of September 11, 2001, with the hope that the Bible and the truths to which it points would issue in the living of lives of noble purpose. Now I write another Bible book, with the radical suggestion that we use the Bible to go beyond the Bible and embrace that to which it points: the gospel, or the good news. In a time when it is easier to write about doom and gloom than about hope and promise, I sug­ gest that Jesus came into the world not as a Bible teacher directing us back into a text, but as one who proclaimed a realm beyond the Bible. He proclaimed his good news against the conventional wisdom of his day, taking up with unacceptable people and advanc­ ing dangerous, even revolutionary, ideas, nearly all of which remain to be discovered and acted upon. I have always been persuaded of the truth of the aphorism attributed to G. K. Chesterton, that 4 THE SCANDALOUS GOSPEL OF JESUS "Christianity is not a faith that has been tried and found wanting, but a faith that has been wanted and never tried." My argument, initially inspired by Vanderbilt University theolo­ gian Edward Farley's seminal article, entitled "Preaching the Bible and Preaching the Gospel,"1 has taken me to the conviction that in order to take seriously the gospel, that is, the content and direction of Jesus' own preaching and teaching, we must dare to venture beyond the Bible itself and into the uncharted territory of the gospel. I was encouraged to do this by a sense that the times in which Jesus did his preaching and teaching were remarkably similar to our own. Then, as now, there was a large and lively enterprise of religion, but beneath the surface of conformity ran deep rivers of fear, disappointment, and frustration. Then, as now, the world found it easier to deal with bad news or conventional wisdom, and thus resisted the in-breaking of anything new or confrontational. Jesus' death on the cross made it clear that the world to which he preached the glad tidings was not prepared to hear them or to take seriously the one who proclaimed them. The "battles for the Bible," which have been fought as skirmishes in the larger culture wars for centuries but with a particular inten­ sity in our own times, have not proved edifying. There may be more Bibles in more tongues and hands now than at any other time in human history, yet the world seems no nearer to the kingdom of God than it ever has been. As a consequence of this view, some say that the gospel is a fraud, an illusion sustained only by a gullible public, and others say that things are so bad that the end of the world must be at hand, and the sooner it comes, the better. I embrace neither of these positions in this book, and I write for those for whom neither position is credible or acceptable. I believe that there is a vast universe of people of goodwill and reasonable intelligence eager to give the Christian faith a chance to speak in their lives and world, who are not satisfied with the conventional Introduction 5 wisdom, and who find things as they are simply not good enough.