Finding the Gospel of Jesus

I ran across this piece over on Christianity Today.com and thought that it was worth duplicating here. [Most of the time I don't find much worth reading on that website]

Read and consider what Donald Miller [author of Blue Like Jazz] has to offer in this thought provoking piece.

Searching for the Gospel of Jesus
by Donald Miller
from Outreach magazine, January/February 2006

My friend Greg and I have been talking quite a bit about what it means to follow Jesus. Greg wouldn't consider himself to be somebody who takes Jesus seriously, but he admits to having questions. I didn't have a formula for him to understand how a Christian conversion works, but I told him that many years ago, when I was a child, I had heard about Jesus and found the idea of Him compelling; then much later while reading the Gospels, I came to believe I wanted to follow Him. This changed things in my life, I said, because it involved giving up everything and choosing to go into a relationship with Him.

Greg said he'd seen a pamphlet with four or five ideas on it, ideas such as man was a sinner, sin separated man from God, and Christ died to absolve the separation. He asked me if this was what I believed, and I told him, essentially, that it was. "Those would be the facts of the story," I said, "but that isn't the story."
"Those are the ideas, but it isn't the narrative," Greg stated rhetorically.
"Yes," I told him.

Earlier that same year, I had a conversation with my friend Omar, who's a student at a local college. For his humanities class, Omar was assigned to read the majority of the Bible. He asked to meet with me for coffee, and when we sat down, he put a Bible on the table, as well as a pamphlet offering the same five or six ideas Greg had mentioned. He opened the pamphlet, read the ideas and asked if these concepts were important to the central message of Christianity. I told Omar they were critical, that basically this was the Gospel of Jesus, the backbone of Christian faith. Omar then opened his Bible and asked, "If these ideas are so important, why aren't they in this book?"
"But the Scripture references are right here," I said curiously, showing Omar that the verses were printed next to each idea.
"I see that," he said. "But in the Bible, they aren't concise like they are in this pamphlet. They're spread out all over the book."
"But this pamphlet is a summation of the ideas," I clarified.
"Right," Omar continued, "but it seems like, if these ideas are that critical, God would've taken the time to make bullet-points out of them. Instead, He put some of them here and some of them there. And half the time, when Jesus is talking, He is speaking entirely in parables. It's hard to believe that whatever it is He's talking about can be summed up this simply."

Explaining Mystery
Omar's point is well taken. And while the ideas presented in these pamphlets are certainly true, it struck me how simply we, the Church, had begun to explain the ideas, not only how simply, but also how non-relationally, how propositionally. I'm not faulting the pamphlets at all. Tracts such as the ones Omar and Greg encountered have been powerful tools in helping people understand the beauty of the message of Christ. Millions, perhaps, have come to know Jesus through these efficient presentations of the Gospel. I did, however, begin to wonder if there were better ways of explaining it. But the greater trouble with these reduced ideas is that modern evangelical culture is so accustomed to this summation that it's difficult for us to see the Gospel as anything other than a list of true statements with which a person must agree.
It makes me wonder if, because of this reduced version of the claims of Christ, we believe the Gospel is easy to understand—a simple mental exercise—not in the least bit mysterious. And if you think about it, a person has a more difficult time explaining romantic love, for instance, or beauty, or the Trinity, than the Gospel of Jesus. John would open his Gospel by presenting the idea that God is the Word and Jesus is the Word and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Not exactly bullet points for easy consumption. Perhaps our reduction of these ideas has caused us to miss something.

Each year, I teach a class on the Gospel and culture at a small Bible college back east. This year, I asked the students to list the precepts someone would need to understand to become a Christian. I stood at the white board and they called out ideas: Man is sinful by nature; sin separates us from God; Jesus died for our sins; we could accept Jesus into our hearts, and so on.
Then, looking at the board, I began to ask some questions about these almost universally accepted ideas. I asked if a person could believe all these ideas were true and yet not be a Christian.

I told them my friend Matt, for instance, believed all these ideas and yet would never claim to be a person who knows Jesus or much less follows Him. The students conceded that, in fact, a person could know and even believe all the concepts on the board and yet not be a Christian.
"Then there is something missing, isn't there?" I said to the class. "It isn't watertight just yet. There must be some idea we're leaving out, some fool-proof thing a person has to agree with to have a relationship with Christ."

We sat together and looked at the board for several minutes until we conceded we weren't going to come up with the missing element. Then I erased the board and asked the class a different question: "What ideas would a guy need to agree with, or what steps would he need to take, to fall in love with a girl?" The class chuckled a bit, but I continued, going so far as to begin a list.

1. A guy would have to get to know her.

I stood back from the board and wondered out loud what the next step might be.
"Any suggestions?" I asked the class.
We thought about it for a second, and then one of the students spoke up, "It isn't exactly a scientific process."

Missing the Messiah
On yet another occasion teaching that same class, I presented a form of the Gospel but left out a key element to see if they would notice. I told them in advance that I was going to leave out a critical element of the Gospel, and I asked them to listen carefully to figure out the missing piece.

I told them man was sinful, and this was obvious when we looked at the culture we lived in. I pointed out specific examples of depravity, including homosexuality, abortion, drug use, song lyrics on the radio, newspaper headlines and so on. Then I told the class that man must repent, and showed them Scriptures that spoke firmly to this idea.

Then I spoke of the beauty and rewards of living a moral life. I talked about heaven and told the students how their lives could be God-honoring and God-centered. Repenting, I said, would give them a sense of purity and a feeling of fulfillment on earth.

When I was done, I rested my case and asked the class if they could tell me what I had left out of this Gospel presentation. I waited as a class of Bible college students—who had all taken an evangelism class only weeks before in which they went door-to-door to hundreds of homes and shared their faith—sat there for several minutes in uncomfortable silence. None of the 45 students realized I had presented a Gospel without once mentioning the name of Jesus.

The story bears repeating: I presented a Gospel to Christian Bible college students and left out Jesus. Nobody noticed, even when I said I was neglecting something important, even when I asked the class to think very hard about what I had left out, even when I stood there for five minutes in silence.

To a culture of people that believes they "go to heaven" based on whether or not they're morally pure, or that they understand some theological ideas, or that they are very spiritual, Jesus is completely unnecessary. At best, He is an afterthought, a technicality by which we become morally pure, or a subject we know about, or a founding father of our woo-woo spirituality.
I assure you, these students loved Jesus very much. It's just that when they thought of the Gospel, they thought of the message in terms of a series of thoughts or principles, not mysterious relational dynamics.

The least important of the ideas, to this class, was knowing Jesus; the least important of the ideas was the one that's relational. The Gospel of Jesus, then, mistakenly assumed by this class, is something different from Jesus Himself. The two are mutually exclusive in this way.
This, of course, is a lie birthed out of a method of communication the Bible never uses.

Finding the Gospel
Imagine a pamphlet explaining the Gospel of Jesus that said something like this:
You are the bride to the Bridegroom, and the Bridegroom is Jesus Christ. You must eat of His flesh and drink of His blood to know Him, and your union with Him will make you one, and your oneness with Him will allow you to be identified with Him, His purity allowing God to interact with you. And because of this, you will be with Him in eternity, sitting at His side and enjoying His companionship, which will be more fulfilling than an earthly husband or an earthly bride. All you must do to engage God is be willing to leave everything behind, be willing to walk away from your identity, and embrace joyfully the trials and tribulations, the torture and perhaps, martyrdom that will come upon you for being a child of God in a broken world working out its own redemption in empty pursuits.

Though it sounds absurd, this is a much more accurate summation of the Gospel of Jesus than the bullet points we like to consider when we think about Christ's Gospel. Perhaps the reason Scripture includes so much poetry within and outside the narrative, so many parables and stories, so many visions and emotional letters, is because it is attempting to describe a relational break man tragically experienced with God and a disturbed relational history man has had since then and, furthermore, a relational dynamic man must embrace to have relational intimacy with God once again.

Maybe the Gospel of Jesus, in other words, is all about our relationship with Jesus rather than about ideas. And perhaps our lists and formulas and bullet points are nice in the sense they help us memorize different truths, but harmful in the sense they delude, or perhaps ignore, the necessary relationship that must begin between God and us for us to become His followers. And worse, perhaps our formulas and bullet points and steps steal the sincerity we might engage God with.

Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies. Don't get me wrong—I'm not saying that for someone to know Jesus, he or she must get a kind of crush on Him. But I am suggesting that, not unlike any other relationship, a person might need to understand that Jesus is alive, that He is God, that we need to submit to Him, that He has the power to save, and so on—all of which are ideas, but ideas entangled in a kind of relational dynamic. This seems more logical to me, because if God made us and wants to know us, then this would require a more mysterious interaction than following a recipe.

In fact, I believe the Bible is screaming this idea and is completely silent on any other, including our formulas and bullet points. It seems, rather, that Christ's parables and His words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood were designed to bypass the memorization of ideas and cause us to wrestle with a certain need to cling to Him. In other words, a poetic presentation of the Gospel of Jesus is more accurate than a set of steps.

Biblically, you're hard-pressed to find theological ideas divorced from their relational context. There are, essentially, three dominant scriptural metaphors describing our relationship with God: sheep to a shepherd, child to a father and bride to a bridegroom. In fact, few places in Scripture speak to the Christian conversion experience through any method other than relational metaphor.

Contrasting this idea, I recently heard a man, while explaining how a person could convert to Christianity, say the experience was not unlike a person who sits in a chair. He said that while a person can have faith that a chair will hold him, it's not until he sits in the chair that he has acted on his faith.

I wondered as I heard this if the chair was a kind of a symbol for Jesus, and how irritated Jesus might be if a lot of people kept trying to sit on Him. And then I wondered at how Jesus could say He was a Shepherd and we were sheep, and that the Father in heaven was our Father and we were His children, and that He Himself was a Bridegroom and we were His bride, and yet we somehow missed His meaning and thought becoming a Christian was like sitting in a chair.