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    Why Jesus?
    Why Jesus?
    Why Jesus?
    Ebook207 pages4 hours

    Why Jesus?

    By Bishop William H. Willimon

    4.5/5

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    No figure in history has received more attention, and been less understood, than Jesus of Nazareth. Too much of what has been written recently portrays Jesus as a vaguely kind and friendly person whose message sometimes pleases but never challenges us, whose presence might comfort but never completes us. That Jesus, in other words, looks a lot like we do, just with better manners. Meeting that Jesus for the first time, the reader is tempted to ask ""Why all the fuss? What here is worth devoting my life to?""Very little about that Jesus is worth it, says Will Willimon. Yet there is another Jesus, the mysterious preacher from Nazareth who continues to invite men and women to claim the true meaning of their lives by giving their lives away in service to God and others. This Jesus continues to fascinate and compel us, in spite of all the attempts to domesticate his message and put distance between us and the call to follow. In his radical teachings, his self-sacrificial death, and his liberating life beyond death, this Jesus teaches and shows us the true meaning and purpose of our own lives.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAbingdon Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2010
    ISBN9781426720048
    Why Jesus?
    Author

    Bishop William H. Willimon

    Will Willimon is a preacher and teacher of preachers. He is a United Methodist bishop (retired) and serves as Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry and Director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. For twenty years he was Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. A 1996 Baylor University study named him among the Twelve Most Effective Preachers in the English speaking world. The Pew Research Center found that Will was one of the most widely read authors among Protestant clergy in 2005. His quarterly Pulpit Resource is used by thousands of pastors throughout North America, Canada, and Australia. In 2021 he gave the prestigious Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School. Those lectures became the book, Preachers Dare: Speaking for God which is the inspiration for his ninetieth book, Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the Sermon.

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    • 4/5
      My previous review was a book with the same title: “Why Jesus.” That one was Ravi Zacharias; this is by William H. Willimon. I thought I would compare the two, but as it turns out, the two books are so different it’s a pointless exercise. I’ll give four stars to Willimon, simply for doing what he says he’ll do.I confess, it took me a while to get into this one. The style doesn’t fit me; too hip, too informal. Too cute. An example will give you a feel for the book’s flavor: Jesus attends a “soiree” and a “woman of the city” shows up and makes a scene, caressing his feet, letting down her hair, and in general putting the party into an uproar. A Pharisee sneers that if Jesus were a real prophet, he would know what sort of woman she is. As Willimon tells the story,Jesus replies to the Pharisee, “Simon, do you see this woman? I show up here expecting a good time, and you didn’t kiss me or give me a foot massage. She knows how to get down and party.”Jesus then puts it in a parable: “A man was owed ten dollars by one debtor, ten thousand dollars by another. He forgave both debtors. Now, think hard, Mr. Religious Expert—which man was the most grateful?”“Er, uh, I guess the one who was forgiven more,” answers the Pharisee.Yeah, it took some getting used to, even though Willimon stayed true to his promise to present Jesus “as the gospels do”: a “wild, weird, and improbable character.” In time, however, I began to appreciate Willimon for his devotion to Jesus. I began to see why Jesus means so much to him. I began to see how many Christians, very different than me, can be inspired by this same Jesus—who seems to meet the needs of just about everyone one way or another. Jesus wears a dozen hats the way Willimon tells it. You’ve met Jesus the Party Person already, so I’ll just list the rest:VagabondPeacemakerStorytellerPreacherMagicianHome WreckerSaviorSovereignLoverDelegatorBodyWhatever you’re looking for in a Savior, it’ll be in there somewhere!

    Book preview

    Why Jesus? - Bishop William H. Willimon

    WHY

    JESUS?

    Image1

    A b i n g d o n P r e s s

    Nashville

    W H Y J E S U S ?

    Copyright © 2010 by Abingdon Press

    All rights reserved.

    No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Abingdon Press, P.O. Box 801, 201 Eighth Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37202-0801 or permissions@abingdonpress.com.

    This book is printed on acid-free paper.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Willimon, William H.

    Why Jesus? / William H. Willimon.

        p. cm.

    ISBN 978-1-4267-0028-6 (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

    1. Jesus Christ—Person and offices. I. Title.

    BT203.W53 2010

    232'.8—dc22

    2010029680

    All scripture quotations unless noted otherwise are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

    Scripture quotations marked NKJV™ are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved

    Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. All rights reserved throughout the world. Used by permission of International Bible Society.

    10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19—10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

    To my students in the Jesus Class at

    Birmingham Southern College

    Contents

    Introduction

    1. Vagabond

    2. Peacemaker

    3. Storyteller

    4. Party Person

    5. Preacher

    6. Magician

    7. Home Wrecker

    8. Savior

    9. Sovereign

    10. Lover

    11. Delegator

    12. Body

    Introduction

    Why Jesus? Because he is the most fascinating person in the world.Into my life he came, unsought and uninvited, took over, and refused to go. He led me into dangerous territory. Only later did I learn this is typical. Though he is one with us, he is neither casually nor promptly known, not because he is arcane but because he is so very different from us, so difficult to categorize or to define, because he is also one with God. You can know him for many years, yet never really know him as well as he appears to know you. He manages to be unfathomable, deep, ungraspable, and yet oddly close, intimate, talkative, and relentlessly relational.

    Why Jesus? Why are billions of people sure that they know him as he really is and also confident that Jesus knows them as they are? Why have they not only adored him, sung songs to him, created grand works of art on account of him, erected great cathedrals in loving but futile attempt to enshrine him, but also have eagerly followed him, bet their lives upon him, and willingly gone where he leads them, even to die for him?

    Why Jesus? I have some of the same challenges in describing Jesus as I have in describing Susan. Who is Susan, really?

    Susan is a teacher. What would I tell you that might be most helpful in conveying who she is? Some Susan stories have become inflated over the years. After all, many agree that she is quite a character. Susan has a history. Her family knows Susan in a way that I don't. Whether they know her better than I do is questionable, however. Sometimes those who are close to a person have difficulty obtaining a panoramic view.

    Why is Susan someone I should know? I might reply, Only time will tell her true significance. Come back thirty years after Susan is gone, and we'll see what of Susan is still with us. Some people are best known only in the backward glance.

    But, of course, the best way to know about Susan would be to get to know her personally, as in opening your door to discover her there, spending an evening in conversation with her, allowing yourself to encounter her face-to-face. And that's what Christians believe Jesus does: he shows up at your place, wanting to introduce himself.

    Why Jesus? My first answer is to remind you and me that if I can't adequately explain my friend and contemporary Susan (as the analogy above shows), then even less successful will be my attempt to introduce you to a Jew from Nazareth—who just happens to be God. Sometimes, looking for Jesus is like staring at the sun.

    Why Jesus? I will tell stories other people have told about Jesus, anecdotes lovingly reiterated by the people who first met him. I'll work mostly from the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), following their goal of not attempting to reproduce a history of Jesus but rather to give a testimony to Jesus. The veracity of the gospel writers' testimony to Jesus is in their lives radically transformed by Jesus. I have great confidence in the accuracy of the four Gospels (the word gospel means good news), those strange literary devices that were concocted from twenty to a hundred years after the crucifixion of Jesus. (Throughout this book, I'll be referring to stories about Jesus from the Bible. You can find the passages in which these stories appear in the You Can Look It Up section in the back of this book).

    The Gospels, and indeed all of Scripture, were born in a culture in which people passed information along orally, were careful to repeat things often, told only what was important, and looked for help from eyewitnesses to verify accuracy. The writers of the gospels collected the stories about Jesus that had been circulated orally and wove them into careful and distinctive accounts of what he said and did—and why that matters. Generations of Christians have found these writings to truly reveal God in singular and life-changing ways. Besides, we're justified in giving particular weight to the testimony of those who paid for their friendship with Jesus by their blood.

    But Jesus is more than his words remembered; he is interesting not only because of what he said but for who he is. I will therefore also talk about Jesus through the medium of his friends. Paul (whose writings are older than the gospels) never met Jesus until the risen Christ accosted him on the Damascus Road. Yet Paul may know as much about Jesus as those who walked next to him down the Jerusalem Road. Paul seems neither to know nor to care about most of the teachings of Jesus or details of his life before the cross and resurrection, yet Paul's wildly adventurous life after meeting Jesus shows that Paul really knows Jesus. We are right to trust descriptions of Jesus given by those most disrupted by Jesus. Some people around Jesus looked at him and wanted to follow him, pattern their lives after his, and tell everybody about him. The majority of people who met Jesus apparently thought he was nuts and wanted him dead. Sometimes, the burning sun is best viewed by watching those upon whom it shines.

    Unlike presumed reconstructionists of the historical Jesus, I shall not attempt to pick through the layers of accumulated wisdom about Jesus and dig down to what some contemporary historian thinks really happened. A dearly loved principle of historians is probability, but the gospels present Jesus as a wild, weird, and improbable character. Aside from just one dismissive reference by the disreputable Josephus, Jesus made no impact on ancient historians. Most of what we hanker to know about Jesus is beyond historians' reach. The yield from two centuries of historical search for the real Jesus has been disappointing. I find delicious irony in the fact that Jesus changed the entire course of history but was ignored by historians of his day. Historians tended not to care about Galilean peasants who neither wrote books nor led armies.

    While my presentation of Jesus benefits from the work of historians, mere world history was never an adequate vehicle for Jesus. Jesus' life and death demand high drama, not historical documentary. The gospel writers were more poets, preachers, and novelists than historical biographers of Jesus. Not content to dig up mere history, the gospels tell just enough of the story of a Jew who forever changed history to make you want to follow him. That's fine with me. I've never been told life-changing truth except by poets, novelists, and preachers. You want to know, Why Jesus? Well, let me tell you some stories.

    Some of these stories involve the church's present-day experience of Jesus. Millions believe that, by the grace of God, they know Jesus quite well enough to follow him, even to follow through suffering and death. I shall say about Jesus what is said about him in Scripture by his earliest friends and enemies and also what is said in the lives of his followers today and down through the ages.

    When I was trying to describe Susan to you, it became clear that the most important things about her—who she really is, what her life is all about— aren't things you can verify empirically. The same is true, of course, with Jesus. But still, we must take care not to diverge from the verifiable details about Jesus: that he was Jewish, worked exclusively in Judea, lived in a country occupied by the Roman army, called disciples, told stories, had compassion for the suffering, was a notorious troublemaker who went to lots of parties, was tortured to death after a short run as a wandering rabbi. Finally, we know that a group of his once-disheartened followers believed that he came back from the dead. These are the facts on the ground that the gospels and the letters of Paul tell us about Jesus. Taken together, allowed to speak with their delightful peculiarities, these earliest witnesses to Jesus give us a trustworthy, irreplaceable rendition of him, the most interesting person in the world. We must meet Jesus as presented by his first followers, or we meet him not at all.

    I'll admit that it's odd to place your trust in a set of two-thousand-year– old writings—unless those writings just happen to be the real truth about God and us.

    It's clear when we read the gospels that we are not reading some myth that took place in an imaginary Disneyland. Picking them up, you can almost taste the dust of Galilee. The people who met Jesus are real people with real-life concerns. Knowledge of the historical and cultural context of Jesus protects us from the sin of making Jesus mean anything we want. People have fantasized Jesus to be a proto-liberationist revolutionary, the boyfriend of Mary Magdalene, a savvy corporate CEO, a roving psychotherapist, a spiritual guru—and that's just this year's books about him. Paul had some choice words for those who preach another Jesus than the one who meets us in the specifics of the tradition.¹ We don't know everything we might like to know about Jesus, but we know enough to keep us from projecting on him our ideas of a more congenial savior.

    Few followers of Jesus trudge after him on the basis of historical details. It's who Jesus is and yet shall be that is most compelling. So in telling you about Jesus, I shall not exclude my own meager testimony. There is a sense in which the contemporary followers of Jesus—that bumbling, sometimes faithful, though often feckless body known as the church—know more about him than his first disciples. This is not simply because his first followers are routinely represented in the gospels as blithering fools. It's also because Simon Peter and the rest of the disciples were around Jesus for less time than we have been. The longer you know someone, the better you know him or her, particularly if he or she is determined to be known by you. Most of us don't discover Jesus; he discovers us.

    One day, some Greeks came to Jesus' disciples saying, We want to see Jesus.² Is that what you want too? Do you want to see the one who came from dry, dusty Galilee, moved under the cold gaze of peasants, a man destitute, without job, house, or welcoming family? Do you want to see this one who, though he had nothing, refused to act like a submissive, cringing simpleton but stood up to the presumed powerful and dared to speak directly for God, tackling sickness and death and taxes head on, facing down both demons and swaggering, sword-wielding bullies? Do you want to see this one who, though he appeared so ordinary, made such wild, reckless claims for himself, reaching out to the dead, the dying, and the demented? Do you want to see this one whom we dare to believe is God with us? If so, then the invitation of this book is simple: come and see.

    Neither two thousand years of familiarity nor the frequent cluelessness of his present-day disciples have dampened the world's enthusiasm for Jesus. A higher number of the world's people now follow Jesus than ever before, and as many are murdered for joining Jesus' swelling chorus as in times of past persecution.

    John's Gospel begins with emissaries sent out to the wilderness by the religious bigwigs in Jerusalem to interrogate a wild preacher known as John the Baptizer.³ They ask John, Who are you? and also who is this one coming after whom you say is mightier? The Baptizer tells them, in effect, that they will have difficulty getting their heads around the real identity of the Christ. Jesus is someone who shatters our preconceptions of just how a Messiah is supposed to talk and to act. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me, says John, the one whom I am unworthy to tie his shoelaces.

    Jesus remains the one whom you do not know, even for people like me who have spent a lifetime trying to know him better. If you are reading this book and feel that you don't know much about Jesus, that's a good thing. In my experience, it's the folks who think they really, really know Jesus who don't know him that well at all.

    I want publicly to thank Jesus for saying Follow me! and thereby making my world more interesting than if he had not risked all on me. Be warned: in reading this book, you are taking a risk of getting discombobulated, commandeered, and befriended by the most interesting person in the world.

    Will Willimon

    You Can Look It Up

    All Scripture citations and references are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. In some cases, I have shortened or paraphrased the NRSV text. To see the full version of these verses, look up the citations listed below.

    1. of the tradition. 2 Corinthians 11:1-4.

    2. "to see Jesus." John 12:20-21.

    3. the Baptizer. John 1:19-28.

    C H A P T E R    O N E

    ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    V A G A B O N D

    The highway that winds up from the sea to Jerusalem is a rapidly ascending road through picturesque but rugged terrain. The heat is high and the vegetation sparse. Israeli military trucks lumber up the hill, making it slow going to the Holy City. Wrecks of tanks and rusting hulks from military skirmishes of the recent past have been left along the road as memorials to the fallen along this bloody, much disputed thoroughfare. The name Jerusalem means foundation of peace, though it never lived up to its name. Stuck in fuming traffic, inching along in the heat, I muse, What a road for God Almighty to walk.

    Most people met Jesus on the road. When John the Baptizer introduced Jesus to the world, he quoted the prophet Isaiah, Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low . . . and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.¹ In Jesus, God worked a highway construction project, making a road straight through the desert to enslaved humanity. Just as in the exodus, when God made a way out of Egyptian slavery to the Promised Land,² so Jesus is the way to God.³ How ironic that while we clamored up to God through our intellect, our morality, our architecture, our art, and our institutions

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