What Jesus Meant: A Book Review: Something I Swore I'd Never Do

I love book reviews, but I never imagined writing one. I'm not sure why. Just didn't seem like how I get down. I like my ideas, and telling the world how clever I am, not other people's wisdom. Figure that out on your own.

But, for whatever it's worth, here's a Review of Gary Wills' What Jesus Meant.


I picked up the book in curious trepidation. I was pleasantly surprised. Everyone, it seems, from John Piper to Marcus Borg, wants to tell me what Jesus did and didn’t mean. Gary Wills is no exception. But his little book, generous in its orthodoxy and challenging in its presentation, did not disappoint.
In What Jesus Meant Wills is completely unapologetic of who Jesus is and what he was/is about. But even though he does not mince words, those words, while not evangelistic in the classic twentieth century sense of the word, give the good news of Jesus, bracing and refreshing. He doesn’t try to crush Jesus into smaller pieces and hide him in political or cultural rant for easier consumption. Instead, he allows Jesus to come through, naked and unashamed.
Wills writes as an insider who is so far inside he doesn’t worry about offending. He’s in so deep that he begins by questioning the whole What Would Jesus Do movement; Jesus would do a lot of things we can’t do, since he was/is God. Wills writes, “He is not just like one of us, . . . he has higher rights and powers, . . . he has an authority as arbitrary as God’s in the Book of Job. He is a divine mystery walking among men” (p. xvi-xvii). The other side of the traditional equation, that Jesus is also fully human, is not lost to Wills. In detailing the Passion of Jesus, what he calls “Descent Into Hell”, he insists on the humanity of Jesus: “Jesus did not wear merely the outer shell or facial mask of a man (as the Docetists taught). He had to enter into the full tragedy of humanity, its bewildered helplessness, its shame, its sense of inadequacy and despair.” (p. 106). I must add, that’s about as much as anyone looking for affirmation of the tradition is going to get. After these two key agreements, Wills and the tradition find little common ground.
The book is worth reading just for Wills’ notes on his own translations, wherein he details the awkwardness of the koine Greek of the New Testament. It’s both shocking and humorous for anyone who has spent semesters poring over individual Greek words, trying to wrest meaning from terms which might have been just the closest at hand for an unskilled first century writer. The translations are fresh and catch the reader by surprise with their implications. For instance, “apostle” is rendered, as it should be, as “emissary”, stripping away some of the religious undertones we unconsciously bring to the texts. On the way to Lazarus’ graveside, where they are likely to be killed, Thomas remarks, “Go we along, then, we too shall die with him.” Wills’ radical Jesus, had no time for religion or politics, the two things polite people do not discuss. But Jesus was anything but polite. He mounted an attack on both. And both, ironically, are the human devices that conspired to kill him. If, as Jesus said, we are to, “Leave Caesar’s matters to Caesar,” (Mk. 12:17) we must wonder how to establish “a Christian politics”. “The answer,” says Wills, “is that Jesus did not come to bring any form of politics” (p. 55). Later, he calls Jesus’ reign is a “systematic antipolitics”, and quotes the Sermon on the Plain, wherein Jesus called his followers to love their foes and to lend without calculating returns and to be lenient as God the Father is lenient, excessive in love. “Anyone claiming to practice a ‘Christian politics’ other that this is a usurper” (p. 89).
Drawing attention to the political connections, Wills calls the torture of Jesus a “burlesque coronation” (p. 110) and describes its legacy. The show, in which Jesus was dressed in faux robes and a cruel crown and given mocking obeisance, says Wills, has been replayed throughout the centuries by Christian emperors, popes, divine-right kings, and, now, certain brands of evangelicals. “All have dressed Jesus in borrowed political robes” (p. 110). It made me think of the Dark Mass of medieval legend, a kind of shadow Eucharist haunting the true remembrance of the humility and sacrifice of Jesus.
Religion is also an enemy of Jesus. In fact, Wills says, “all religious formalists have reason to fear Jesus” (p. 67). While it’s easy to think of other offenders, those of us in paid ministry positions might spend a little time trembling. “Jesus did not come to replace the Temple with other buildings, whether huts or rich cathedrals, but to instill a religion of the heart, with only himself as the place where we encounter the Father. At first one might think that Jesus would not recognize most of what calls itself religion today. But, on second thought, it would probably look all too familiar” (p. 76).
Jesus comes out clearly in Wills’ portrayal: the woman-loving, Sabbath-breaking, sinners’-friend, wine-guzzling itinerant who claimed authority over such things. In other words, the Jesus we’re all a little embarrassed of. He’s the Jesus who flaunts convention for the sake of justice, and has little time for religious observance. He cleanses the Temple, not to restore it, but to replace it. His reaction, thinks Wills, would be the same were he to walk physically into St. Peter’s Basilica or the Mormon Tabernacle or the Crystal Cathedral. I wondered what other edifices might have made the list.
What’s most surprising in Wills’ Jesus centered critique of religion is his insistence that St. Peter was not the first bishop of Rome (he calls apostolic succession “a fiction” – p. 91), that Jesus did not intend to establish a hierarchy and that the presence of Jesus, not words of any kind, establishes a gathering of the true Church. This from the man whose Why I Am a Catholic rode the New York Times best seller list.
Religion and politics killed Jesus, but why did he die, in a metaphysical sense? After exploring a few “classic” theories of the atonement, most of which involve a pissed off God, Wills speaks of Jesus “mission as lifting humankind up into his own intimacy with the Father” (p. 117). He tells a touching story of his son waking in the night, terrified by nuns who told him he’d go to hell if he sinned. “There is not an ounce of heroism in my nature, but I instantly answered what any father would, ‘All I can say is that if you’re going there, I’m going with you’” (p. 117). That, he realized, is an imperfect picture of God’s love – a love willing to descend into hell for our sakes. God’s love rescues us not from God’s anger, but from “the forces at work against God – all the accumulated sins that cripple human freedom” (p. 119-120).
So, if it’s not religion or politics, what was Jesus all about? Wills’ translation of Jesus’ opening salvo reminds us, “God’s reign impends” (Mk. 1:15; p. 84). Citing the parables of emergence (like seeds and yeast and weeds growing with wheat and debt forgiveness and extravagant wages), Wills leaves behind the tired discussion of the kingdom as now and/or later or broken in pieces or fully realized. He says, “The reign is a dynamic process . . . It is not two things, one present and one to come. It is one process unfolding” (p. 85).
Jesus is the way into this reign, the way, the truth, and the life. In fact, Jesus is the reign himself. To illustrate this holy mystery, this divine conundrum, Wills quotes Augustine, whom he has biographied: “Where should we go but to him? And how should we go, but by way of him? So he goes to himself through himself, and we go to him by way of him, and both of us – he and we – arrive at the Father” (p. 91).
Interestingly, Wills answers what seems to me a very evangelical question, “How do I get in [not to heaven, but God’s reign]?” He calls it “the test”. “Love is the test . . .Did you treat everyone, high and low, as if dealing with Jesus himself, with his own inclusive and gratuitous love, the revelation of the Father’s love, whose sunshine is shed on all? . . . It is radical love, exigent, searing, terrifying” (p. 56-57).
There’s more. Wills treats homosexuality, the Body of Christ, Judas, and the harrowing of hell with brevity and depth. He’s a good read for the quotes alone, From Denise Levertov to G. K. Chesterton to Flannery O’Connor to Shusaku Endo and a dozen others. What Jesus Meant has a home on my shelf between Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship and Cahill’s Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.