Thoughts on McLaren's The Secret Message of Jesus

I've been in Winchester this week. I've been reading in the area of christology. One particular book held my attention moreso than others, Brian McLaren's The Secret Message of Jesus. The book is as much apology as it is christology. What follows are some of my notes on his book with an occasional observation on my part. If you do not know who McLaren is, I've linked his website to my blog [See "Links worth visitng" below].

McLaren penned his book in 2006 to better understand Jesus and his message. He had become disillusioned by persons who had become convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had figured both Jesus and his message out and, in McLaren's words, had "reduced [Jesus and his message] to their own kind of mathematics. It's these three concepts or those four steps or this simple five part formula, no more sophisticated than an elementary equation."

For McLaren, the church's conventional versions of Jesus have failed to do him justice. Conventional versions fail to see Jesus in his native wildness and original vigor. According to McLaren, Jesus and his message are better than anything we have heard or understood or figured out so far.

Early on in the book McLaren observes that "the portrait of Jesus I found in the New Testament didn't fit with the image of Christianity projected by religious institutions, charismatic televangelists, religious spokespeople in the media -- and sometimes my own preaching." So, he suggests a reappraisal.

McLaren's reappraisal follows familiar lines. He looks at the political and religious climate of Jesus' day. He pushes himself and his readers to fully understand the "interpretive grid" used when reading scripture. We all have one. Our grids help us to see some things all too clearly while blinding us to other things altogether. The zealots wanted Jesus to be a zealot who advocated rebellion and revolution as they did. The Sadduccees wanted Jesus to be a Sadduccee who advocated a go along to get along approach when it came to relating to the Roman occupiers. The Pharisees wanted Jesus to be a Pharisee who advocated an external religious purity and rigor. And so on. The story is familiar. Jesus is cast as one of us.

Jesus resists. We cannot change him. Rather, he invites us to change, which is what repentance is all about.

McLaren makes a lot of the fact that Jesus preferred to get his message across in parables. For McLaren, "parables entice their hearers into new territory . . . [and we] can respond with arrogant and impatient anger (I have no idea what he's saying. This is a waste of time!), which makes you walk away. Or [we] can respond with eager and curious humility (I can't let this go. I must know more!) . . . [P]arables have a capactiy that goes beyond informing their hearers, parables also have the power to help transform them into interactive, interdependent, humble, inquisitive, and persistent people."

Parables invite their hearers/readers to reconsider their world and consider a new one, to admit that what is known may be incomplete or wrong, to give life a second and third and fourth thought, to think. As much as we may want fast, painless, effortless information instead of slow, energetic, engaging transformation, that's not Jesus' way or message. McLaren writes, Jesus' message comes "not as a simple formula or list of information and not as angry ultimatum, but instead as a secret hidden in a parable, like a treasure hidden in a field, like a seed hidden in soil, like yeast hidden in dough."

McLaren draws on the writings of a lot of my heroes -- C.S. Lewis, N.T. Wright, Walter Wink, Walter Brueggemann. If I am not mistaken, Rich's Faith Stretchers book study has either read McLaren's book or are slated to do so this year. A very wise choice. There is a lot here to absorb and utilize.

McLaren, in the book's afterword, includes the poem by Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, "A Future Not Your Own." It's a poem well suited to sabbaticals and to sabbatical blogs.


It helps, now and then, to step back
and take the long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of
the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confessions brings perfection . . .
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results . . .
We are prophets of a future not our own.


That's it for the moment. Peace.