Book Review: The Secret Message of Jesus
If you’ve been tooling around the emerging church blogosphere for the last several months, I’m sure you’ve seen a review or two of Brian McLaren‘s new book, The Secret Message of Jesus. (If you haven’t, so much the better…this short review will not stand up to the exhaustive commentaries that have already been posted.) There is no one on the emerging church scene who is as polarizing as McLaren, and — as a parallel — no one who has the cojones to say what a bunch of us were thinking but were afraid to say aloud.
Many reviewers have called this new book “N.T. Wright for the everyman,” and for good reason. Where Wright is a theologian, McLaren is a pastor and practitioner. Wright has made himself a student of Jesus’ (and Paul’s) times, and McLaren has taken this cue, re-examining the messages of Jesus (both public speaking and private conversations recorded in the Gospels) with an aim to applying those messages to the current cultural milieu — which is pretty much what a pastor does, right?
McLaren — as any good English major would do — also approaches the message of Jesus with a respect for the medium of Jesus’ message…that is, parable and metaphor. He contends that the medium tells us much of Jesus’ intent for his potential followers: to deliberately obscure information in favor of cultivating relationship. If Jesus’ message was intended to transmit information, the hearer could walk away with the info in her pocket, feeling terrifically enlightened and superior; instead, story (“the kingdom of God is like…”) and metaphor (“you must be born again” and “I will give you living water”) invite the hearer to stick around and find out more…to stick around and be changed.
He also examines the “signs and wonders” surrounding the ministry of Jesus through the dual lenses of the ancient culture and Jesus’ message…i.e., if they’re “signs,” they must be signs that can help us understand what exactly the message is, and wonder at how frickin’ awesome the message really is, once we start to get it. (For those of you just tuning in, they’re signs of the kingdom of God drawing near.) McLaren’s musings on demonic possession and Jesus’ liberating power from them are especially wonderful, as he suggests such are signs of Jesus’ power to point out, name and banish spirits that overpower groups of people away from God’s kingdom…”isms” such as racism, sexism, Nazism, terrorism, capitalism, communism, etc.
The most affecting section of the book is the latter third — “Imagination: Exploring How Jesus’ Secret Message Could Change Everything” — in which McLaren explores the present implications of Jesus’ secret and radical message. (For those of you just tuning in, the secret message is “the kingdom of God is near.”) What does it look like to be a citizen of this kingdom? What are the priorities, values, and passions of its citizens? What do the citizens of the kingdom hope for and work toward? Who, exactly, is a citizen of the kingdom of God?
McLaren’s answers will surprise — and hopefully, inspire — you. Get the book. Now.
