Antipodean Writer

What if Jesus Came Back? Antipodean Writer

What if Jesus came back to walk the earth today, doing the things he did, and saying the things he said: just as he did back in first century Palestine? And if Jesus did come back today, how many present day church-goers would flock to welcome Him? I have a sneaking suspicion that many of today's church-goers would experience outright alarm at the things such a Jesus would say and do. The reason for my suspicion is simply this: Jesus in His own day was a radical. His words, His actions, His teaching were explosive, controversial, incendiary, and outrageously offensive to the people of His own day. And most of us simply don't like being offended if we can possibly avoid it. But this raises yet another question: how to reconcile this offensive first-century radical with the "sweet Jesus meek and mild" served up weekly from so many twenty-first century pulpits? Part of the answer appears when we observe that the revolutionary words that shocked first-century audiences have little or no impact today. A teacher who says nothing shocking cannot be shocking. But why aren't we shocked by the words Jesus speaks? Is it because Jesus' words have been carefully explained away by generations of preachers who have transmuted His parables into inoffensive platitudes? Has the repetition of His teachings over some twenty centuries dulled our ears, as we have become too over-familiar with oft-repeated gospel stories to pay them any conscious attention? Has familiarity, in other words, bred in us a contempt of what He said? Of Jesus Himself? Part of the solution to such over-familiarity, it seems, would be to hear Jesus' words and see Jesus' actions as His original audiences did in ancient Palestine. But how could we possibly do this? The attempt to hear and see Jesus from such a fresh perspective became the inspiration for this work. To that end I imagined what would happen in a modern-day metropolis if Jesus went around doing and saying the things we read about in the Gospels: and how these things would be reported to us via the modern news-media. Each news-transcript in this volume describes a well-known gospel story. Reading the transcript presents us the gospel story through the eyes of critical reporters - I hope - can jar us into seeing more clearly what Jesus' words meant to His original hearers. The distortions of reality spun into the transcripts are deliberate: being the stock in trade for so much of what passes for mainstream media news coverage today. Such misrepresentations can, if they force us to reject the bias of the reporter, demand that we pay closer attention what Jesus actually said, and did - and what He meant by it. In any case, I hope that these imaginative gospel retellings might open our eyes afresh to the vital, life-giving reality of Jesus Christ: whose words remain as authoritative and challenging to us today as they were when He first spoke them 2,000 years ago. If His words have never challenged us, then I take it that we never really understood what He said in the first place.