Jesus Teaches, But Gomes Preaches

Dr. Peter J. Gomes is afraid: he is afraid that the gospel of Jesus, the radical and “scandalous” good news he brought, has been lost in the rest of the Bible. The effort to reclaim the message constitutes the subject of the latest book by Gomes, a religion professor and the minister of Memorial Church. “It is no accident that although Jesus came preaching a disturbing and redistributive gospel, we do not preach what Jesus preached,” he writes. “Instead, we preach Jesus.”

In his latest work, “The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What’s So Good About the Good News,” Gomes criticizes the church and its adherents for straying from Jesus’ message in order to preserve the status quo and gratify immediate self-interest. Following a highly charged national election in which “Jesus” signified the right wing of the Republican Party, such a critique represents a necessary step towards decoupling Christian religiosity and extreme political conservatism. The text is more than just a critique, however; it is also a guidebook to rediscovering Jesus’ teachings and, through them, God. It is in this latter capacity that the “The Scandalous Gospel” may come up short for many readers.

“The Scandalous Gospel” combines fairly simple biblical interpretation with very adept explanation from the incredibly eloquent Harvard pastor. The book isn’t meant to add to the canon of interpretation, but rather to reach the readers who need it most—those who may not know Jesus in the “socialist” light in which Gomes presents him, for example. As he puts it, “For readers from all traditions, including those who are just discovering the Christian faith or are discouraged by their experience of it, I have written this book.”

Gomes divides “The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus” into three main units: the first describes “The Trouble with Scripture,” the second discusses the gospel in light of conventional wisdom, and the last poses the question, “Where do we go from here?” Throughout, Gomes paints the teachings of Jesus in the radical light in which contemporaries would have viewed them, portraying Jesus as something of a socialist. Gomes doesn’t write in a vacuum, however, and he includes numerous mentions of current socio-political situations—the war in Iraq, Sept. 11, homophobia, and race relations—to convey how Jesus’s teachings apply to the modern world.

Yet where Gomes’s book falls short is not in the message it presents, but in the way it presents it. Gomes is good about writing accessibly, but for those with more biblical knowledge, the book can get dry after the first 100 pages or so. Gomes’s tone is overly preachy—there’s a reason most sermons aren’t 245 pages—and the work is laden with rhetoric and anecdotes that resemble the parables Gomes describes as “Jesus’ most effective teaching instruments.” These may have worked well for Jesus, but then again, his audience was generally uneducated.

Gomes’s message is not revolutionary, nor is it particularly novel, as the author acknowledges himself, but it comes at a time when it is necessary: the increase in the prominence of fundamentalist faiths over the last decades alone makes Gomes’s book relevant. Gomes is right in his diagnosis of the church’s ailment as religion for the status quo, and he is right to spend much of his book pointing the way to the “good news” rather than criticizing the audience he could potentially reach.

In his conclusion, he sums up his argument, stating: “If we read what Jesus says and see what he has done, we must be convinced that the status quo, ancient or contemporary, is still not where he would have us be. The notion that we should invest in some sense of primitive purity rather than in the adventure of what is not yet and is yet to come suggests that we really do not trust the nature of Jesus’ ministry, and that should he come again as he came before, we would disregard him in the same way.” Gomes’s book can be monotonous and unoriginal at times, but he deserves our praise for re-presenting this fundamental message at a time when it’s all but forgotten.

—Staff writer Joshua J. Kearney can be reached at kearney@fas.harvard.edu.