Innocuous Jesus?

This article appeared in the March 1976 issue of Sojourners.

The virtual abolition of distinction between the private and the political realms to my mind resolves a secret of the gospel which bothers and bemuses many people of the church, though they may seldom be articulate about it. Most churchfolk in American Christendom, especially those of a white bourgeois rearing, have, for generations, in both Sunday School and sanctuary, been furnished an impression of Jesus as a person who went briefly about teaching love and doing good: gentle Jesus, pure Jesus, meek Jesus, pastoral Jesus, honest Jesus, fragrant Jesus, passive Jesus, peaceful Jesus, healing Jesus, celibate Jesus, clean Jesus, virtuous Jesus, innocuous Jesus. Oddly enough, this image of Jesus stands in blatant discrepancy to biblical accounts of the ministry of Jesus familiar to everyone (by which Jesus is known to have been controversial in relation to his family and in synagogue appearances, to have suffered poignantly, to have known complete rejection of intimates no less than enemies, and to have been greeted more often with apprehension than acclaim).

More particularly, this notion of an innocuous Jesus contradicts the notorious and turbulent events now marked as Holy Week in which the historical Jesus is pursued as a political criminal by the authorities, put to trial and condemned, mocked and publicly humiliated, executed in the manner customarily reserved for insurrectionists, and, all the while, beheld by his followers with hysteria and consternation. While the traditional churches have invested so much in the innocuous image of Jesus, they have not been able to suppress and remove from common knowledge the public clamor of Holy Week. This has placed church people in the predicament of having two conflicting views of Jesus simultaneously with little help available as to whether the two are reconcilable and, if not, as to which is to be believed. I think most just linger in the quandary.

I recall how uneasy, as a younger person, I used to feel in church when Lent, especially Holy Week, would happen and when, suddenly, it seemed, all that we had been told during the other church seasons about Jesus would be refuted in the recital of gospel accounts. There were these obvious questions which would never be mentioned, much less answered. Why, if Jesus was so private, so kind, so good, was he treated like a public criminal? Why would the state take any notice of him, much less crucify him? I became aware that others' felt this discrepancy, too, and that some met it by steadfastly concentrating on the idea of an innocuous Jesus since that convenienced their way of life. They made the effort to overlook the contrary evidence of Holy Week and the disquiet it occasioned. Some others, I noticed, opted the other way: they ideologized Jesus, rendering him a more political agitator. I found both of these attempts deeply unsatisfactory, both being narrow and acculturated versions of Jesus, the one pietistic, the other political.

And if the church failed to deal with this remarkable discrepancy, one still might have recourse to the New Testament to ascertain whether the contrasting images of Jesus had basis and, then, to comprehend the issues posed in Holy Week. The secret involved has to do, I learned in the Bible, with the political significance of the works, discreet though they be, attributed in the gospels to Jesus, and, similarly, the implication, politically, of his sayings. Both are cryptic: characteristically Jesus tells a parable, ending the recital with the remark "those who have ears, let them hear." Or, characteristically, he heals someone in some way afflicted in mind or body and then cautions the one healed and those who may have witnessed the happening not to publicize it. It is only when his parables or his works become notorious (the particular precipitant episode being the raising of Lazarus) that the authorities move against Jesus. Why do the rulers of the world regard Jesus so apprehensively? Why is he an offense -- and a threat -- to their regime? The answer that emerges in the biblical accounts is that in teaching and in healing Jesus bespeaks and demonstrates an authority and capability over the power of death, and it is that very same power of death in the world which supplies the only moral sanction for the state, or its adjacent ruling principalities. This Jesus preached and verified a freedom from captivation in death which threatens in the most rudimentary way the politics of this age. The rulers perceive this, once they have learned of Jesus and of what he has said and done, accurately to be their undoing. Thus, the very events which have been most private or most discreet in Jesus' ministry take on the most momentous political meaning; and if, in the days of Holy Week the truth of the confrontation becomes public, it has been promotive throughout the life of Jesus, from Herod's attempt to murder the child through the wilderness temptations to submit to the power of death -- portrayed in explicit political terms.

It is, in other words, the coherence of the power of death multifariously at work in the world which explains why the public authorities cannot overlook the ministry of Jesus when it becomes apparent to them that he possesses authority and exercises capability over the power of death, as exemplified in his preaching and healing. In the midst of the consummate public confrontation between the political principalities and Jesus during Holy Week, on Maundy Thursday, Jesus promises that his disciples will receive and share through his triumph over the power of death in that same authority and capability over death in this world. And so it is that his promise is fulfilled at Pentecost, and thereafter, whenever that authority is shown, wherever that capacity is verified; insofar as the Christians live faithfully in the power of the resurrection, freed from captivation or intimidation by the power of death, they have known, and they know a hostility and harassment on the part of the ruling principalities similar to that which Jesus knew.

William Stringfellow was an attorney, lay theologian and social critic, and Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.