Living Jesus

John Pritchard

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780281064984
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

'This richly engaging study vividly conveys how opening our hearts to Christ can release the transformative power of love to flow through our lives and into our broken and needy world. I pray that many will be touched by their encounter with Christ in Living Jesus.'
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu 'I'm with John Pritchard - unashamedly and incurably obsessed with Jesus. As I read his beautiful new book, I felt both my mind and my heart being enriched and challenged - to ponder the life and meaning of Jesus with my mind, and to respond from the depths of my heart. Whether you're a long-term follower of Jesus or just beginning to explore what he's about, you'll find in Living Jesus a dependable guide... gracious, intelligent, balanced, and generous with insight.'
Brian McLaren, author, speaker and activist 'What a fantastic book! Jesus Christ is the centre of human history, but who is he? John Pritchard shows us the Jesus who jumped off the pages of the Bible and into his life. I encourage you to read this book, whether you're a follower of Jesus or just wanting to find out more. You will be moved, you will laugh and you will cry. In those moments when you wonder why you are a Christian, Living Jesus will remind you. An inspirational book written by a man who loves Jesus and loves people.'
Mark Russell, Chief Executive, Church Army

1

Jesus – a personal obsession

It’s time I paid tribute to Sandra. She was my girlfriend in my last year at school. I was brought up in a fine Christian home and going to church was just what you did on Sundays. Through my teenage years the attraction was less about being in the choir and getting paid for weddings, and more about the girls you could meet at the youth club or among the young Sunday School teachers. I believed in God in a vague sort of way but preferred not to get too close. In any case, life held all sorts of vibrant opportunities and wasn’t God inclined towards negativity?

But then Sandra began lending me books. They had strange titles, like The Cross and the Switchblade and God’s Smuggler. I read them dutifully but found I was entering a world of Christian faith of which I knew very little. Here were dramatic tales of amazing events, of a God who acted decisively in human affairs, of a relationship with Jesus Christ which wasn’t confined to bread and wine at an altar rail but was richly personal and transforming. It was all a bit much for me. I wrote in my list of book reviews (I was that kind of boy) that they were ‘very interesting but not very Anglican’. I blush at the memory!

I fear that Sandra and I parted for no better reason than that I wanted a free run at university. Oxford was going to be a new world. But Sandra had made a decisive contribution to my life. She had opened up the possibility that I might be missing something rather crucial about Christianity, that it wasn’t essentially something to do with doctrines and good behaviour but rather something to do with a relationship, and in particular, something to do with the living reality of Jesus Christ. The door was opening.

The Jesus I’ve been offered

As I look back I can see a number of versions of Jesus that I’ve been offered through the years and the various stages of my journeying. They’ve all arrived from hidden places in our culture and presented themselves with varying degrees of credibility to my emerging world of ideas and beliefs.

Gentle Jesus

Gentle Jesus is well known in Junior Churches and primary schools all around the Western world. In my own case he was clearly depicted in a picture on my bedroom wall – calm, wise, tall, with blue eyes and fair hair, a strong jaw-line and a strange taste in long white nighties. He seemed to be particularly friendly with little furry animals and birds that should have known better than to hop around on the hands of strangers. But of course this was no Stranger; this was Gentle Jesus, everybody’s friend. He was oddly comforting at first but completely remote from my real world. He was epitomized by the words of the Christmas carol: ‘Christian children all must be mild, obedient, good as he,’ but it has to be said that such a manifesto was hardly attractive to a boy who wanted to play cricket for England and climb Everest. If I got too close to this Jesus, would I have to drink fruit juice at parties and have a cold shower every time I thought of girls? This Jesus wasn’t going to go very far in my life.

Judge Jesus

Judge Jesus is alive and well in the dark corners of many minds in traditional Christendom. He particularly afflicts young people in their early teens. He and I got acquainted almost without an introduction. He was just there, watching me with slightly narrowed eyes, not actively intervening but almost certainly disapproving as I struggled through my teenage years. I thought the best way to handle this was to keep my distance and whistle confidently. Gerard Hughes tells of a young married man who lived worthily and simply; he and his wife spent most of their holidays going to Christian conferences. Hughes encouraged him to meditate on the story of the marriage feast at Cana in John 2. He saw tables heaped with food set out beneath a blue sky. The guests were dancing and it was a scene of life and enjoyment. ‘Did you see Christ?’ Hughes asked. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Christ was sitting upright on a straight-backed chair, clothed in a white robe, a staff in his hand, a crown of thorns on his head, looking disapproving.’¹ As Gerard Hughes points out, if he had been asked what image of God he carried in his mind the young man would probably have talked about a God of love, mercy and compassion, but another subconscious image of God was effectively operating in his life, as it does in many devout Christian lives. Judge Jesus is a tyrannical figure who can do great damage if he is allowed to follow us around constantly flourishing a yellow card, getting ready for the Great Day when he can finally send us off the field with a grim red one.

National Trust Jesus

National Trust Jesus is much more benign and really rather well brought up. The great thing about this Jesus is that he’s very understated. His churches are a delight to visit occasionally to remind oneself of one’s heritage and the virtues of ‘the old services’. This Jesus is frozen in time, but usually in a time which never existed. You don’t actually need a National Trust card to visit him but you do feel you shouldn’t turn up uninvited. Someone once called the Church of England ‘the Church that’s dying of good taste’. The Jesus I encountered later would almost certainly be respectful of the church-as-National-Trust-property, but he would then most likely go down to the pub and watch the football on Sky. However, in my teens I was on nodding terms with this ‘Lilliput Lane’ Jesus. He was, after all, innocuous.

Living Jesus

A strange thing happened to me at university. Thanks to my wonderful Christian parents and the preparatory softening-up by Sandra I was ready to encounter the living Jesus when I was offered an intellectually credible and emotionally satisfying portrait of the man-in-the-middle of the Christian story. Afterwards I wondered how I could have gone so long without seeing that, although I had lots of pieces of the Christian jigsaw, I had never tried to put them together, nor had I realized that I didn’t have the big central piece, the one called Jesus. As I thought, listened, read, talked, and finally put that big piece in the centre, so I found that this Jesus stepped off the pages of the New Testament and into my life. It was a Copernican revolution. Instead of having Jesus circling around my sun at a respectably safe distance, now Jesus was the sun and I circled him with varying degrees of trust. I found some words years later which still speak for me. Douglas Webster was a canon of St Paul’s and he once spent a dismal winter’s day reading Bertrand Russell’s book Why I Am Not a Christian. He then wrote a brief essay which begins:

I am a Christian because of Jesus Christ, and for no other conscious reason. I find him unforgettable. I cannot get him out of my system. I do not know how he got there, but I am thankful that he did. I am a Christian because of Jesus Christ, especially because of the way he lived and the way he died, what his death did, and what he did with death in resurrection.

I agree.

Terminator Jesus

Terminator Jesus then made a surprise appearance. It’s possible to be so impressed with the new-found energy of faith and the powerful nature of its central figure that we start to believe, and to live as if, ‘my God is better than your God’. When we meet opposition we may be tempted to face up to the confrontation and say, ‘Wait till I put my tanks on your lawn!’ Or even, if defeated, to mutter darkly, ‘I’ll be back!’ Terminator Jesus is an initially attractive figure. He sometimes reappears when the religious right supports international adventures such as the invasion of Iraq. Here the tanks are chariots of fire leading God’s Righteous People to victory. When the television pictures show an ‘enemy’ target disappearing in a puff of smoke, the Righteous cheer and quote the book of Revelation. But Terminator Jesus doesn’t measure up well to the picture of a man on a cross, crying in the darkness. When the gap between these pictures of Jesus becomes too great, one of them has to go. I stuck with the Bible.

Professor Jesus

Professor Jesus is undoubtedly a wise and good man. I met him first at theological college. He took me into the domain of hard, critical thought and wouldn’t let me off the intellectual hook. He introduced me to the tools of academic theology and fired my theological curiosity, which has lasted ever since. It has to be said, though, that Professor Jesus sometimes needs to be let out to play and to relax. He certainly needs to tie study together with the life of prayer and practical action. But, then, he’s used to that. He’s been doing it all his long (pre-existent) life.

Jesus, the Hon. Member for Galilee South

This political Jesus had been lurking in the wings for a while but he emerged more clearly when I went to be a curate in the middle of Birmingham. The human flotsam and jetsam of city life would often drift to the Bull Ring, looking for help. The homeless, the addicted, the desperate – they all had a story to tell, and very often the finger of blame pointed to society and its attitudes as well as to their own personal responsibility. I remember when a night shelter had to close down and people were found dead on the streets. I was there when the IRA pub bombs went off a few hundred yards from o...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the author
• Dedication
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of Contents
• A word at the beginning
• 1. Jesus – a personal obsession
• 2. Jesus – the magnificent outsider
• 3. Jesus – centre point of history
• 4. Jesus – changing the rules
• 5. Jesus – the world’s hope
• 6. Jesus – crazy about the Church
• 7. Jesus – partner in prayer
• 8. Jesus – in a world of pain
• 9. Jesus – in the mind of the artist
• 10. Jesus – in a world of faiths
• 11. Jesus – to the end of time
• Group study course
• Notes