Meaning and the Great Story
According
to Hollywood, Jesus’ story is “the greatest story ever told.” (1965 movie, produced and directed by George
Stevens, starring Max von Sydow as Jesus.)
Whether the film lived up to its billing or not, Hollywood got the title
right.
The story
comes to us almost exclusively from the canonical gospels. One of Jesus’ famous sayings, “It is more
blessed to give than to receive,” comes from Acts, and the Revelation reports
various messages from the resurrected Jesus; e.g. “I am the alpha and omega,”
and “I am coming soon.” But if we want
to know about the earthly life of Jesus, we go to the gospels.
Of course,
there have been retellings of Jesus’ story.
From the second century to the twentieth, authors have “spun” Jesus in a
variety of ways. The second century
gnostics reworked the story to make Jesus more “spiritual”; their version of
Jesus is hardly likely to persuade modern readers unless we are predisposed to
reject orthodoxy and/or are tempted to attribute the canonical gospels to an
orthodox conspiracy. But orthodoxy, as
expressed in the creeds, arose in the third and fourth centuries. It is far more likely that the gospels created
orthodoxy than the other way around.
Modern
retellings of the Jesus story are often just as tendentious as gnostic
gospels. Enlightenment rationalists,
such as Thomas Jefferson, erase miracle stories. Marxists make Jesus into a revolutionary;
social reformers make him a reformer.
Pluralists avoid Jesus’ demands for obedience and faith. Theological liberals misunderstand or reject
Jesus’ “Son of Man” sayings.
I do not
deny there is a difference between story (the gospels) and the meanings (creeds
or theological systems or sermons) that interpret them. There is nothing illegitimate about the work
of a critic or interpreter. Whenever the
church proclaims good news about Jesus, it does so by interpreting the
gospels. In literature, we call that “criticism”;
the attempt to understand at a deep level.
We always run the risk of bad criticism, of misinterpreting the text.
Notice that
I assume that good criticism implies an attempt (and some degree of success) to
read a text fairly and on its own terms.
I have no interest in theories of meaning, sometimes labeled “deconstructionist”
or “reader-centric,” which liberate readers from their duty of faithfulness to
texts.
So we have
story and meaning. Both are needed. No matter how wonderful our sermon,
interpretation, or creed, it cannot replace the gospels. No matter how restricted our criticisms are—even
if they amount to a public reading of the text—we cannot avoid
interpretation. All readings are
interpretive. All interpretations are
tentative, waiting (in a sense) for better criticism.
Gospel is a
unique kind of story. It isn’t tragedy,
though without faith people may read it that way. It is the deepest comedy, a comedy of joy, of
a shockingly happy ending. It is not a
quest like the search for the grail or Frodo’s mission to Mordor; at the same
time it is a quest unlike all others.
Jesus’ mission exposes him to misunderstanding from his friends,
unbelief, enmity, conspiracy, and social injustices of many kinds, including Roman
oppression, ethnic hatreds, religious sectarianism, poverty, violence, and sexism. In the end, the forces of our world kill
Jesus.
(Whatever
his faults, Mel Gibson, when making The
Passion of the Christ, got that part right.
Who killed Jesus? Answer: We all
did.)
But it was
not the end. In this story, Jesus
wins. When we, his enemies, kill him, he
triumphs over us. He invites us to
submit and be remade.
Notice the
recursive element to this essay. I’ve
been writing about story and meaning while engaging in criticism. There’s nothing wrong with this. If my essay is badly written or if my thesis
is thoroughly mistaken, the remedy is to reread the story and restate its
meaning.
