What is the Gospel? (Musings on The Jesus Action Figure) (Telling the Story of God II)
Brandon Cook
The greatest of all illusions [is] the illusion of familiarity. [1]
-G.K. Chesterton
I have a Jesus action figure in my office, discovered in the bottom of an Urban Outfitters discount bin one cold (by Southern California standards) Christmas-shopping day. I guffawed when I found it. I find it both funny and sobering. Funny because… well, you should never try to explain why something is funny. But sobering because we live in a society in which Jesus has become a parody, to be lampooned or mocked. Or at least, his Church has often become so, and he has the dishonor of standing in proxy for it. It is also a sign to me that our culture thinks it already knows the story of Jesus, so we can all laugh and joke about it.
This problem of presumed familiarity is a uniquely twenty-first century problem. In the first century, after all, few people had heard of Jesus. When you heard the story of a Jewish savior-messiah who had come to save not just his people, but the whole world—and not from barbarian hordes on the northern borders, but from death itself—it was a novel concept, to say the least. By now, though, the story has been told so often, and often quite badly, that overfamiliarity has bred contempt. It’s like when someone starts telling a joke and you say, “Yeah, I’ve heard it.” The Gospel has often been watered down to a punchline we’ve already heard, which is easy to dismiss. The true Gospel—the revolutionary good news of Empire subverted and new hope revealed—gets hidden, its story gets buried.
People’s responses to the Gospel can also be far worse than “There’s nothing there for me.” They can sometimes veer into outright hostility, partly because of how often Christianity has so poorly carried the Gospel message. Dallas Willard famously said that Christianity often gets reduced to “the Gospel of sin management,” which is the result of Christians focusing their efforts on rules of external behaviors and not on being transformed from the inside out.[2] Or perhaps people think that Christianity is an invitation to “get religion,” to become like Ned Flanders, pedaling Jesus. Some think it means you have to become anti-science or anti-reason. Or, as one Gallup poll made clear, it may bring to mind hypocrisy, perhaps because many Christians use the Gospel to be right rather than to love.[3] It may, more darkly, bring to mind abuses of power and, tragically, the abuse of children by Catholic priests. When such objections crowd the mind, a hearer might dismiss Jesus’ invitation out of hand, all while failing to understand Jesus himself.
They might miss that Jesus’ Good News is relationship with God that saves us from death in every form, beginning with the forgiveness of our sins and culminating in a new way of living—all possible because of the faithfulness of Jesus to us and the power of God available to us through him.[4] It is the story of Jesus being enthroned as the King of all, and the invitation to follow him with allegiance and loyalty as we participate bodily in his new creation.[5] It is an invitation to be made new from within by the grace of this good King, even while we are unable to get our own selves in order. It is a call to stand with the poor and the powerless as God has stood with us, to seek racial reconciliation and justice, to give what you have to those in need, to live in generosity and abundance, to live in freedom and the strength of the Holy Spirit, the power of God that makes all things new. Yet it gets reduced to a plastic punchline on sale for a discounted price amidst consumers rushing around to buy more stuff.
Charles Spurgeon purportedly said, “The Gospel is like a caged lion. It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of its cage.”[6] There is work, then, to reclaim the true Gospel of Jesus from the pretenders who now crowd the stage. How do we let the true Gospel out? This work proves more difficult than we might think.
For all of these readings in one place, order my book 'Learning to Live and Love Like Jesus.'
[1] Chesterton, G.K. The Everlasting Man. Rough Draft Printing. Seaside, Oregon. 2013. Page 98.
[2] Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. HarperCollins. New York, NY. 1998. See “Chapter 2: Gospels of Sin Management.”
[3] The poll is now over a decade old, though I doubt the results would skew differently now. See unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity…and Why It Matters by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons. Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI. 2012.
[4] See John 1:12, Romans 5:8, I John 4:19.
[5] See Matthew Bates’s Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King. Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, MI. 2017. Page 13.
[6] As with many great quotes, this one is actually an amalgamation of several quotes, but rightly attributed to Spurgeon. See https://elliotritzema.com/2012/07/31/spurgeons-let-the-lion-out-of-the-cage-quote/ [September 11, 2017].