I recently read reJesus by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch.
Like everything by Frost and Hirsch, this is a great book, and well worth reading. However, it was not what I expected the book to be. I judged the book by it’s cover…actually, by the subtitle on the cover.
The subtitle of the book is “A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church.” This led me to believe that the book would show the wild side of Jesus in the Gospels, and how we, as followers of Jesus, can live more like Him in our world.
The book did a great job explaining why we should study the gospels and learn to live like Jesus, but didn’t do a great job explaining how Jesus was wild, or how we could study the gospels to discover the wild Jesus.
Glimpses of the wild Jesus did come through. On pages 109-110, for example, they retold the story of Jesus confronting the demoniac near Gadara. It got my blood racing as I realized how wild Jesus really was in that situation! This is what I thought the book was going to contain.
Once I realized that the book was little more than just a call for the church to return to the Jesus of the Gospels, I really enjoyed the book. The message it contains is sorely needed in Christianity today.
And who knows? Maybe Frost and Hirsch will come out with another volume entitled “ReJesus: reReading the Gospels for a Missional Church.”
I have to admit I’m a little thrown at the thought of a “wild” Jesus….
What this does speak to me is that I need to be very careful to not place Jesus in my very own, pre-defined ‘box’. Jesus was/is fully man and fully God in my opinion, and as much as He has revealed to us, we still “see through a glass darkly” as Paul so eloquently phrased it.
I’m not very good at conveying what I’m thinking at times…So I hope that makes sense 🙂
Yes, it makes sense. I am not thrilled with the idea of a “wild” Jesus either, though I do think He was not the docile, soft-spoken type of man we most often portray Him to be.