The Secret Message of Jesus: Part One

In part one of The Secret Message of Jesus McLaren attempts to excavate Jesus’s Kingdom message that he claims has long been buried.

In chapter one, he makes a case for why recovering the essence of Jesus’s message is essential for those who do and don’t follow Jesus. He writes, “In one of my previous books, I said that clariy is sometimes overrated and thst intrigue is correspondingly undervalued. But here I want to say–clearly–that it is tragic for anyone, especially anyone affiliated with the religion named after Jesus, not to be clear about what Jesus’s message actually was.”

In chapter two, he describes the political nature of Jesus’s message and compares and contrasts what he says to the other major “political parties” of his day: Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and Herodians. He talks about how Jesus confounds them all with a message that is impossible to neatly categorize.

In chapter three, he describes Jesus as a prophet and gives four different ways Jesus’s teaching on the Kingdom resonated with the message of Israel’s previous prophets. He also talks a bit about what would have been one of the more shocking aspects of Jesus’s message to his Jewish contemporaries–that the Kingdom of God was “at hand” as in available and accessible in the here and now.

In chapter four, he summarizes the plot of the Scriptures and describes how the story of God’s interaction with his creation finds its fulfillment in Jesus.

In chapter five, he talks about the hiddenness of Jesus’s message. He writes, “What could possibly be the benefit of Jesus’s hiddenness, intrigue, lack of clarity, metaphor, and answering questions with questions? Why risk being misunderstood–or not understood at all? If the message is so important, why hide it in evocative rather than technical language?”

In Part Two, McLaren begins to grapple more fully with Jesus’s hidden message.

More later.