Good Friday, April 22, E minus 2

to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,
our judge and our hope.

Surely evangelism, proclaiming Jesus, is a basic task of the church. We may be embarrassed by the excesses of our more aggressive evangelical neighbours, but if you really think this is good news, why would you not share it with others? We can’t compete with slicker clubs and nonprofits on doing good and having fun – we have to rely on proclaiming Jesus.

What do we expect of church, if not Jesus talk? One Anglican friend suggests that liberal churches who won’t talk Jesus are like a hardware store that won’t talk tools. You say you want a hammer? Let’s talk about the process of nail implementation, and a technology that might help…

Take a moment now, and remember a time when you loved Jesus, and Jesus made sense to you. Was it a Sunday School moment, or a choir song? Did the sacrifice of this passion week move you once? When did you lose focus on your image of Jesus?

Many people think that the church sells a personality cult built around a superhero. They worry that Jesus as our judge is an authoritarian leader of a hierarchical organization. Few people understand Jesus as a figure of hope, the measure of their vision of ultimate promise and purpose.

Remember singing the old hymns and praying the simple prayers, to Jesus. Is the vaguely impersonal divinity without gender or human face enough to sustain your prayer life? Perhaps we need to take seriously Marcus Borg’s book title, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.

Will Easter be another equivocation festival, or an acclamation that ‘Christ is risen’ with a renewed energy to ‘proclaim Jesus’?