Do we think we know Him?

The other day, I stopped by a favorite lunch place to grab something and the requisite iced tea and slipped into a booth quietly with a newspaper for a brief break. The booth behind me held a professorial looking man and a young woman and they were engaged in a lively conversation. You can’t help but overhear voices that engaged and that close when you’re quiet, and I heard him ask her what her impression of “him” was. “What’s the first impression you get when you hear the name Jesus?” he asked her. That caught my attention.

She paused….um…..”well people think he was sort of soft and fuzzy, but I don’t necessarily think that was true.” She talked about social justice issues and the tendency Jesus had to advocate against the system for the disenfranchised. And I’m sitting there thinking back to the homily I heard Cardinal Francis George give in Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago several years ago about the ubiquitous, faddish, merchandised question “What would Jesus do?” George said it was presumptuous of us to put Jesus in these marketing terms, as this soft-touch, feel-good pop culture icon. I’ll never forget him saying that, in all likelihood, Jesus was ‘terrifying’, in the way He made people tremble and turn away and resist the truth.

What is the truth about Jesus? As St. Augustine so poetically wrote, He is “beauty ever ancient, ever new.” We know Him so well, and not at all. He is familiar, and startling. Encountering the reality of Jesus is stunning.

Joseph Ratzinger, brilliant theologian and compelling author and Pope of the universal Church, has recently released a new book about Jesus. The English version is being released Tuesday. It’s causing quite a stir, because people tend to seize on the version of Jesus that works best for them.

Pope Benedict’s trip to Brazil last week revived an old retelling of the Christian story in which Jesus is cast as a social revolutionary determined to overthrow the established order. The massive success of “The Da Vinci Code” reflected the hunger of millions to see Jesus as a regular person—a man with a wife and a child, a popular teacher whose true life story was subverted by the corporate self-interest of the early church. A look at any best-seller list reveals a thriving subcategory of readable scholarly and pseudo-scholarly books about the “real” Jesus: he was, they claim, a sage, a mystic, a rabbi, a boyfriend. He was a father, a pacifist, an ascetic, a prophet. In some parts of the Christian world, the aspects of Jesus’ story that most strain credibility—the virgin birth and the physical resurrection—have become optional to faith….

And that’s why it’s so crucial to engage that false gratification of the hunger people experience for God Incarnate, the humanity of the Divine.

Benedict offers an unvarnished opposing view: belief in Jesus, he says, is the only thing that will save the world.

Period. It’s radical. And Benedict is unequivocal.

Benedict has been notoriously disapproving of unauthorized views of Jesus; he helped John Paul II crush the liberation theologists in Central America in the 1980s

(the word is “theologians”)

and more recently suspended an American priest for writing a book about Jesus that he said did not give sufficient credence to the resurrection. Butfor orthodox Christian believers, Benedict’s book is a gift—a series of homilies on the New Testament by a masterful Scriptural exegete.

Benedict is that.

MSNBC is running an excerpt of the book at their website. It’s good for starters. But personally, I can’t wait to read the whole and real thing.

“Jesus of Nazareth.” Do we really think we know him?