Mark Strauss’ “Bad, Bad Jesus”

This post is a contribution to Patheos’ book club discussion on Mark Strauss’s Jesus Behaving Badly: The Puzzling Paradoxes of the Man from Galilee.

You’ve heard about “bad, bad, Leroy Brown,” the “”baddest man in the whole damn town” who was also “meaner than a junkyard dog.” Jim Croce’s song was a #1 hit in 1973.

But have you heard about “bad, bad Jesus?”

Probably not, because the Jesus most of us know is a “good, good Jesus.”

In Jesus Behaving Badly: The Puzzling Paradoxes of the Man from Galilee, Mark Strauss takes aim at the common perception of Jesus as the meek, mild, loving, all-inclusive, don’t-judge-anyone-but-love-everyone, “have it your way,” Santa Claus savior.

He invites his readers to take a look at a less-comfortable portrait of Jesus: but one that is truer to the actual gospel accounts than our common image of him.

Strauss shows that the postcard Jesus, the one we’ve narrowed down to a palatable but thin image, gets a lot more complicated with a close reading of the gospels. There are tensions, or paradoxes, that emerge from the gospels sometimes disparate or even apparently conflicting presentations of Jesus.

Was Jesus a revolutionary or a pacifist? Was he angry (judgmental, vindictive, etc.) or loving? What he an environmentally conscious or an “earth scorcher”? Was he a legalistic or a teacher of salvation by grace? Did he proclaim the reality of hell as “eternal, conscious, punishment” for the unrepentant unbelievers, or was he a “gentle shepherd” whose teachings lend themselves to a view of universal salvation? Was he anti-family or family friendly? Was he racist or inclusivist? Sexist or egalitarian? (and so on).

The answer to all these questions is not (thankfully!), “Yes,” or “He was both!” Strauss, for example, shows that–especially when we take into account the context of Jesus’ life,  mission and the the setting of the gospels themselves, he was neither sexist nor racist. Nonetheless, in posing the questions the way he does, Strauss gives us pause and forces us to rethink our pretty but superficial pictures of Jesus.

On the whole, this is a terrific book. It seems like it would work wonderfully to introduce people to a Jesus they’ve never considered before.

I particularly found the second half of the book illuminating, insightful, and rich with information about the context in which Jesus lived. It also provides an excellent snapshot of the secondary scholarship/debate regarding who Jesus was and what he taught.

Strauss develops a deep, multi-layered picture of Jesus that comes out of the gospels accounts in conversation with other NT texts (Paul, etc.). I especially found his “Racist or Inclusivist?” chapter illuminating, as well as his reflections on the question whether Jesus was a “failed prophet or victorious king.” Strauss respectfully engages the scholarship on Jesus in relation to the notion of the kingdom of God, Jewish eschatological anticipation, and so on, with contemporary sources and puts Jesus in the context of the first century. This is the greatest strength of the book. As Michael Bird notes in his blurb of the book, it is like “meeting Jesus for the first time.”

In the first half of the book, Strauss engages these questions:

Was Jesus a revolutionary or a pacifist? Was he angry (judgmental, vindictive, etc.) or loving? What he an environmentally conscious or an “earth scorcher”? Was he a legalistic or a teacher of salvation by grace? Did he proclaim the reality of hell as “eternal, conscious, punishment” for the unrepentant unbelievers, or was he a “gentle shepherd” whose teachings lend themselves to a view of universal salvation?

There’s some very good stuff here in the first half. That said, Strauss seemed a bit too quick to resolve the tensions or paradoxes that he so admirably set up. I found this to be particularly true with his engagement of the questions of legalism / forgiveness.

As Strauss points out, Jesus had the audacity to forgive sins on many occasions and he taught the forgiveness of sins and viewed his own death as taking place for the forgiveness of sins. Yet, when Jesus warned about coming judgment and the consequences of sin (particularly of sin by the religious elite against the marginalized and outcast), he did not seem to as anxious as we often are to move into an assurance of the standing offer of forgiveness. His teachings about judgment and the criterion whereby we will be judged seem, in the synoptic gospels especially, to hover pretty consistently over our action or inaction with respect to the poor and marginalized. Matthew 25 is the great case in point here, and is a text that I rarely if ever hear evangelicals preach in accordance with its “plain reading.”

Liberation, contextual, and global theologians, however, consistently point out the dramatic force of this text and others of Jesus sayings with respect to our responsibility for the poor, marginalized and outcast. They seem more willing than most evangelicals—Mark Strauss included here—to let the paradox stand as a point of tension than they are anxious to resolve it through a “salvation by grace alone” theology.

Strauss resolves the tension by setting it under the penal substitutionary framework. In making this move, however, Strauss runs the risk of encouraging readers to fall back into a more reductive version than the gospels themselves present.

In several of Strauss’ later chapters, he (wisely, in my opinion) omitted the “resolving the paradox” section at the end. Had he taken this approach in his chapter on the question whether Jesus was a legalist or a preacher of grace, he might have more consistently kept the “complex” Jesus more front and center.

A bit of engagement with liberation theology readings of Jesus might have helped in this regard, too. The Jesus of liberation theology is by no means a tame, preacher of forgiveness or the inspiration of “your best life now.” For those of us who occupy the center of privilege in society, this Jesus can be quite uncomfortable and “counter-cultural,” indeed. He’s more like Jim Croce’s “junkyard dog” than the meek and mild Jesus standing at the door or your heart, waiting for you to let him come in.

Related to this point are the many other ways of nuancing the atonement of Christ that also serve to deepen or enrich our understanding of Jesus. I am of the persuasion that Girard’s theory of mimetic violence and the “final scapegoat” theory, for example, does a better job of connecting (or unpacking) Jesus’ death as a sacrifice than does the Lutheran-Protestant-Evangelical penal substitutionary atonement theory that I took to be espoused in the book as the key to understanding the meaning of Jesus’ death.

Those few points aside, Strauss’ Jesus Behaving Badly is a very good book that could facilitate some excellent conversations about Jesus in a college or seminary classroom or even church small group. Strauss is at his vest in the book when he resists the temptation to harmonize or resolve the paradoxes he sets up, letting the reader wrestle with this “new” and challenging Jesus.

As a final note, what could have made the book even better: An appendix or final chapter that unpacks the methodological questions involved in moving from presentations of Jesus in the gospels to a single, systematic (theological) portrait of Jesus. What does it mean, for example, that we have both diversity/ambiguity with regard to Jesus’ person and actions both within the individual gospels and across the four gospel portraits? How do the differing theological purposes and perspectives of the four accounts figure into how we decipher the “Puzzling Paradoxes of the Man from Galilee”?

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