The Words of Jesus

Phyllis Tickle

Context is a tricky business, and an important consideration when interpreting the Bible or anything critics call “texts.” We chastise for taking statements “out of context,” and judge Scripture by reference to other Scripture, reading the New Testament in the light of the Old, and balancing Jesus’ harsh statements about plucking eyes out against his other sayings.

French structural theorists argued that words acquire meaning—not because they refer to concrete things but because they refer to other words— and argued we are all talking past each other because every individual’s unique world view creates a unique context for meaning (thereby ushering in the postmodern era of personal, relative meaning).

Liberal biblical scholarship, in its quest for the historical Jesus, has so undermined traditional concepts of the context of the Gospels that this Jesus falls like a house of cards. Offended literalists argue that words mean what they mean and have always done so.

In The Words of Jesus, Phyllis Tickle has done what she considers a fairly radical thing and taken Jesus’ words—those “red letter” sayings—out of the context of the other words in the Gospels in an effort to reclaim some of their power (in this format they become “like bullets”), only to reinsert them into the context of her own evaluation.

In what amounts to a long introduction to Jesus’ words themselves (arranged in her own thematic categories), she places them into contexts both historical and personal. On the question of historical context, she argues that Jesus is often “lost in a wilderness of scholarship,” and prefers to let her picture of Jesus remain somewhat cloudy. There is a level of resignation here but she also argues this is God’s intention when it comes to our perception of Him—in order to retain our sense of Him as God, we must never think we have a handle on Him—this is why the Old Testament God is so adamant that His people not make images (idols) of Him.

Tickle negotiates between the literalist and metaphoric schools of interpretation—the fundamentalist and the liberal—arguing that Jesus stuck to neither, chiding literalists for not thinking metaphorically and vice versa. Her own third way is what she titles “actualness”—a rather clumsy and vague word that attempts to show right interpretation comes through living Jesus’ words, rather than analysing them. This personal approach is interesting for someone who, she says, generally writes “about,” rather than “does” religion. But there is sense and richness in her argument that words come alive in relationships; that a concept like love exists not in analysis but in meditation and practice. One can only understand Jesus’ words in the context of having a relationship with Him. In her words, He becomes “the Yearning, not a guru.”

Terry Eagleton, on the other hand, in his rather cumbersomely titled Terry Eagleton presents Jesus Christ: the Gospels (Revolutions series), favours the political over the personal in his analysis of the words of Jesus. He answers the question of whether Jesus was a revolutionary with the vacillating conclusion “yes and no,” along the way, in typically witty fashion, throwing out a series of questions (Why was He crucified if He never claimed to be God? Why did He seek His own death?) that probe an enigmatic figure of Jesus and, perhaps, are properly answered only with the traditional interpretation that He was, indeed, God.

The book itself—even more than Tickle’s book—seems to be an excuse for a publisher to repackage the gospels with an introduction from a famous leftist literary critic as purchasing incentive. Yet Eagleton is a wise and entertaining critic, who may prompt the target audience (those who wouldn’t be seen reading the Bible) to re-evaluate their preconceptions of Christianity.

The Christ in Eagleton’s reckoning is certainly revolutionary in some ways— one who, Eagleton decides, was killed just as much for His popularity with the poor as for His threat to the religious leadership—even if the climax of Jesus’ tale “turned out to be a resurrection, not a revolution.”

Eagleton suggests that although the Christian church traditionally put a spiritual slant on many of Jesus’ words, their contemporary audience saw them as political (a thesis surely supported by the triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the subsequent about-face in the Jerusalem crowd’s attitude by Good Friday).

This may be so but Jesus repeatedly made it clear His words would often be misunderstood. Although Eagleton puts Jesus’ words into a Marxist context, writing that “the kingdom of heaven turns out to be a surprisingly materialist affair”—“a crust of bread or a cup of water”—he also concedes that Jesus ultimately “offers a relationship rather than a body of dogma,” a conclusion that, in the end, gels with Tickle’s.

Extract from Signs of the Times, September 2008 .

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