What’s the main point, anyway?
by L. William Countryman

I’m often struck by a significant difference between the message of Jesus, particularly as it’s found in the Synoptic Gospels, and the message of the church. Anybody who reads carefully is likely to notice it. The problem may be sharpened for me because of who I am – a gospels scholar who is also an Anglican and finds the classical Christian tradition profoundly helpful in shaping human life. I have a commitment to both church and Gospel, and I keep running up against the reality that they are not the same.

To hear the church, from the mid-first century onward, one would think that the central thing was what you believe about Jesus. To hear the teachings of Jesus, you would assume that the main point is a little different. The main point in those teachings has as much to do with our relationships with other people as our relationship with God. In fact, our relationship with God is directly interconnected with our behavior human-to-human: "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us."

I’m not trying to set up a polar opposition here or blame Paul for transmogrifying the simple religion of Jesus into the complex theologizing of Christianity. It’s not that simple. Followers of Jesus emphasized Jesus in their teaching because, in Jesus, they had encountered God – teaching, calling, loving, healing, forgiving, renewing, changing them. They weren’t choosing Jesus against Jesus’ teaching but with the teaching.

In Jesus’ ministry, there’s no reason to think that the message was somehow insufficient, just because it didn’t yet include the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection for and with us. It was already able to give people new life. It can still do that.

I’m not suggesting that we somehow give up preaching Jesus. How could we not want to share that gift with others? But I think people in our own time often need to encounter Jesus first not in terms of a religion that sometimes falls egregiously short of its founder’s standards, but in terms of a life-transforming message. Remember that Jesus’ first hearers welcomed that message because it changed their lives and their worlds.

I’ve argued more than once (Good News of Jesus; Forgiven and Forgiving) that the main point of that message was forgiveness. I still believe that. And I believe that it transforms lives. And I believe that it’s never been more essential than right now. How are Israelis and Palestinians going to build a new and lifegiving reality in what we still call, with more grief than hope, the "Holy Land"? I don’t have any detailed prescription, but I am confident that nothing at all will happen unless significant leadership on both sides begins to acknowledge the necessity of forgiveness.

That will mean both acknowledging one’s own need of forgiveness and cultivating the ability to forgive the wrongs committed by the other side as well. Jesus taught that this is possible because it is in fact the way God works. God forgives. Even if you don’t need forgiving, you are forgiven. In fact, being forgiven is better than never having needed forgiveness, for the experience of being forgiven awakens love and generosity, virtues that are in notably short supply among the more conventionally pious.

I’m not saying that the only hope for the Holy Land is for Jews and Muslims to become Christians. I’m saying that the message of Jesus, the message that Jesus preached and lived, is the only hope – for the Holy Land or for any place else. It’s easy in human life to keep piling up the lists of wrongs and calculating what is owed and putting off reconciliation until the score is settled. It will never be settled. The only hope for the future is mutual forgiveness. And it will work because that’s how God works, too. And that’s the main point.