May/June 2002

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Harold Fickett's The Living Jesus is based on a premise as uncomplicated as a two-by-four: If Jesus is who he says he is, then Jesus should be where he says he will be—that is, in his church. "Jesus' prophecy of continuing to abide among his followers meant far more than the usual elegiac memorializing," Fickett writes. "He gave us reason to believe that his very personhood—who he is—would invest itself in those who chose to follow Jesus' way." Fickett goes so far as to warn that if the church does not display Jesus' "holiness, or perfect love," then the world has reason to doubt the resurrection.

A novelist, ghostwriter, editor, and journalist, Fickett has spent a lifetime in the bowels of the church's subculture and knows its unseemly side all too well. What he is after in The Living Christ is what emerges out of all the muck, what rises above the personality cults, the glitz, the wunderprograms, the spectacular failures, and the everyday sins. He wants to see Jesus.

Where to look? Shouldn't Jesus be known to us today in the same ways he was known when he walked the earth? Yes, Fickett says:

I began doing spadework, thinking through what I knew of the various aspects of Jesus' personality as we see him in the gospels. I became convinced that the most illuminating way of looking at Jesus centered in the roles he played in the lives of those who met him, whether followers or opponents.

The result of that "spadework" is an interesting though idiosyncratic menu: Jesus as wayfarer, healer, man of prayer, liberator, prophet, and martyr.

The first category is the most forced: while Jesus was certainly a wayfarer in that he traveled far by foot, there is nothing revelatory about this attribute. A hobo is not Christlike simply by being ...