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It comes to me as no surprise that some of the most interesting, creative, and compelling writing about Christianity should come not from the pen of a theologian or ordained minister, but from a creative writer who has steeped himself for decades in Jesus, the Gospels, and life’s hardest questions. Reynolds Price has displayed his eloquence in such matters in Three Gospels,Letter to a Man in the Fire, and numerous novels, plays, poems, and memoirs. In A Serious Way of Wondering Price takes on ethical issues that have befuddled and divided Christians for two thousand years. With his novelist’s keen sense of character and situation, Price engages these issue in a new and perhaps even radical manner that will benefit any reader who is ready to encounter Jesus anew.
The centerpiece of the book is a trio of “speculations” in which Price has Jesus address three controversial realities: homosexuality, suicide, and the place of women in society. Each speculation is in essence a short story featuring Jesus and one other character -- in each of the first two stories we meet distinct versions of Judas Iscariot, and in the third Price gives the woman caught in adultery the name Rahab and extends her interaction with Jesus. Using this framework Price can ask, in a way far more effective than the fundamentalist faddists with bracelets and key chains, “What would Jesus do?”
In imagining the ethics of Jesus, Price asserts that “any search for a single command that compresses the heart of Jesus’ ethic must pause soon, wherever it ultimately settles, at Mark 12.28-34.” It is there that Jesus is asked “What commandment is first of all?” and replies that first is love of God and second is love of neighbor. “Anyone who today wishes to consider what Jesus of Nazareth might have done in his lifetime, or suggest doing at any present crossroads of moral choice, could hardly do better than reflect upon a single command, Jesus’ own reiteration of Leviticus 19.18: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
It is a reminder of a principle that seems obvious; but the rhetoric of religio-ethical debates often implies that Christians are forgetful of this central, all-encompassing, and even non-negotiable aspect of Jesus’ way, favoring instead the specificity of law found elsewhere in Leviticus and in Pauline condemnations. Reynolds Price, a self-described “outlaw Christian,” offers a clear rationale and model for vividly imagining the ethics of Jesus in the context of a church that has been willfully “self-blinding” in regard to racism, that has “effectively ignored the plight of the poor,” and that has failed to tolerate “any forms of sexuality beyond the traditional choices of marriage or chastity.”
It is a model well worth studying and emulating. To freshly imagine the Jesus we meet in the Gospels is an invigorating and rewarding task that Price’s fellow outlaws do well to undertake. A Serious Way of Wondering is a vital tool for those who wish to walk with a rich and relevant Jesus in the twenty-first century.
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