Jesus: Meditations On His Stories, and His Realtionships With Women

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Spirituality
Author:	Andrew Greeley

This a wonderful book for cutting through the hide-bound fundamentalism and rigid homilies that have made Jesus a remote figure even to many observing Christians. The author also takes pains to divorce his Subject from the dictates of commercial fare like Dan Brown's "Di Vinci Code" which distorts the stories of Jesus' life with material from much later and non-canonical sources in order to spice up the Incarnation with tales of Mary Madelene as a wife of Jesus or a mother. Greeley points out:

"To put it in modern terms, when Jesus chose a human to announce officially his return to life, he engaged in affirmative action and selected a woman". (page 79)

Indeed it was Mary Magdalene whom Jesus first appeared to according to John's Gospel. She was the first apostle. Even St. Paul, who is taken to task by progressive elements for being sexist, made clear in a one of his Letters that men and women were equal under Jesus Christ--as were Jews and Gentiles, free people and slaves, et al.

It was the later Romanization of Christianity that lowered the status of women from the status they held in the first house-churches around the Mediterranean of the First Century AD to the demotion they faced after the long prosecuting of the faith when the Emperor Constantine and other men of state and sword institutionalized Christianity with the needs of Imperial and male Ecclesiastical power . (Roman pagan society traditionally gave all power to the patriarch of a family, even that of life and death over wife and children.)

Father Greeley, noted sociologist, prodigious novelist and priest, takes a fresh view of the parables of Jesus that are interposed throughout the Gospels. Although a Catholic, he has no agenda here to serve any one form of the faith, nor to set out to prove the "one true faith".

The book's interpretations cover not just the more famous "stories" such as "The Prodigal Son" or "The Good Samaritan" but almost all the great and some lesser-known parables such as the story of the "Wise and Cunning Servant" and "The Workers in the Vineyard". Greeley is always weaving in two strong threads through all the parables of Jesus: that they are surprising stories, sometimes even humorous in their twists and turns of events, and also that His stories are strongly weighted against notions of envy and revenge that permeate in culture.





Greeley also makes plain something that is clear to many like myself who read the Gospels later in life for the first time were very surprised to find: that Jesus Christ always treated women, his followers as well as those looking for a cure for their ailments or those that afflicted their sick children, with both respect and decency and a pure love for the feminine half of humankind, all without condensation or sentimentality.
This makes Jesus almost unique in the Ancient World as a religious leader who neither demeaned nor took women for granted--even those like the Samaritan woman at the well in John's Gospel or the harrowing story of the woman taken in adultery and thrown at his feet (John 8) to provoke him to follow the Law or renounce it in some form.

This is a good book for an overview of Jesus and the Gospel stories. Some may dispute Father Greeley's findings here and there, but they are too learned and straight forward to be dismissed casually.