Chapter Ten: Giggling for God

Chapter Ten: Giggling for God

Bell offers a number of examples of humour from the stories about Jesus, and looks at the challenges of language and culture in the shared understanding of jokes and humour. He concludes the chapter—and the book—by encouraging us to ask why and where we might be able to find humour in both the Bible and Jesus.

Chapter 9: Righteous Indignation

Chapter 9: Righteous Indignation

In my first year of seminary, a classmate in our Introduction to New Testament Studies class described Jesus driving the moneychangers out of the temple as “Our Lord’s hissy fit.” The words did what they were supposed to: they caught our attention.  My classmate called the story that for a couple of reasons: one was to make Jesus’ anger and deep frustration clearer, and the other was to contrast it with the less just reasons to be angry we see and feel.  The people Jesus gets mad at are extorting others by exploiting their desire to be close to God through the temple’s customs.

What Bell tries to show is that responding to God’s love with love doesn’t always look nice,  like something you’d see on a Hallmark card: righteous anger (“rooted in love and justice”) has its place, and it’s indifference, rather than anger, that is the emotion truly to be rejected.

Chapter 8: Business Lunches

Chapter 8: Business Lunches



If you do a Google image search for Jesus, you have to scroll a long way before you see a portrayal of him as someone other than a white-skinned, brown-haired, bearded man dressed in flowing robes.  We’ve come to see some striking corrections to those pervasive images in the last couple of decades (try another search, this time for “Jesus Mafa” to see some powerful imaginings), but Bell challenges us to expand our vision of Jesus a bit further.  Why, he asks, is Jesus always skinny?  Bell offers 23 different examples of stories where Jesus ate, and another collection of sayings that revolve around food.  He also shows us why the arguments for a ‘skinny Jesus’ don’t hold a lot of water.  What’s truly powerful about this chapter, though, are the six “Reasons for eating” that Bell offers—reasons we see in the stories of Jesus and reasons that we can relate to in our own lives.

Chapter Seven: Talking to Strangers

Chapter 7: Talking to Strangers

After a moving anecdote of seeing two communities living in the same place, sharing faith, and yet failing to interact with one another, Bell looks at how Jesus welcomes interactions with people who might well be overlooked. Mixing modern references with biblical stories, Bell wonders what it was like for Jesus to have grown up an exile.  He looks at how Jesus is for all people, encountering Samaritans, foreign lepers, and centurions with grace and care. Bell concludes by marvelling at how Jesus is “uniquely able to recognize and to love the good in those who are ‘not belonging to this fold.’”

Chapter Six: Feminine Faces

Chapter Six: Feminine Faces

Bell’s main point in this chapter is that the “female witness was indispensable.” He reminds us that when we read the Bible carefully,

• we learn more about the stories and the faith of women in Jesus’ life than we do about the men
  
• we see Jesus using images that speak to the lives of women as much as images that speak to men
  
• we see Jesus caring for women—even when they’re being ignored by men in authority

These re-discoveries might be challenging. We think of the twelve disciples, but few of us can rhyme off their names—and as Bell reminds us, we know very little about most of them—but we get a deep sense of who Mary and Martha are, and about how Jesus loves them.  Once again, Bell asks us to look at what’s really in the Bible.

Chapter Five: The Religious Reprobate

Chapter Five: The Religious Reprobate

1. Bell speaks at length about how Jesus was formed by his religious tradition and was a regular adherent. He speaks about how at all major festivals Jesus and his disciples were observant, practising Jews. Yet at the same time, he runs into trouble with his peers in the synagogues and temples. What were Jesus’ main clashes with the religious establishment and over what issues? What parallels do you see to today’s world?

Chapter Four: Christian Family Values?

Chapter Four: Christian Family Values?

1. Bell outlines the stories of famous biblical characters with an eye to reminding readers of how fallible these characters actually were.  Why do you think God uses such fallible people?