Essential Reading: Life of Christ
Only two classes of people found the Babe: the shepherds and the Wise Men; the simple and the learned; those who knew they knew nothing, and those who knew that they did not know everything. He is never seen by the man of one book; never by the man who thinks he knows. Not even God can tell the proud anything! Only the humble can find God!
- Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ
Comments like the one above are the reason why Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ is, in my opinion, one of the most essential books on any preacher’s bookshelf (aside from the scriptures themselves, obviously). Buy this book. Read it with a pen or highlighter in hand so that you may underline Sheen’s copious observations and asides that may serve as springboards or inspiration for future sermons. I don’t care if you think you are the most protestant Protestant who ever protested and have little to learn from a long deceased Roman Catholic bishop and television personality. You’re wrong. Because Bishop Sheen probably knows the scriptures and the story of Jesus better than you, or in any event he is probably a better storyteller, and that is what really matters here.
The first and most important book recommendation that I have for every preacher is not a book about preaching, it is a book about Jesus. Sheen takes a story that we all think we know and sheds new light all over it. He makes the story of Jesus come alive with his attention to detail and he leaves his readers with the clear impression that not only does he view the story of Jesus as a living story, but that he views the God of Jesus as a living God. This, above all else, is the job of the preacher: connecting the congregation to the story of Jesus and helping them to experience his story as a part of their story. Now, I should add, that I am not one of those preachers who thinks that every sermon needs to be focused on the gospel passage; I do, however, think that every sermon should use whatever passage of scripture is preached on as a window to the whole gospel story. As preachers, we always have a bigger story to tell than just what is printed in the bulletin on Sunday morning. That is why you need this book.
Bishop Sheen’s book is a composite sketch of the life of Our Lord. He does not waste time delineating which details come from Mark’s gospel and which details come from John’s, etc. His purpose is helping people to know Jesus, not helping them to know the authors of the gospels, and this is a difference that it would be good for preachers to be mindful of. If, in reading the quote from Sheen’s book above, your first thought is: “But the shepherds are in Luke’s gospel and the Wise Men are in Matthew’s!” then I have a piece of advice for you: Your congregation doesn’t care. Or at least, they probably don’t. They definitely don’t want this pointed out to them at length on Christmas Eve. Nor should they. Such distinctions might be a great topic for bible study, but a sermon isn’t a bible study. It is an encounter with the living Christ that takes place in the context of worship. The Jesus that we worship is the Jesus of all the gospels, not just one, and definitely not just your favorite. Fulton Sheen knows very well that the accounts of Jesus’s life do not agree in all of their details, but the story he tells is of one Lord and not four different Lords, just as there is only one Jesus that we encounter in worship, it doesn’t matter whether that encounter happens at the font, the pulpit, or the altar. When it comes to telling Jesus’s story, the preacher can learn much from Sheen’s habit of pushing the distinctions between the gospels largely to the side so that they don’t interfere with the ability to take in the story. You might have a good reason to do some “bible study” from the pulpit, but I doubt it. Save it for your adult forum or Lenten bible study. And please miss me with that mythical object of fantasy called “the historical Jesus.” Sheen doesn’t waste any time speculating about what “actually” happened apart from the gospels, and nor should you.
My copy of Sheen’s Life of Christ is heavily underlined, but there are also a few question marks and marginal notes for statements that I either don’t understand or that I am not sure I agree with. You will likely not agree with his every observation either. Read this anyways. I have still found more inspiration for sermons from this one book than any other book I own (outside of the bible itself). I will offer one caveat though: in the midst of so many observations about the life of Jesus that seem absolutely timeless, now and then Sheen reveals himself to be very much a product of a different time. We are all shaped by the times we live in, all of us, and Sheen is no exception. He was writing this book in the 1950s. He occasionally will say things that we probably wouldn’t say now, and occasionally it seems as if he is projecting the concerns of his own day back into the gospel (we all do this!). His preface is an excellent example. After a brief paragraph railing against communism, Sheen writes:
The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without His Cross. But a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God is a cheap, feminized, colorless, itinerant preacher who deserves to be popular for His great Sermon on the Mount, but also merits unpopularity for what He said about His Divinity on the one hand, and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other. This sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces, sustained sometimes by academic etymologists who cannot see the Word for the letters, or distorted beyond personal recognition by a dogmatic principle that anything which is Divine must necessarily be a myth. Without His Cross, He becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears.
In many ways a brilliant passage, marred I think, by his use of the adjective “feminized” to indicate weakness. He clearly doesn’t know the women I know. But whether we like it or not, this sort of casual sexism was rampant in the age in which this was written. We simply cannot expect someone writing in the mid-twentieth century to sound like someone writing in the early twenty-first. Old books, and old authors, still have much to say to us though, even if we have to occasionally encounter comments that we find a bit challenging or even offensive. Sheen is inspiring, but not faultless. I remember watching an episode of Bishop Sheen’s “Life is Worth Living” in which he made an extremely negative and uncharitable comment about homosexuals. I think he was wrong about that, but I don’t think he’s wrong about Jesus. I’m not looking for a dead Roman Catholic bishop from the 1950s to affirm my sexuality. I can find that elsewhere. What I am looking for, whenever I pick up Sheen’s book, is wisdom from someone who has a deep, deep understanding of Jesus’s story, and skill in sharing that story in compelling ways. And that is what I find. It really is a must read for any preacher, because telling the story of Jesus IS YOUR JOB, and Sheen can help you do it better.
