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N. T. Wright on the Gospel and Meal Jesus Gave Us
What can people inside and outside your church learn about the gospel from the way you preach and practice the Lord’s Supper? Bishop Tom Wright wrote Simply Christian and a book on communion to explain why Christ’s resurrection is good news for the whole cosmos.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Chances are you’ve heard, sung, or recited those ancient words in worship, most likely during a communion service.
But in what way do you understand this mystery of faith? Do those words signify an inspirational example…a formula worth repeating at a quarterly or monthly Lord’s Supper…your assurance of going to heaven when you die…a challenge to the powers that be…good news for the whole cosmos?
The way your congregation understands those words will shape how you proclaim the gospel, relate to all creation, and celebrate the Eucharist.
Two books by prolific theologian N. T. Wright—Simply Christian and The Meal Jesus Gave Us—are especially relevant for people who feel puzzled about the place of Jesus and the sacraments in worship and life.
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The stream Christians drink from
More often known as “Tom Wright” or “N. T. Wright,” Nicholas Thomas Wright grew up in an Anglican family in Northumberland (northeast England). Already as a boy, he wanted to become a pastor. But he changed course while at Oxford, when John Wenham, his Greek grammar prof, said that the stream from which Christians drink is polluted by bad theology.
“From that day on I knew God was calling me to an academic, though still very much church-related, vocation,” Wright wrote in an article explaining his pilgrimage in theology.
His advisors suggested he choose either pastoral or academic work. But Wright resists either/or polarities. So he’s found ways to connect history and theology with congregational life and the wider world of public culture.
He has worked as a theology professor and college chaplain in the U.K. and Canada, served as Canon Theologian at London’s Westminster Abbey, and is now Bishop of the Diocese of Durham for the Church of England.
Meanwhile he has written more than 40 books. Some are huge footnoted scholarly works about the historical Jesus. (Wright says Jesus bodily rose from the dead but didn’t preach about justification or being the second person of the Trinity.) Others are about the Apostle Paul. (Wright disagrees with academics who say Paul founded the Christian religion.)
Peppering his talks and books with references to Tiger Woods, 9/11, the G8 goals, and The DaVinci Code, Wright also loves helping ordinary people engage with the biblical text. That’s why he cites William Tyndale as a hero, why he’s written The New Testament for Everyone commentary series, and why he wrote Simply Christian and The Meal That Jesus Gave Us.
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The voice behind the echoes
“I had a dream the other night, a powerful and interesting dream. And the really frustrating thing about it is that I can’t remember what it was about.” That’s how Wright begins Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense.
He describes longings common in every culture and era, voices that echo in our imagination yet elude us in reality. We dream of justice, a world put to rights so that all enjoy hope and prosperity. We hunger for spirituality and deep relationships. We delight in beauty. Yet in trying to find these things that we know must exist, “we’re like moths trying to fly to the moon.”
Too often, instead of living a “full, rich, glad human existence,” we give up on the echoes. “Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamour for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment,” Wright says.
It’s only in the story of Jesus that we “recognize the voice whose echoes we have heard.” Wright’s big picture view of Christianity, as revealed in the Old and New Testaments, shows how God acts in human history to make all things new. The Incarnation is a divine rescue mission from evil, death, and the powers and principalities that corrupt God’s good creation.
“The gospel message is precisely that Jesus is Lord and God raised him from the dead,” Wright says. When Jesus died on the cross and rose from the tomb, he launched God’s new world.
And it’s precisely at the resurrection where “recent generations of Western Christians have taken a drastic wrong turn,” Wright charges. Like trying to pour God’s vast ocean of love into a tiny bottle, the church has spiritualized and privatized the gospel. It has unhinged Jesus from history.
Reducing salvation to “going to heaven” and “having a personal relationship with Jesus” distorts truth. It lets “true for you, not for me” skeptics interpret truth as “something happening inside you” instead of “God’s powerful, loving revelation of the way things are in the world.”
Worse, Wright explains, this escapist Gnostic misreading of the gospel lets the church conveniently ignore “the pressures of contemporary empire…. Saying Jesus is Lord means Caesar isn’t…. Genuine Christianity, which names Jesus as Lord of earth as well as heaven, is and has always been a threat to empire.”
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Where heaven and earth overlap
A Christian Century interviewer once asked Wright, “How do you make the figure of Jesus come alive for people these days?”
Wright replied, “One way is to urge people to become a character in the story. You are on the edge of a crowd listening to Jesus. And the sacraments are important. When scripture and sacrament meet, people are driven to the intimacy of prayer and the life of discipleship.”
His slim, easy-to-read The Meal Jesus Gave Us puts readers in the story. First he compares communion to a birthday party attended by Martians. The aliens are puzzled by the rituals. The earthlings celebrate according to habit but can’t explain why they do what they do.
Helping readers imagine themselves at a freedom party (Passover) and Last Supper (along with scared, confused disciples), Wright leads readers through the concepts of new meal, new story, new family, and new life.
One partygoer tells another, “Part of the story is that God is taking the world somewhere. He’s got plans. Apparently he’s promised to do for all of us what he did for Jesus after he died. And for the whole world too…. This God really does love the whole world and wants to make it all alive in a new way, like he did with Jesus on that first day of the week.”
The Meal is simple enough for young teens to understand. Yet it builds on a theme Wright uses in Simply Christian and other works. Heaven and earth, God’s future and our present, come together in Jesus—especially in communion, “the richest of all Christian symbols.”
In joining the drama in which Jesus takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and feeds us, we do something that sinks the meaning of communion into us more deeply than mere words can.
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Read the companion story on How Three Congregations Are Enriching Communion.
“We welcome grant applications that help worshipers experience communion more deeply and see its connections to all of life,” says Betty Grit, who manages the Worship Renewal Grants Program at Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.
Hear N. T. Wright speak about Simply Christian on January 5, 2007, at the Calvin College January Series. Listen to his Space, Time and Sacraments seminar at Calvin College. Listen to Wright’s archived Calvin lectures on preaching and teaching Romans, recovering biblical worship, and what St. Paul really said.
Download this free online discussion guide for Simply Christian. Pair it with this discussion guide on beliefs about prayer. Follow this worship service plan based on the theme Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
Scroll down to explore everything on the best website of N. T. Wright links. Join the Wrightsaid discussion group. Regent College offers one-stop shopping for Wright books, audios, and videos.
In this interview, Tom Wright explains why the Eucharist means so much to him. The blogs Alistair Adversaria and Gower Street yield insights into how his life and theology connect. Wright wrote the libretto for “Easter Oratorio,” composed by Paul Spicer.
To understand Wright’s views on the collusion of empire and Gnosticism (on both the Christian right and left), read his Shipwreck and Kingdom address, or watch the first section of his Simply Christian lecture at Washington Cathedral, or read his Judas and the Gospel of Jesus: Have We Missed the Truth about Christianity?
Plan a church education session to discuss Tom Wright’s statement that in the U.S., the people who strongly argue for creationism and against Darwin “are themselves totally soaked in the social Darwinism which says that the economic and political modus operandi of the Western world since the eighteenth century has got the right to develop and do its own thing, because might is right, and because we have developed this way and therefore we can get on and do it.”
Order This Holy Mystery: A United Methodist Understanding of Holy Communion, as well as the children’s version. Download four free Eucharist-related articles. Here’s a handy chart for knowing whether you may take communion in another church.
Browse related stories about Bible commentaries, global music, the Lord’s Supper, and practicing reconciliation.
Feel free to print and distribute these stories at your staff, council, worship, or education committee meeting. These questions will get members talking about the place of Jesus and communion in your church.
- What is the same and different between how Wright defines the gospel message and how you (personally or as a church) define the gospel? How do these differences shape your worship?
- What do you think of Wright’s charge that many churches are not proclaiming the full story of God’s good news for whole people, the whole world, and the whole cosmos?
- Compared to the examples given in these stories, does your church give more emphasis or less emphasis to the Eucharist? In what ways do your communion practices support or detract from your theological values?
What is the best way you’ve found to deepen congregational understanding of the gospel message or experience of the Lord’s Supper? Please write to us so we can identify trends and share your great ideas. Whether you do these or any other things, we’d love to learn what works for you:
- If you started accenting table fellowship as a joyous confirmation of scripture…or channel of God's healing and comfort…or inspiration to seek justice for others in Christ's body—what happened? Which results or best practices would you recommend that other churches try?
- Did you create a drama, visual arts resource, song, litany, or Communion-related offering that worked especially well?
- Did you research how other churches in your area or theological tradition do communion? If so, how did you share this research? Did you use the research to make changes in your Eucharist practice?
Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photography by Steve Huyser-Honig
This story was originally posted on December 8, 2006. External links were operative at the time the story was posted, but may have expired since then.
CICW web story reprint policy:
You have permission to reprint this article (or other stories in this collection) in its entirety, in print or online. Before the title of the article, please reprint the following permission statement. If you are reprinting online, please link to the website listed.
This article was first published by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, http://www.calvin.edu/worship/stories/.