Born-again Stories

Looking for Jesus
by Virginia Stem Owens, Westminster John Knox; 261 pp.; $18

Virginia Stem Owens doesn't deny that Jesus today can be known immediately, personally, and even miraculously. But in her experience, when it happens, it is the result of his initiative, not her effort: "However much I want to transport myself to his celestial habitat, I do not believe I can, at will, reach through time to lay hold of that ethereal figure. He lives now on the far side of these earthbound stories and comes and goes as he will."

Yet it is in these earthbound stories from the Gospels that she finds solace. In them she discovers herself and even more: words "which contain life itself." "This is the place," she writes, "where I can indeed count on finding Jesus."

In this book, she rehearses 23 Jesus stories "to illuminate and clarify the gospel narratives, while also making them permeable enough for entry"—meaning she refuses to find a simplistic "lesson" for readers today, but instead tries to let the power of the story work on each of us in its own complex way. It's not just her attention to the more salient revelations of biblical scholarship but her narrative freedom that helps us re-engage these old, old stories. The porticoes at the Bethzatha Pool had, she says, "turned into something like a perpetual waiting room at a doctor's office." The Samaritan woman reacts to Jesus with "Great, the guy's a religious nut, too"; then, after giving "a skeptical snort," says, "Okay, Mr. Jew, just where do you expect to get this Wonder Water?"

With her usual gentle and probing style, Owens reminds us that Jesus is bigger than any of our favorite constructions (Jesus the Revolutionary or Jesus the Republican or Jesus the Whatever). Better still, she puts us there with Jesus, with the people he met, because, as she says, "only by entering his story can we hope to meet Jesus."