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Back to blasphemy

Kevin Miller

My friend John Livingstone Clark is a poet, writer and university instructor from Dundurn, Sask. His most recent book is Back to Bethany: Eighty-nine Paragraphs about Jesus and Lazarus in Abbotsford. A former resident of Abbotsford, B.C., Clark wrote this fictional tale of Jesus arriving in Abbotsford in the mid-1970s as a buckskin-clad hippie Messiah. One of Jesus’ first acts is the resurrection of a perennial loser named Lazarus, who has overdosed on pills. Jesus then sets out with his new friend to gather apostles from among the rugby players, cheerleaders and realtors of the Fraser Valley – with little to no success. Along the way, Jesus and Lazarus comment on topics ranging from the incarnation to death.

When I first heard about this book at a pre-publication reading last year, I was delighted with Clark’s exceptional writing skill (“She’s a Rempel without a cause if I’ve ever seen one”) and his critique of Mennonites in the Fraser Valley (“Of course [Coach Jackson] went to the Mennonite Church, but that was just for stock tips and other financial advice”). I approached Clark after the reading and asked him for an advance copy. That’s when the problems started.

Yes, the book was witty and finely written – but it was also blasphemous. Among other things, the Jesus in the book swore and approved of fornication. Needless to say, I was very disappointed.

I had spoken at length with Clark, and he had told me that his intention was to make Jesus accessible and relevant to the hardened minds of the agnostic students in his university writing classes. Clark also told me that he was in love with “the Christ figure,” and that he intended to keep Jesus pure throughout the book because literature these days was lacking in heroes who were truly good.

So what went wrong? Clark’s intentions sounded as sincere and heartfelt as any youth pastor’s. He wanted to reinterpret Christ for a new generation. But Clark’s jaded, wistful, ineffectual Jesus is nothing like the pure, holy person of Christ we find in the Bible.

If I had picked this book off the shelf, I would have passed it off as just another writer using artistic license to tarnish the gospel, like The Last Temptation of Christ. But because I knew Clark, I could not dismiss the book so easily. I found myself asking why so many writers, filmmakers and other artists seem obsessed with dragging Jesus down into the gutter. It’s as if they think sinfulness equals humanness, and there is no way they can identify with a Saviour who lacks this essential quality.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that this book is exactly what Clark intended it to be: a sincere attempt to define Jesus. However, it is missing the same ingredient that every aberrant testament of Jesus Christ lacks: the insight of the Holy Spirit. As a result, in Back to Bethany we see Jesus doing things that He would never do.

So how should we respond to this book? Should we boycott the rest of Clark’s writings because he wrote a misguided testimony of Jesus? Should we stage protest rallies around his home? I hope not. No one was ever “protested” into becoming a Christian. God’s kingdom is founded on love, and a prerequisite for love is understanding. John Livingstone Clark is searching for Jesus. That he took the time to write this book is testimony to that. He may not know the truth yet, and he happens to be in a position to have his unorthodox views published, but our battle is not against flesh and blood. Instead of protesting against Clark, I urge you to pray for him, that one day he would find the true Jesus.

Kevin Miller works for a Christian Publishing house in Maple Ridge, BC.

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Last modified July 20, 1999.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
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