Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana

It's almost a high-school literature teacher's joke: Divine 1st person point of view. Any literary person worth their salt knows the only kind of omniscient point of view is 3rd person (or 2nd, in the extremely rare case of Augustine's Confessions). But Anne Rice blithely jumps those literary tracks (as she jumped another, from vampire lit to theography) in order to give us the 1st person perspective of Jesus of Nazareth, God and man, on His way to becoming the Saviour of the world.

One measure of the audacity of Rice's premise is that I approached and read her first few chapters more with fear than with anticipation, three interrelated fears based upon my discomfort in hearing a 21st century author directly ventriloquising Jesus. The first fear was technical. I thought that the Jesus was going to sound too human, that the 1st person narration was going to drain all the awe from Jesus's person. But she pulls it off. If you look hard enough, there are probably cracks where the craft doesn't hold up (because Anne Rice is human!), but on a first reading the Hypostatic Union comes across. Jesus's voice is human, of course, but with a dawning recognition that He is God, and what that fully means for His time on earth. The second fear was specifically sexual. Any 21st century biographer of Jesus is going to have to deal with His sexuality; the audience demands it. But an account of some aching crush or surge of hormones couldn't help but demean the personhood of Jesus, drop Him down to snicker-worthy, and a 21st century audience would be slow to follow a reluctant turning away from some nascent love affair to some Higher Love. We would feel His bodily longings, not feel the Higher Good He alone would feel, and this would cheapen His mission. And, in this book, Jesus is unquestionably, deeply, and bodily in love with a lovely woman. But Rice manages to make the experience also quite unlike any romantic relationship before or since. To avoid clear spoilers I will say only that Jesus was never "in danger" of giving up His mission, nor, except for a few agonised moments, do I think an audience would want Him to. The third fear was more broadly political. Surely, in this most drearily querulous of times, Rice could not avoid the temptation to make a Statement about the political issues that divide our country, the United States, for instance. Surely, ventriloquising the voice of God, she would make God sound like she wanted Him to. There are a few moments where Jesus's voice could be read as joining one side of a debate or other, but more often than not, Rice carefully resists such coopting, and I respect her for it. The audacity of her premise is, on the whole, matched with her success: speaking the human voice of God as it might have been then in such a way that now we can still manage to show Him reverence.

Aside from all that, it is simply a very good story, starts getting especially good about chapter 11. Intelligently Rice chooses the initial Gospel accounts of Jesus's ministry as the end of her story, so that we see the familiar material (during long stretches she stays quite close not only to the Biblical story but to its text) as a crux, not just a beginning, and in that way the old can take on additional meaning.

If there is anything time-bound or contemporary, limited, about the presentation, it may be the human perspective itself, a failure of our current, and our culture's current, imagination to comprehend anything higher than ourselves, for better or for worse. Christ has to come a long way to meet our materialist culture. Of course Rice borders dangerously on sacrilege. But she subverts her own human presentation. Her human Christ is in nearly every respect set apart from His community, even from His family. We come to find out, for instance, that His "brothers" (initially addressed as such) are cousins, that His romantic longing has, well, such an unexpected denouement, that His limited way of knowing (His perspective is Divine, but not omniscient) can expand so gratifyingly. He is human, but being separate from all other humans He can easily, in the course of the book, grow into a fuller understanding and use of His Divinity, and we, having joined Him when His perspective is more human, can more easily follow His remarkable journey into Messianic ministry.

This isn't how it happened (should you believe, as I do, that it happened). But this surely resembles how it happened. I read the final page on a Sunday morning (after a difficult week), closed the book, and having arrived where the book's momentum had carried me felt compelled into worship.

Note: I have not read the first book in the trilogy.

After reading, The Lord Jesus Christ Out of Egypt, I was hoping Anne Rice would continue to write about Jesus' life in the same manner. Christ the Lord, The Road to Cana is so engrossing..I can barely put it down. I am ready for the next chapter in His life.

Anne Rice's Jesus deeply touches one's heart with his innocent wisdom, his vulnerabiity, the magnitude of his caring. It is personally heartrending to know what is coming. The Greek word for "to believe in" has the connotation "to trust, have confidence in." Like no other book I've read, this book brings me most clearly to that trust.

I found Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana deeply moving and incredibly clarifying. Before, the events described in the Bible were a jumble in my head although I had read them several times. Now as never before, I had an understanding of what our Lord must have gone through as he became ready to be the sacrifice for our sins. It was fascinating to follow His progress. It seems to me that Ms. Rice must be truly anointed to have provided such a magnificent portrait of our Lord's advent on the Earth. Thank you Ms. Rice . I hope you are forthcoming with other books of this caliber.

FIRST, read "Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt," also by Anne Rice. That is the first book of this trilogy in progress. Both books are wonderful treatments of Christ's youth and self discovery. The first person telling pulled me in, making Christ more familiar than he's ever been for me. The only downside is that readers will finish reading both books too soon. Rice's story telling is a gift... and she has an evolved comprehension of God's patience and mercy which she shares by threading that understanding through the action in both stories. I would like to believe that both books were divinely inspired. After all, who are we to question the ways of the Lord?