| When I started preaching back in 1997, I remember well one piece of early advice I received from a godly man in my home church, a lover of baseball and Jesus: “Just preach like Jesus and you’ll never swing and miss. You’ll always hit a home run in the pulpit.” I thought that was pretty solid advice and still do because I think I know what he meant: I should preach the gospel faithfully, without any worldly compromise, and I should preach the good news with profound pathos. But can we really preach like Jesus? After all, during his earthly ministry our Lord proclaimed himself as the Son of God. I can’t do that. And it certainly never turns out too well for those who gain followers, then claim to be the messiah. How should Jesus’s preaching in, say, the Sermon on the Mount, shape our proclamation of God’s Word? In his article, Why Jesus Can’t Always Be Our Model for Preaching, Hershael York brings some much-needed clarity to what can be a confusing issue. “In some ways,” York writes, “modern preachers should no more emulate Jesus’s preaching than contemporary Christians should copy the crucifixion. Just as the work of redemption was his alone, a work in which we may merely share, so elements of his preaching can only be reflected in ours, but never actually appropriated.” York shows how Jesus’s preaching can legitimately shape ours, as well as how we dare not try to emulate Jesus in our preaching. |
