“The Messiah of Morris Avenue” by Tony Hendra

The Messiah of Morris Avenue

By Tony Hendra
2006
245 pages. Audio: 7 hours and 31 minutes
Fiction

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It’s probably only fair to say at the outset that The Messiah of Morris Avenue is not a great novel. That’s okay. You should read it anyway. The author, Tony Hendra, is better known for his other work. He is a British satirist, was an editor at National Lampoon, participated in the satirical rock documentary This Is Spinal Tap, and hung out with people like John Cleese. In other words, satire is his game.

The basic idea of the novel is simple and straightforward. Jesus has come back to modern America as the Hispanic street preacher, Jay. He gathers together a ragtag group of disciples, becomes a media phenomenon, and threatens the religious and political structures. That all sounds pretty familiar doesn’t it? America in Hendra’s telling has basically been taken over by Christian evangelicals who are authoritarian to the point of fascism and are utterly intolerant of anyone’s views but their own. By the way this book was written 13 years ago, in 2006. Hmmmm.

Well, if I have my audience right, I don’t have to worry much about spoilers here. After Jay begins to gather a following, the religious/political authorities (in this book they are pretty much the same thing) decide to torture and kill him.

I felt drawn to the great thought experiment of trying to retell the story of Jesus in a contemporary American setting where the Pharisees are evangelicals and the world is driven by media. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting from a British satirist, but even though his satirical gifts are on full display I found the book incredibly respectful of the Jesus story. I found myself drawn to Jay.

Any of us who tried to do this would certainly make some different choices than Hendra does. But I think for all of us who preach, that act of faithful imagination—that effort to imagine what Jesus would say and do in our contemporary setting and how we and the world around us would react to it—is a most worthy project.

Even though Jesus’s enemies are not very nuanced in this book, and even though it will not go down as one of the classics of the fiction of faith, and though it is no threat to Pilgrim’s Progress, it is well worth a read. It is a powerful reminder that Jesus might not fare any better in 21st-century America than he did in first-century Palestine.

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Hendra is actually an excellent writer, and I also highly recommend Father Joe, a memoir about his lifelong relationship with a monk. After the publication of that book, Hendra’s daughter accused him of sexually abusing her. And some of those who worked on This Is Spinal Tap have complained that he took far more credit than he deserved. It’s always hard to know what to make of one who can write so movingly about Jesus yet have a life that seems a little bit of a wreck. Is it hypocrisy or is it just humanity? I will leave it to the reader to decide.