DR. JENSEN has been Archbishop of Sydney, the largest Diocese in the country, since 2001 and is Chair of the General Synod Doctrine Commission. He has written a number of books including The Quest For Power, At the Heart the Universe and The Revelation of God and in June this year presented the inaugural TC Hammond Lectures in Ireland.

I've spent most of my life talking to Australians about Jesus. He is my great enthusiasm. But it's a job that's getting harder. I am wondering how the future of Jesus and the future of our country will intersect. Let me illustrate.

Four of our brightest and best - university medallists, historians, lawyers, Harvard graduates, first class honours men - have written a book called, Imagining Australia: Ideas for our Future. It is a work of bold and imaginative suggestions. Rightly, they put a discussion of Australian values in the first chapter, headed, 'Australian National Identity'. After all, it's hard to imagine the future, without starting with matters of beliefs, identity, ethics, relationships, history.

But they do not have much room for Jesus in their vision of our future. They see that we need values, but they favour humanist values. They seem to think that a secular state means a secular community. Perhaps they think that multiculturalism has disaffiliated Jesus; he is too divisive to be allowed to speak.

I wonder, though, how much they actually know about Jesus. Perhaps they lack the requisite knowledge to bring him into the discussion. For example, they casually quote Abraham Lincoln as an authority: Lincoln saying, 'a house divided against itself cannot stand.' No doubt he did say this. But he knew quite well, as did all his hearers, that he was quoting Jesus. He was citing a supreme cultural authority; he did not have to offer a footnote.

But we have now reached a stage where four highly educated and intelligent Australians apparently fail to recognise a standard quote from the Bible. It explains, I suppose, the absence of Jesus from their treatment of values. Mind you, it is a surface absence, because, whether they know it or not, Jesus is basic to our history, and so our culture. Thus, when they are trying to upgrade traditional Australian characteristics, such as a fair go, Jesus pops up, anonymously. In a truly striking sentence, they say: 'The modern fair go demands that we should do unto others as we would have done unto ourselves'.

It is striking, isn't it? Once again there is the utterly unconscious quoting of Jesus, as a source of modern secular values. And there is the lovely irony that the modern fair go is described in the antique English of, 'do unto others' - straight out of the King James Version of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus is there, but he's been rendered invisible. He is an anonymous Jesus; he makes his contribution without acknowledgement. And that's one of the chief problems of the job I am doing. Frankly, Jesus is slipping out of memory and imagination. We cannot really blame the authors of the book. As the historian Dr Stuart Piggin has observed, 'Australia's social commentators and historians are tone deaf to religion'. He documents the way in which the cliché that this is a country without a religious past is religiously repeated.

Professor Brian Dickey of Flinders University is just as trenchant: 'The secular left liberal accounts of our history which became so dominant from 1950 to 1980 did not want to treat with Christianity, except to scorn it...' In these circumstances, Jesus' kingdom has waned, you could say. His future is very unsure. We have other gurus now. People seem to know so little about him, that they are unwilling or unable to refer to him explicitly in a discussion of values. We cannot bring him to the table to tell us what he thinks.

But, and here is a paradox indeed, another reason for his invisibility is that he is very well known. He is like the life of the party - everybody knows Jesus. His kingdom continues to wax, you could say. He is so well known, we do not even have to think or talk about him. Which means, I submit, that we apprehend him via cultural clichés, which hide the real Jesus from view. We do not know him all that well. Parts of his basic teaching would surprise us.

Which leads me to another problem. It's the churches who talk mainly about Jesus, and who wants to hear what they have to say? This is a significant problem for me, in giving the Boyer Lectures. I am, after all, a denominational official; I carry the burden of the uncertain reputation of the churches. It is difficult to get beyond the boredom, indifference or antagonism that many people feel towards organised religion. Perhaps, it would be better for me to stick to something safe, like botany or golf, or even values, or social justice.

Why Jesus? For three main reasons. First, because it is simply a fact that he is one of the two or three most influential people who have ever lived. 'The name of Jesus' said the American sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'is not so much written as ploughed into the history of the world...' Most people who have thought deeply about the subject, will recognise the justice of this assessment.

Or take these words attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte:

I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I founded Empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love, and to this hour millions of people would die for him.

Second, his life and teaching have been so fundamentally important to our own culture. I would say that we are even secular in a Christian sort of way: we can quote the Sermon on the Mount as a part of modern humanistic ethics without knowing it.

You will always have trouble in understanding our literature and history, our identity, if you know little about Jesus; you will also have trouble understanding the modern world. A world in which the words of Jesus are taken with utmost seriousness, and acted upon, by millions of people whether in the newly developing China or in the USA. His words have that sort of contemporary significance.

Third, because I think that, as well known as he is, he is unknown. You could say that his sheer greatness has obscured the facts about him. At least before he slips from view, we ought to ask whether he has some vital and permanent truths to share with us.

I don't really want to talk about the institutional church, or even religion. Such things are of marginal interest to me. I quite like going to church, but I find it hard to like the institutional church. And I don't really think of myself as a religious person.

What I really want to do - and I think that we need to do as a nation, while we still have the chance - is to talk about Jesus, and to let Jesus talk back to us.

I want to provoke a national debate with the Jesus of the Gospels. I know that we have no established church or religion. That is good law; we are fortunate not to have been afflicted with a state church. I know that we have embraced multiculturalism, and I myself am delighted by the new and different Australia that is emerging as a result of our immigration policies.

But some seem to think that it means that we have no basis for our civilisation, apart from a few scaled down general values like a fair go and mateship, the myth of ANZAC and the myth of Eureka.

At a time when other cultures seem menacingly assured and powerful, we seem to have become very modest about our own past, very nervous about identifying who we are, very shy about receiving inspiration from some of the greatest words ever spoken.

We keep thinking that our inherent tolerance and decency will preserve us. We are, after all, a liberal society, interested in the rights of the individual, and giving all a 'fair go'. I would suggest that these national traits are far more tenuous in us than we like to think. Put to the test, we may well fail them.

When we are no longer prosperous, when we have to struggle for existence, if terrorism becomes a part of life, what would make us stick to these values? Where would we look for inspiration? I hardly think that the story of the Eureka stockade is going to inspire mateship, tolerance and a fair go for all.

If I wonder aloud about the future of Jesus, it is not because Christianity itself is dying. In many parts of the world faith in Jesus is growing at an astonishing rate. But in places like Australia, we must now ask, has Jesus Christ a future? Is he going to continue to influence us at all? Are we going to appeal to him for guidance? Is he going to impact lives for good? Many of our forebears looked to Jesus as their inspiration when they created Australia. He did not seem to be a foreigner then.

Can he be brought into the national conversation about the future?

So what am I hoping to do? My practical aim is to inspire a widespread, adult reading of the New Testament Gospels. I want you to understand some of the issues at stake as we read these documents. I want you see what a surprising man Jesus is; I want to trace something of his impact on the world; I want to see whether there is a trajectory which suggests that more is yet to come; I want to see whether he can speak with something like his old power, to central cultural issues like personal freedom, human relationships and the future of our country.

I was discussing this project with a sympathetic agnostic and she said this: 'How can Jesus enrich the lives of unbelievers?' I will try to attend to that question.

I am trying to stand where you may be, willing to think as an adult about Jesus Christ, but no surer than that. I certainly do not think that I own Jesus in some way. He belongs to us all, even to unbelievers.

I aim to be like a committed but sympathetic art critic: someone who stands with you before a portrait; someone who helps you to see for yourself, what you own eyes are observing. The critic cannot take your place. Indeed you will have your own perspective, your own angle of vision, your own presuppositions. Nor do I have the skill, or the time, to tell you everything that may be told.

As we share this experience, I hope that you will tell me what you see, for this is not a one-way event. Nor can I predict the results: I only know that it is vital, never more so than now. The quest for the truth about Jesus and his future, has ramifications social, political, cultural and personal.

For your part, you may be repelled, attracted, indifferent; in the end, you may share the perspective of that famous Beatle, John Lennon, who famously said, 'Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock'n'roll or Christianity.'

Alternatively, however, you may stand with the great French mathematician, Pascal and say, 'Jesus is the centre of all, the object of all; whoever knows not him, knows nothing aright, either of the world or of himself...In him is all our happiness, our virtue, our life, our light, our hope'.

What do we make of Jesus? Why do I say that we hardly know one of the most famous, the most universal of all men?

As usual, there is a history behind these questions.

Pretty well for the first time, between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, many intellectuals expressed an 'enlightened' attitude to Jesus. Miracles became as implausible as the tooth fairy; people began to study the so-called 'Jesus of history' rather than the Christ of the Gospels; biography, rather than theology.

The church worshipped him as both God and man; rationalism accepted his humanity, while rejecting his divinity. This attitude became widespread in the community.

But that created a problem. What, do you do with Jesus? How do you explain his sheer historical importance, while denying his divinity?

The favourite answer was to turn him into the supreme moralist; to say that he taught us how human life is to be lived. He became a sort of peasant ethicist, a Galilean Socrates, a model human, a religious genius.

In the reverent, but irreverent, words of Thomas Carlyle, the nineteeth century thinker and historian, he was 'the greatest of all Heroes.' The difficulty of this is with Jesus himself. He is an awkward person to categorise. Hard to know why the Jesus of the 'enlightened' was crucified.

Of course his teaching has moral implications, but... He is not like a moral tutor, not like a philosopher, not like a hero, not like a pedagogue. He is more like a man carrying a sandwich-board, proclaiming the end of the world. He was a man of the future.

That's why I say he is unknown. I believe that if you asked for a popular summary of the teaching of Jesus, 'love one another' would be the reply. Perhaps, to bring it right up to date, 'include one another and don't discriminate; give everyone a fair go and be good mates.'

But if you asked Jesus to summarise his teaching, he would say: 'God's kingdom is near; get ready for it.'

So we have this problem: Jesus is universal, so he must have said really important things; but the things he did say are so particular, so time-bound, that they are not important.

Who is Jesus? Let's start with the basics; let's start with what he said, and how the information has reached us.

The New Testament contains four Gospels, written in the quite common Greek of the day, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Matthew's Gospel has him beginning his public life with this message: 'Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near' (3:17).

Mark, probably the earliest of the Gospels, has him saying this: 'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news' (1:15). Both Gospels clearly regard this announcement as the burden of his message. They are the theme and substance of the Gospel.

But, if so, why can't they agree? Why does Matthew report his words as 'kingdom of heaven' and Mark, 'kingdom of God'?

To answer that, we need to take a brief detour. The detour will help us see how the information about Jesus has reached us. The puzzle in this case is a relatively easy one to resolve. Matthew is reflecting, or perhaps respecting, Jewish scruples about naming God aloud; 'heaven' is a euphemism for 'God'.

Mark, writing, as we think, to a non-Jewish audience, speaks straight - out of 'God', 'the kingdom of God.' All very well, but after all, which did Jesus himself say? Strictly, neither; he probably spoke Aramaic rather than Greek.

So, our knowledge of Jesus, is in any case mediated by the Gospel writers in all sorts of ways. The perspective of the writers is one of the things which we are going to have to allow for, as we assess Jesus. These writers have already translated him linguistically. Their special interests will also 'translate' him historically. If we cannot cope with this mediated, translated Jesus, we will have to find some other one, for that is the way the Gospels are.

Our detour is over. Let's return to the task of getting to grips with the main theme of Jesus' teaching: he made a huge point of saying, 'the kingdom of God is near'. When he said things like 'turn the other cheek', 'love one another', or 'blessed are the poor in spirit', it was because the kingdom of God was near. His call for righteous behaviour had a huge, hurrying urgency about it.

What is this kingdom? I can tell you that it was a very tricky phrase, in that time and place. It stirred powerful emotions.

Hundreds of years before, the people of Israel had enjoyed a successful period of history under the reign of David, who, in turn, saw himself under the reign, or kingdom, of God. You could say that, in a way, the kingdom of God had come with David. Israel was a rich and powerful empire. But that was long ago. The more recent history of Israel had been one of foreign domination and exploitation - Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and now the Romans. They were an out-of-the-way province of the Roman Empire.

As usual under such circumstances, there were different ways of reacting. Think of occupied Europe during World War 2: some collaborated; some conformed; some conspired, some revolted; but most at least hoped. I guess that in the second world war the hope of the enslaved people lay in Allied power. Some, certainly believed in a Providence which would bring peace, freedom and justice. But they had no promise of this; no certainty.

Those who heard Jesus were different. They had a history of a promise-keeping God. God had freed them from Egypt as he said he would; God had freed them from exile in Babylon, as he said he would; God would do it again, because he said he would. They certainly contrasted their present miserable situation as a nation under bondage to Rome and her lackeys, with the glowing promises of God for a national, indeed a universal renewal. To them, God had a proven track record as a promise-keeper.

Why were they under the heel of Rome? They did not read their situation as mere power politics; they read it in moral and spiritual terms; they understood that it had something to do with their own evil, and God's justice. It gave their national life a depth which is hard for us to imagine, let alone experience.

In short, they were looking for an open manifestation of the kingdom of God. The kingdom would include the putting to rights of all things, the judgement on the wicked inside and outside their own community, and the elevation of the righteous. It would usher in a new heaven and a new earth.

You will have noticed already, two major factors which shaped the original listeners. The first was their Bible; they belonged to a nation of the Book; they lived in a world in which the teachings of the Book were the staple intellectual and spiritual diet. It provided them with their framework of meaning.

It's hard for us to understand this, because we have lost our sense of identity through history. In our national life there is now a vacuum where most peoples have a history. It's hard to find meaning, purpose and community without it.

The four authors of Imagining Australia know this. They suggest that we begin to make the story of Eureka, our national myth. To me, Eureka seems rather weak on capacity to inspire and shape; how it will sustain humanistic Australian values in the hard years which may well lie ahead, it is impossible to imagine.

You know, even appropriating the biblical history of Israel as if it were our own, could be a better option. It has been done before now. Think of how the biblical story sustained the American slaves.

The Bible was the history book of the nation of Jesus. But it was more than mere antiquity: it was filled with a powerful sense of promise, of time waiting to be fulfilled, of events still to come. It was promise one side, and faith on the other.

In the end it became the history book of western culture, not just the slaves. It provided for us, until very recent times, the dynamic of hope, in a world without clear meaning, purpose or community. We have lost it, but we have not replaced it, unless you think that Eureka may do the trick.

I spoke of two key factors shaping the original hearers. The first was the Bible, the second was their political situation. Here, all their hopes collided with all their fears.

The ancient historian Dr Paul Barnett tells us about the zealots, who were prone to violent terrorism and insurrection. He says that, 'In Jesus' day the "zealot" hope was expressed in the slogan "No master except God".' Dr Barnett calls one zealot, Judas the Galilean, the Osama bin Laden of his day. He led a revolt in 6 AD, when Jesus the Galilean was about ten years old.

'No master except God' is a declaration in favour of God's kingdom. Dangerous words; you could acquire a crown of thorns for announcing its imminence. Depending, of course, what you meant. Jesus, understandably, spent a lot of time explaining what he meant.

He was certainly talking about the coming of the reign of God upon the earth. The coming of God's reign (as opposed to the kingdoms of men), is going to be cataclysmic. Furthermore, he called it by the dangerously ambiguous word, 'gospel', or 'good news'.

On the one hand the word goes back 700 years to the prophet Isaiah, and his prediction that the Lord would come as King to his people. This he called 'gospel'. On the other hand, in the first century world of the Roman Empire, it referred to the birth of a new heir to the throne, or to the coming of the Emperor, an event of 'good news'.

To call Jesus' announcement 'good news', therefore, was to suggest at least that there was going to be a competition for the throne, that here was a message political. When Jesus preached, conflict was in the air from the very beginning. No wonder he was crucified: that was a decisive answer to his pretensions.

And yet...there has been scholarly discussion as to whether Jesus himself was a zealot, an insurrectionist. Sober historical reseach cannot sustain that. 'My kingdom', he said to Pontius Pilate 'is not of this world' (John 18:36) - and that is what he spent a lot of time explaining. The kingdom language was not a call for political or military action as such. 'Turn the other cheek' had a very contemporary application in those days. He clearly taught that the kingdom was a gift of God to be expected, not a product of human effort to be worked toward or brought in by violence.

Not that it seems to have done him much good; it was crucifixion for him.

Have you noticed that the closer we get to the Jesus of history, the more interesting but less relevant he seems? No wonder men like Carlyle and his French contemporary Ernest Renan laid great stress on his ethics and his model life. What else were they to do with him? How else could you explain his influence?

When we approach the real Jesus, when you put him back into his times, we can understand him better. But he seems so particular that it becomes impossible to give him any universal significance. That is why his future has become problematic; because he spoke so much about the future.

What sense can we make of this?

He was a prophet of the kingdom, which he said was very near in time. Why on earth, then, are we still talking about him? Is it not time to shake off the cultural burden of a failed prophet, this pale Galilean, as he has been called, and to seek fresh heroes, fresh gurus?

Or, perhaps, to shake ourselves free from all who call on us to repent and believe? Surely now we must see that he has no future precisely because he thought so much about the future. His future did not come; it is past; he no longer matters. It is Eureka for us. The wonder is that he has had any influence at all. Perhaps it is a no contest, between Jesus and rock 'n'roll.

Two ways open before us as we investigate these themes. In the next lecture I am going to begin by exploring the nineteenth century answer. Perhaps we can salvage something out of the teaching of Jesus, without having to accept his apocalyptic announcements; or, perhaps, if we really understood him, we can finally rid ourselves of his kingdom, and reduce him to an ancient moral sage.

Or, then again, perhaps not.

--This is the first in a series of lectures to be given by Archbishop Peter Jensen of Sydney, Australia.

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