As minister of Harvard University's Memorial Church, Gomes was a popular preacher well before The Good Book
became a bestseller in 1996. Several subsequent books were, or read like, first-rate sermon collections, but this is an incisive original aimed at cautious defenders of conventional wisdom. Asserting that “we are meant to go beyond the Bible in order to discover the gospel,” Gomes points away from the past toward “a future in which promise and fulfillment meet.” Meanwhile, “we must manage to live in the world as it is”—a world steeped in hostility, suffering and injustice. If we take the gospel seriously, “then like Jesus we will risk all, and might even lose all.” Still, we hang on to a muscular hope that is “not mere nostalgia for what never was, but an earnest expectation of what is to be.” A born storyteller, Gomes knows how to spin an aphorism: “The opposite of fear is not courage but compassion.” And indeed his tone is compassionate even when he chides those who fear conflict and change, but especially when he extols God's provision “for the healing and care of all his creation, and not simply our little part of it.” (Nov.)
