Justice Wakes, “The god many seek today is the deity of upward social class mobility and middle-class prosperity. These listeners’ hearts are not tuned to hear about the blood and gore of a Palestinian Jew dying helplessly and hopelessly on a Roman cross.”25 Besides failing to appreciate or at least articulate the real significance of Jesus’ death, the importance of his life, i.e., what might be learned from the Jesus of history, is seldom mentioned. Jesus is treated more as a means to an end than