Before I Set Out A Few Weeks Ago on a vacation trip that included a 17-hour trans-Atlantic hop, a close colleague said, "Get absorbed in a paperback thriller, and you won't even notice how long the flight is. Take a Follett or a Clancy—they're heaven for a long trip."

What I dared not tell her was that I'd already bought not a Clancy but a Yancey. What's more, I felt pretty close to "heaven" during my reading of Philip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew (Zondervan/Harper-Collins, 1995). The hours raced by, and the trip was smooth, refreshing, challenging.

Not only was I "kept company" by one of America's most successful religion writers, but also by his support team of quotable thinkers, including Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Leo Tolstoy, G. K. Chesterton, Scott Peck, Walter Wink, C. S. Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, Fyodor Dostoevsky, W. H. Auden, and Mother Teresa.

Before we landed, I was asking myself, "Why did it take you so long to read a book you've known about since its publication eight years ago?"—especially when Yancey makes it so clear that "no one who meets Jesus ever stays the same." Yancey found that the doubts that afflicted him from many sources—from science, from comparative religion, from an innate defect of skepticism, from aversion to the Church—took on a new light when he funneled them through the words of the man named Jesus.

Yancey cites one estimate that more has been written about Jesus in the last 20 years than in the previous 19 centuries. He explains that though he set out to tell the story of Jesus rather than his own story, inevitably the search for Jesus turned out to be his own search—a search, readers will notice, that is rooted in the conventional view of the Trinity (the union of the three divine Persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in one Godhead), but doesn't close the door on other viewpoints.

Yancey says that the more he studied Jesus, the more difficult it became to pigeonhole him. For example, people who looked to Jesus as their political savior were "constantly befuddled by his choice of companions." Jesus had uncompromising views on rich men and loose women, yet both enjoyed his company. "His extravagant claims about himself," says Yancey, "kept him at the center of controversy, but when he did something truly miraculous, he tended to hush it up."

I suspect that every reader will settle on passages that shed fresh light on their individual spiritual journeys or challenge them to greater effort to live lives that more closely parallel Jesus' example.

I especially enjoyed Yancey's remarks about Jesus' "energy of restraint." He says that what one could almost call Jesus' "divine shyness" took him by surprise. It was so unlike the southern fundamentalist church of his childhood, where he often felt the victim of emotional pressures. There, he recalls, doctrine was dished out in a "Believe and don't ask questions" style. Yancey found none of these qualities in the life of Jesus.

He goes on to suggest that Jesus insists on such restraint because "no pyrotechnic displays of omnipotence will achieve the response he desires. Although power can enforce obedience, only love can summon a response of love, which is the one thing God wants from us, and the reason He created us.... Love has its own power, the only power ultimately capable of conquering the human heart."

Now, despite the magnitude and complexity of his task, Yancey is only too eager to tackle the difficult questions once discouraged in his Sunday School. He does it without indulging in historical or doctrinal speculation, and with complete honesty. He doesn't mind saying he doesn't know. He's also ready to assault—with evidence from his years of painstaking research—the churchbound cliches that have tamed Jesus and kept him in comfortable religious boxes.

Yancey examines three basic questions: Who was Jesus? Why did he come? And what did he leave behind? He also asks pertinently and persistently whether we are taking Jesus seriously enough in our own day and age.

Along with author Scott Peck, whom he quotes several times, Yancey was "absolutely thunderstruck" by the extraordinary reality of the man he found in the Gospels. They both discovered that Jesus was often frustrated, sad, depressed, anxious, scared. As Peck puts it, "A man who was terribly, terribly lonely, yet often desperately needed to be alone.... a man so incredibly real that no one could have made him up."

This view makes it a little easier to relate the gospel event to the world in which we live today. Toward the end of his book, Yancey touches on several social and political issues. He mentions at one point that even as the US appears to grow increasingly secularized, with church and state heading in different directions, he finds that the more he understands Jesus' message of the kingdom of God, the less alarm he feels over these trends.

"The real challenge, the focus of our energy," he writes, "should not be to Christianize the United States (always a losing battle) but strive to be God's kingdom in an increasingly hostile world.... As America slides, I will work and pray for the kingdom of God to advance. If the gates of hell cannot prevail against the church, the contemporary political scene hardly offers much threat."

In writing his book, Yancey had another goal in mind. This emerges in a foreword to a Leaders' Guide to the book, where Yancey says: "In the end, what does it matter if a reader learns about 'The Jesus that Philip Yancey Never Knew'? What matters infinitely more is for you to get to know Jesus."

I'd add that you don't have to wait for your next long flight to get started.