Looking for Jesus among the scoffers – Theatre Review

‘Golgota Picnic’ by Rodrigo García
Théâtre du Rond-Point, Paris (until 17 December).

The Archbishop of Paris has called it ‘deliberately offensive’, and extremist Catholic groups such as Civitas have been protesting outside the Théâtre du Rond-Point since it opened on 9 December. A police barrier has been erected around the building, and only theatre-goers with tickets or their name on the guest-list are being allowed in. Given this situation, I decided to go to see for myself what all the fuss is about. And I did so wearing my dog-collar.

There were a few looks of surprise from police and people inside the theatre, and I was taken for a kindred spirit by comedian/activist Frigide Bargot (although I am not). The theatre was full to bursting. Onstage, a few deckchairs and blankets suggested the ‘picnic’ of the title, while the rest of the space was filled with hamburger baps lined up neatly in rows. The back wall was taken up by a screen on which were projected close-ups of the performers and elements of pre-recorded video.

Initially very wordy, the play begins with a monologue on the sins of humanity and the alternative virtue of moral free-fall. This is spoken by a character who may (or may not) be a fallen angel. Another diatribe cites very selectively from the gospels to present Jesus as a kind of anarchist guerrilla. Action soon takes over from words, however. We see a man being nailed to the floor, under a cruciform spotlight. There are echoes of Adam and Eve in the garden, the tower of Babel (provocatively built as a big-mac made of worms), and the making of a blood-stained shroud.

Some of this is done purely for shock-value, but other elements of the play seem to attack political realities in France, Spain, or Argentina. There are also moments of beauty that reference religious art, and a rendition of the words ‘Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me’. The play ends with a full rendition of Haydn’s ‘Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross’ that helps to resolve the sometimes frantic action and anger of the play into something more meditative. The moral, if there is one, is that Christ is to be found wherever people seek for justice, truth, and beauty. He is even in the play’s anger against political injustice and religious authoritarianism, though not in its crueler or cruder parts. And he is certainly not to be found in the anger of the protesters (particularly when they speak of ‘blasphemy’), although their desire for a more Christian France cannot be far from the heart of God.

More rubbish about soul mates – Film Review

Crazy, Stupid, Love (Dir. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, USA, 2011)

The music, mood, and cinematography are at times reminiscent of Magnolia, Juno, or Little Miss Sunshine. The premise is simple: lots of people are disappointed in love, and there is nothing like finding this out the hard way to make a good movie script. Sometimes they even tell each other the hard truth (cf. Shortbus). All of this was enjoyable.

Some of the films comic scenes are almost Shakespearean in complication, and there are tragic moments too (like the speech made by the son at his Eighth-grade graduation ceremony). This was the point at which you should walk out of the cinema if you want to savour the story without its facile Hollywood ending.

But, of course, the film continues. And, of course, it goes too far. There was some sexualisation of teenagers, and some rubbish about true love and ‘soul mates’.

Hidden together for Christ’s sake – Book Review

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2008; first publ. 1937)

The German title of Bonhoeffer’s ‘Discipleship’ is much broader than the usual English translation The Cost of Discipleship. While ‘cost’ captures the sense of the first main section on ‘cheap grace’, it arguably does so at the expense of later sections on the community of discipleship and of its chief focus, Jesus Christ. Beginning with the gospel accounts of the calling of Jesus’ first disciples, Bonhoeffer then offers an exposition and meditation on the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), and on Jesus’ subsequent instructions to his disciples (e.g. in Matthew 10). The work is challenging and practical in itself, but also gains moral authoriry from its historical context. Bonhoeffer wrote Discipleship after the National Socialist party came to power in Germany, and he himself died at the hands of the Nazi regime, just days before the end of the war in 1945.

‘Cheap grace’ is famously the first target of Bonhoeffer’s criticism, and rightly so. He attacks a genteel but ultimately cost-neutral version of Christianity that represents a watering down of the gospel. Following Christ (for this is what ‘discipleship’ means) entails a costly engagement with the realities of this world in the light of God’s kingdom.

Other themes stand out from a reading of this text in the twenty-first century, too. Notable among these are the ‘hiddenness’ of God’s righteousness, the importance of community, and the recurrent focus on Christ.

Bonhoeffer’s work is ‘radical’ both in the sense of ‘explosive’ and in the sense of ‘getting back to the roots’, as it reworks familiar themes from scripture, the Fathers, and Lutheran theology in a way that really grapples with the contemporary situation. May we do likewise!

“Go down to the woods…” – Theatre Review

Jane Packman Company, ‘The Woods’ is showing at MAC Birmingham until 27 February 2011

Deeply ambiguous and embedded in the human psyche, the woods is the topos of choice for many of our fairy tales as well as our fantasies. This show captures the breadth and depth of meaning contained in our idea of a wood. It is therefore both disturbing and enticing. In a word: poetic.

‘The Woods’ has a number of interlacing narratives, but these exist primarily to create a mood, rather than a straightforward storyline. As a result, they are visceral and impressionistic rather than the stuff of your typical ‘kitchen sink’ drama.

Yet what really sets the ‘The Woods’ apart is not poetry or myth, but texture and smell. The powerful set – which is also an installation in its own right – brings the forest indoors in a way that is both calming and unsettling.

Jealousy – Film and Theatre Review

La Princesse de Montpensier (dir. Bertrand Tavernier, France 2010)
Georges Feydeau, A Flea in Her Ear (La Puce à l’oreille, 1907)

Two takes on the theme of jealousy. One is a film based on a novel by Mme de La Fayette (1662). The other is an English production of a French play.

Five different men claim to be in love with the Princess of Montpensier. One of them is her husband. Passions run high. There is one man of honour who brings out the best in nearly everyone. The result is a historical drama.

Mme Chandebise has a flea in her ear. She is sure that her husband is unfaithful (he isn’t), so she decides to entrap him (it doesn’t work, of course). Much hilarity ensues. The result is a farce. Shame that Tom Hollander was indisposed on the evening when I went to see it…

A Flea in Her Ear is showing at the Old Vic until 5 March 2011

‘The tragedy of the commons’

Dictum: The tragedy of the commons is that everyone rushes in and wrecks them.

Proof: public conveniences, public transport, the beach, shared kitchens, recycling boxes…

Counter-proof: Wikipedia, community gardens, the café project, medieval common grazing, blackberry bushes beside the river…

‘Hacking’ the tradition

Notice how the Church fetishises the Bible (not least in our body language, for example through the Gospel procession), while at the same time we criticise or reinterpret it in our sermons. Seen in this way, a preacher is like a hacker who has gained access to the hidden code and is now in a position to let loose a virus in the system. This metaphor works especially well when the virus is itself a confection based on existing elements within the tradition…

The Human Spirit and the Holy Spirit

How to elevate the Holy Spirit as the spirit of freedom or (my current favourite) improvisation, without falling into dualism in one’s theological anthropology? The danger is that by elevating the spirit, one would seem to be separating it from the body.

My current position is to see the body/spirit as a single complex, since neither spirit nor body is thinkable without the other.

Liturgy of the Word for 1 January 2011

This service for the feast of the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus is a very simple ‘liturgy of the word’, with prayers, a psalm, a reading, and a gospel text. The readings are agreed by an ecumenical committee and relate to this particular day in the Christian year, as we shall see.

The psalm comes from the Hebrew scriptures and dates from roughly the fifth century BCE. The epistle is one of the genuine writings of St Paul from the middle of the first century CE. The gospel is from the early second century CE. The prayers I will use come from the book of Common Worship of the Church of England, and from the Bible.

I will invite you to stand at two points in the service: when I enter with the Gospel Book, and when I stand to read from it, saying ‘Hallelujah, Hallelujah, hear the gospel of our Lord according to Luke’. I will also invite you to respond in the Kyrie.

The Lord be with you. Let us pray.
Collect:
Almighty God,
whose blessed Son was circumcised
in obedience to the law for our sake
and given the Name that is above every name:
give us grace faithfully to bear his Name,
to worship him in the freedom of the Spirit,
and to proclaim him as the Saviour of the world;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen

Kyrie: Please feel free to repeat after me:
Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy, Christ have mercy
Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy

Readings:
Psalm 8
Galatians 4:4-7
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hear the gospel of our Lord according to Luke.
Luke 2:15-21

Sermon:
“… after eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:21).

Immediately we find ourselves in the middle of a story. The passage of time in Luke’s narrative is imitated in the Church’s calendar. Today is eight days after Christmas. Historically this is problematic of course. We do not know the real date of Jesus’s birth. The 25th of December is actually a pagan festival that has been Christianised by the early Church, just as pre-Christian sacred sites were often destroyed so that churches could be built in their place.

Not only this, but the whole of Luke’s birth narrative has been called into question by textual scholarship, which has noticed its mythological character and the many discrepancies between Luke and Matthew’s accounts. The reference to an ‘angel’ and the miraculous ‘conception’ of Jesus in this text also confront us with elements of an early Jesus-myth.

But this text has a curious specificity. It remembers the Jewishness of Jesus in his ‘circumcision’. This took place in accordance with Jewish ceremonial practice, eight days after his birth. Whatever we may think about circumcision as a practice, there is no doubt that (a) it has never become part of mainstream western Christianity, and (b) it continues to play a determinative part in the construction of Jewish identity. Thus Luke situates Jesus in a particular time and place, and as an emphatically Jewish child. This fact sits uncomfortably within a history of nearly two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism. In fact, it serves as a challenge to that tradition, which has only recently come to be appreciated again, for example in the work of the Jewish biblical scholar Geza Vermes.

In later years, this story of the circumcision of Jesus became important as a sign of the physical humanity of Jesus. It was necessary to defend the physical against Christian dualists who feared or hated the body. These dualists refused to believe that the divine could become human, or that the human could be joined to the divine. There is a story of a Christian mystic, Agnes Blannbekin, living in Vienna in the late thirteenth century, who imagined herself swallowing the foreskin of Jesus as a sign of her piety and devotion (MacCulloch, Christianity, p. 421). There is no escaping from the physicality of this image, for all its weirdness!

Alongside the circumcision, Luke’s narrative also refers to the ‘naming’ of Jesus. And it is on this point that I would like to focus today. In Jewish spirituality, the ‘name’ of a person or place represents its identity. And this identity is constructed and re-constructed socially and historically. So the name ‘Jesus’ refers to ‘Yeshua’ or ‘Joshua’, a hero from the Tanakh (or Jewish scriptures) who is said to have led the people of Israel out of the wilderness into a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’. Yeshua is a symbol of ‘salvation’, utopia, or homecoming (as the ‘angel’ had predicted: ”you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins’; Matthew 1:21). So the identity of Jesus is explicitly linked – from the very beginning – to his relationship with ‘people’ and to something called ‘salvation’.

We could spend a long time talking about the concept of ‘sin’. Indeed, I would like to hear from you about this subject. For now, I will say that our contemporary concept of sin owes more to the subjective turn and to the moralising of the nineteenth century than it does to the Hebrew idea of brokenness, especially of broken relationships, estrangement, alienation.

If we turn back to the psalm we heard at the beginning of this service, we find the place of human beings in the universe called into question: ‘when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are [men] that you are mindful of them, [sons of men] that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour’ (Psalm 8:3-5). I have retained the gender-exclusive words ‘men’ and ‘sons of men’ to preserve the parallelism of the Hebrew poetry. The NRSV has ‘human beings’ and ‘mortals’.

This text immediately raises questions about the origins of the universe. In a post-Darwinian world, a phrase like ‘the work of God’s fingers’ inevitably brings a smile to our lips. It is such an obvious anthropomorphism. On this subject, I would like to state that – contrary to what the Creationists or proponents of ‘Intelligent Design’ will tell you – the Bible never speaks of creation ex nihilo (from nothing). Nor does it attempt a scientific explanation for the origins of the world. The Bible is not concerned with the physics or biology of ‘how’ the universe came to be. Rather, it is interested in the ‘why’ of creation, the question of meaning. The Bible presents a collective mythological attempt to account for the unity and diversity of the world and our human experience of it.

In the Hebrew tradition, the beauty of the world is interpreted as a sign of the majesty and wisdom of God. To this, I would add that the very beauty of evolution by natural selection astonishes me. In it, I see again the wisdom of God.

But the scope of the universe raises the question of human meaning and identity. Faced with the enormity of space, ‘the moon and stars’ (Psalm 8:3), the writer of this psalm wonders what possible place there can be for such a small thing as a human being. Pascal was to say something similar in the seventeenth century, when the sheer scope of the universe was becoming clearer through the twin technologies of the telescope and the microscope. The solution proposed by the psalmist is to focus on the dignity of human beings arising from our relationship to God and the natural world: ‘You have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honour. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands’ (Psalm 8:5-6a).

As a solution, this is not without problems. The word ‘dominion’ suggests an exploitative relationship with the environment, and continues to be used to the detriment of the natural world in the rhetoric of fundamentalist Christianity. The phrase ‘a little lower than God’ has also proved controversial. It can be contested on philosophical and psycho-analytical grounds. I would recommend the work of Ernst Bloch in Atheism in Christianity, which touches on this hierarchical and disempowering kind of relationship with the divine.

The best we can do, in the light of our previous discussion of ‘sin’, is to say that human relationships with God, with each other, and with the natural world, are all characterised by brokenness – often as a result of our own selfishness or the traps we have set for ourselves in our political and economic systems.

The second reading we heard (from St Paul) offers us more hope. Here we read that Jesus introduces us to a new kind of relationship with the divine. This is presented through the metaphors of (a) liberation ‘from slavery’ (Galatians 4:4, 7); (b) liberation ‘from law’ (Galatians 4:5); and (c) ‘adoption’ into a new family-relationship (Galatians 4:5-6). In other words, Jesus is presented as the solution to the problem of alienation, not as its source.

Wherever Christianity has supported ‘slavery’, repression, or alienation, it has ceased to be Christianity. The real raison d’être of Christianity, as presented here, can be summarised as freedom and relationship. ‘God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying “Abba! Father!”‘ (Galatians 4:6b). No more restriction, repression, or alienation… the Spirit is a symbol of freedom and spontaneity. My favourite picture of the Christian life takes its cue from the Spirit, who enables us to ‘improvise always good and always non-identical good choices’ as we walk through life.

This is much, much harder than it sounds. So a truly Christian community needs humility as we struggle against law, slavery, and alienation in pursuit of freedom and relationship in the Spirit. The gospel begins when we receive ‘a new name’, representing our true identity. And it continues in the Spirit of freedom and community as we try to improvise good choices together. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Prayers: Please feel free to sit or kneel as we pray the Our Father.
Our Father…

The Grace: Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all, ever more. Amen.

The Dismissal: Let us go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.

‘Donne moi la main’ and ‘Humpday’ – Film Reviews

‘Donne moi la main’ (Dir. Pascal-Alex Vincent, France, 2008)
‘Humpday’ (Dir. Lynn Shelton, USA, 2009)

If these films have anything in common, it is the theme of friendship between men. ‘Donne moi la main’ deals with the relationship of two brothers, while ‘Humpday’ features a more complex interaction between a man, his wife, and his long-lost best friend. Both films reveal the capacity of their central male characters for deception, manipulation, and exploitation as well as tenderness and honesty.

Having discovered that his twin brother Antoine is gay, Quentin in ‘Donne moi la main’ tries to sell Antoine’s body to a stranger in a bar, without telling his brother what he is doing. Ben in ‘Humpday’ has a similar difficulty: he is unable to tell his wife the truth about the party he attends, and the film he plans to make with his friend Andrew.

In both films, redemption comes in an understated way through honesty and acceptance of the other.