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A sermon preached at
Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ
Bethesda, Maryland
by the Rev. Rich Smith
On Judas, Da Vinci, and the Incredible Flying Jesus
This just in: according to the New York Times, the showing of the new movie, The Da Vinci Code has been banned in the Solomon Islands! No matter that there are no movie theaters in the Solomon Islands, the Prime Minister has decided to protect the 500,000 residents of the islands, 97% of whom are Christians, from this supposed attack on their faith. Maybe he’s worried about bootleg copies being shown in underground home theaters?
Risking eternal damnation – or boredom, if your believe the Washington Post’s film critic, who said it was “like watching your parents play Sudoku” – I went to see the movie this past week. It was very entertaining, and didn’t attack my faith at all, and I was disappointed that there were no protesters outside the theater, because that’s one picket line I wouldn’t have minded crossing. Of course, I was on a bit of a roll, since the week before, I stopped off at the National Geographic building and toured the exhibit about the recently published Gospel of Judas, which was also supposed to be a threat to the foundations of our faith, and I suffered no ill effects. More about that in a few minutes.
What I want to say this morning is that stories are an art-form, and all art is “a lie that tells the truth.” Stories are told for a number of reasons – to entertain, to enlighten, to provoke thought or debate, to explain why things are the way they are. These stories might be cast as a mystery, like The Da Vinci Code, or a rehabilitation of a previously known character like Judas, or even a biblical story that seems incredible but solves a problem, like our scripture reading this morning, the Ascension of Jesus, answering the question, “If Jesus was resurrected and came back and walked the earth, what happened to him?” And so he is portrayed as floating up through the clouds to heaven. I don’t happen to believe that literally happened, but it is a good story. More about that in a few minutes as well.
First, how many here have read the Da Vinci Code? Seen the movie? I can see why it’s been on the best seller list for three years now. When I took it on vacation in the summer of 2003, I started it on the plane, took it to the cabin, and did not get out my fishing pole until I had finished reading it. Fortunately, that didn’t take long, for it is a real page turner. And that is first and foremost what it is: an engrossing, entertaining novel, one which starts with a bit of historical truth, builds a premise, and asks “what if?” It plays with your mind, as all good stories do. And, like good stories – and good art – it gets you to widen your world, entertain some enlarged possibilities....and if it unsettles your faith, maybe your faith needed some unsettling.
Many critics, biblical scholars and church historians have taken Dan Brown to task for presenting so many things as “fact” that are plainly not the case. My first response is, “Hey, folks, it’s just a novel, it’s fiction, get over it!” But when things are taken seriously, a little more examination is required. As one evangelical leader observed,
“We live in a Jesus-haunted culture that is biblically illiterate,” and so we can take advantage of this as a teachable moment! Anything that gets people talking about Jesus, or curious about Jesus, is a good thing, whether it’s the Da Vinci Code, or Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, or earlier works like The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus Christ, Superstar. All of them were fiction, fiction based on a thread of historical truth, pointing to a vision of ultimate Truth.
The Da Vinci Code is basically a modern quest for the Holy Grail, only in this case the grail turns out not to be the literal cup that carried the blood of Christ, but a vessel of a different sort, a person who carried the blood-line of Christ. Dan Brown makes clever use of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous painting of the “Last Supper,” suggesting that the disciple of Jesus’ right hand is not John, the beloved disciple, but Mary Magdalene, and that she is the vessel, th one whom Jesus intended to carry on the mission. He even suggests that Jesus and Mary were married, and that she was pregnant with his child at the time of the crucifixion, fled to France, that this child continued this royal bloodline, and that Jesus’ decedents are alive to this day.
Now, Brown is not the first to play with this idea. Many novelists and story-tellers have entertained this possibility. And while the Bible never says that Jesus was married – there is really no evidence for this – it doesn’t say he wasn’t, either. And what if he was? Would it make any difference to your faith and mine? Is there something evil about marriage and childbirth? If Jesus was fully human, what would be wrong with him experiencing this very human thing? While John Dominic Crossan says that the chief argument for Jesus remaining single is that he was very likely too poor to be married, and University of North Carolina scholar Bart Ehrman lifts up Jesus affinity to the sect known as the Essenes, who were celebate, other biblical scholars have pointed to the band of women that accompanied the disciples, and pointed out that in that society only two kinds of women could associate that closely with men – wives and prostitutes. Of course, the church for centuries tried to paint Mary Magdalene as a prostitute, albeit a reformed one, and even though that description has been largely exposed as false, it is still hard to dislodge in the popular mind set. I have believed for years that Mary was never a prostitute, and have learned that Magdalene is not based on a place, Magdala, which never existed, (built later as a tourist attraction!), but comes from the word “migdal” which could be translated “great”, as in “Mary the Great”, a title that would be appropriate for the wife of Jesus. And in John’s Gospel, Mary is the only mourner at Jesus’ tomb. It would have been highly unusual for her to be there unless she was next of kin.
What I’m saying is, the possibility exists that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife – just not for the reasons Brown uses in his novel. Thus the possibility of a divine bloodline as well, although if one does the math, in only 25 generations a person would be only one part out of some 66 million related to Jesus, and it’s been about 60 generations now, which I don’t have enough zeros to calculate. Besides, unless each generation had only one child, there would be billions of people who now carry that divine bloodline. After all, if you go back far enough, we’re all related. But maybe that’s the point.
In any case, none of this is essential for my faith, nor would any of it destroy my faith. I try to assume that we are all the “Body of Christ,” that I carry something of Christ to others, and that I meet something of Christ in every person.
Another theme of the Da Vinci Code has to do with the way the Church has protected its version of the truth, and suppressed others. While Brown pretty much has his supporting facts wrong, the bottom line is there is a lot of truth in what he says. Of course I have to keep reminding myself, this is just a novel, an entertaining story, so don’t expect too much. When Brown says that there were many versions of Christianity around in the early centuries, and that it wasn’t until the Council of Nicea in325 that an orthodoxy was settled on he is largely correct. Where he is wrong is the idea that Nicea was called to decide the divinity of Jesus and which books would be considered sacred, authoritative scripture, or “canon.” Nicea was called to unify the Church, to agree on a common understanding of the nature of Jesus’ divinity. But it was already agreed that he was both human and divine. It is true that the newly converted Emperor Constantine didn’t really have a dog in the fight, he didn’t care much about the theological nuances being debated. But he did know they were tearing the Church apart and he wanted the matter settled. In the end they did come together, although the pressure to agree was – shall we say – quite strong. Only two bishops who cast dissenting votes, and they were banished.
As for the canon of scripture, that was largely settled by the end of the second century, and contrary to what the Da Vinci Code says, included the writings – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and to a lesser extent, John – which present a sometimes scandalously human Jesus. Omitted were the Gnostic writings, which assume a body-soul dualism, are much more mystical, hint at secret knowledge shared only with a few or available only to the enlightened, in which Jesus is at best a God who takes on human appearance. This is really opposite from the way Brown has it. But it is true that the early church was very diverse, and that for a long time there was no one orthodoxy, and it is very valuable indeed to learn about the different beliefs and ways in which people were Christian. In that, it is not unlike the present age, for we have Christianity that includes everything, as Bart Ehrman puts it, from Roman Catholic missionaries... who devote themselves to poverty for the sake to others to televangelists who run twelve step programs to ensure financial success.... StaidNew England Congregationalists to Appalachian snake-handlers... Greek orthodox priests dedicated to liturgical incantations and incense, to fundamentalist preachers who view high-church liturgy as a demonic invention....liberal political activists intent on transforming society to Pentecostals who think society will soon come to a crashing halt with the literal return of Jesus. And most of these don’t regard the others as Christian. At the very least, these early Christian writings that didn’t make it into the New Testament remind us that it was ever thus.
One of those early Gnostic writings, which was known about because it had been declared heretical, but had never actually been found, has recently been published by the National Geographic Society as the Gospel of Judas. Supposedly, this new discovery was to turn the traditional view of Judas Iscariot on its head and challenge some of Christianity’s deepest beliefs. Actually, I find the story of how the manuscript was discovered and passed around by antiquities dealers, and finally restored and translated to be the most fascinating part. But then, I have never held to the traditional view of Judas anyway.
That traditional view is that Judas was a traitor. Though chosen to be one of the twelve disciples, among Jesus closest and most trusted friends, he was somehow overtaken by the devil – Satan entered his heart, according to the Gospels – and turned against Jesus, betraying him to the authorities who wanted him dead. And so for this he has been vilified throughout Christendom. I have always thought it strange, a contradictory argument, really, that if, Jesus was supposed to die for our sins, that if salvation could only be accomplished by his death, that the person who played his part to bring this about should be so hated. If Jesus’ death saves us, shouldn’t we thank the person who helped it happen? Or make him a saint?
Maybe this also troubled the gnostic writer who told the story in the Gospel of Judas, for here Judas is portrayed as secretly doing what Jesus asked him to do. “You will exceed all of them,” Jesus tells him. “For you will sacrifice the man than clothes me.” The Jesus Seminar scholars would tell us that this doesn’t sound like the historical Jesus at all, for his emphasis was never on otherworldliness, or the saving power of his sacrificial death – that was a later theological interpretation. But to the gnostic was of thinking, Jesus wasn’t really human at all, and so Judas was doing him – and all of us – a favor by helping him shed his physical body, not really betraying him to his enemies, but simply bringing his death about and liberating his true nature. We could debate Gnosticism all day, and may want to at another time, but I don’t find anything faith-shaking in this story.
As I said, I have never subscribed to the traditional view anyway. I think Judas was simply mis-guided. He was a Zealot, who was anxious to see the Roman oppressors overthrown. He believed Jesus was the one to do it, was gaining a following, was primed to incite an insurrection, and he thought that when push came to shove, Jesus would stop babbling about loving your enemies and turning the other cheek and bring on the revolution. This, by the way, is how Judas is viewed in Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, and I think it really was the temptation Jesus faced, not marrying Mary Magdalene, but going the way of militant force to bring in the kingdom.
Interestingly, there is a fourth view of Judas – beyond the villainous traitor, or the secret co-conspirator or the misguided Zealot – and that is that he never existed at all. This is what Bishop Spong thinks. “My study has convinced me that Judas was a creation of the second generation of Christians designed primarily to shift the blame for the death of Jesus from the Romans to the Jews. The pressure driving this creation of Judas came from the war between the Romans and the Jews beginning in 66 C.E. and ending at Masada in 73 C.E. The crucial event in that war was the destruction of Jerusalem and the razing of the Temple in 70 C.E. Roman hostility against the Orthodox Jews, who they blamed for initiating this war, was overwhelming. The Christians, who at this time were primarily Jewish, needed a way to separate themselves from the Temple authorities and to reach out to the Romans. To vilify a representative Jew, who had the name of the whole nation, Judah or Judas, while exonerating the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, accomplished exactly that. So Pilate was portrayed in the gospels, written either during or after that war, as washing his hands and proclaiming himself innocent of the blood of this man, while the Jewish authorities were portrayed as accepting the blame for Jesus' death and suggesting that it was appropriate to pass that blame on to their children.” And he concludes, “If Judas was not even a figure of history then a 3rd century copy of a 2nd century fantasy that offers a new possibility about this man's motives might be of minor historical interest but it is of no great significance.”
To me, the significance of Judas, Da Vinci, and all the others lies in the fact that people are interested in anything that raises the possibility that orthodox Christian faith, as it has been taught by the churches over the centuries, may not be the only way to understand what being Christian is all about. Might there be something more? As Brian McLaren puts it, there is an “experience in shared frustration with status-quo, male-dominated, power-oriented, cover-up-prone organized Christian religion. We need to ask ourselves why the vision of Jesus hinted at in Dan Brown's book is more interesting, attractive, and intriguing to these people than the standard vision of Jesus they hear about in church....Is it possible that, even though Brown's fictional version misleads in many ways, it at least serves to open up the possibility that the church's conventional version of Jesus may not do him justice?”
In the end, we want to “do justice” to Jesus, we who live in this “Jesus-haunted, biblically illiterate” culture, and are charged with making sense of this old story for our time. And so in our scripture passage today we find Jesus bidding the eleven remaining disciples a last good bye. As I said, the story of a flying Jesus, lifting off into the clouds, seems incredible – and I once witnessed a live passion play where at the end that exactly what the character did, pulled by wires right up into the stage rafters – but if Jesus did come back from the grave and walk the earth, he had to get to heaven somehow, and in the cosmology of the time, heaven was literally “up there”. I tend to read the story differently, and conclude that it’s a way of saying: if Jesus is no longer present in a specific place it allows him to be present in every place, and that he needed to “go away” in order for us to step up and carry on his work. The Ascension is a story that I do not take literally, but I do take seriously, “a lie that tells the Truth” – something that challenges me to think, to consider how I view the universe, to reframe reality, and finally, to act as I believe a follower of Jesus is called to act in this world.
And so I conclude with a bit of poetry – not to take literally but seriously – words from W.H. Auden – that do Jesus justice:
He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.He is the Truth.Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.He is the Life.Love Him in the World of the Flesh;And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
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