Philip Pullman would not I suspect very much like this morning’s gospel. The famous author of the Dark Materials Trilogy has just written a new book entitled ‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.’ It was reviewed by Rowan Williams in the Guardian and since I have not yet had time to read the original I rely on the Archbishop’s summary of the plot.’
‘Its premise is that Mary gave birth to twins: first there is Jesus, an earthy, generous visionary, a radical teacher who creates panic amongst the religious and political authorities; and then there is “Christ” – a nickname for the weaker, self-righteous, fearful brother who shadows Jesus, trying to persuade him to accept a destiny he refuses. … “Christ” is … in love with miracles, with the dream of an unanswerable human authority sanctioned by God’; Christ needs a world forever safe from doubt and permeated by the benign presence of a God who reinforces his commands with magic. This shadow figure takes hold of Jesus’ identity, recording and editing what he says and does. He is encouraged by a mysterious stranger who eventually prompts him to betray Jesus to death; he then stage-manages the “resurrection” appearances by presenting himself, “Christ” as Jesus risen from the dead. “Christ” is tormented by the knowledge that he is distorting and betraying Jesus, but he accepts the stranger’s assurance that all this is necessary to stop Jesus being forgotten and to create the church in which God’s authority among men and women will be secured once and for all by the language of miracle and power.’
The story is a fable which once again shows Pullman’s total rejection of organized religion as the home of religious humbug and tyranny. It may also remind us of the argument of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor – that Jesus was too radical for ordinary human consumption, and for his memory to survive at all, you will have to lie about him.
‘I and the Father are one’. When the author of John’s gospel represents Jesus saying this, is he, in Pullman’s terms, writing like the scoundrel Christ. This text is one of main the starting points for the Church’s belief in the divinity of Jesus. Nowadays we find that belief hard to understand, instinctively perhaps we may prefer Pullman’s Jesus, the radical, visionary who is even so very much of this world.
And yet as the archbishop points out, Pullman’s reading of the gospels is not perhaps as subtle as the gospels themselves in the telling of Jesus’ story. When we read the gospels and the creeds we need to bear in mind one thing about divinity. Divinity is not something we can understand in itself. God is not just a superior thing alongside everything else that exists. God is the source and creator of all that exists and therefore divinity cannot be another characteristic in the world. So to say that Jesus is divine is not comparable to saying that Jesus was wise or loving or dark skinned. To say that Jesus is divine puts him in a place where human language has to tread very carefully. And that of course is hinted at in the gospels as the disciples continuously fail to understand Jesus and the miracles do not seem to prove anything consistent to those who witness them. As the Archbishop puts it in his review, the gospels often display the irony that the more you say about the authority or divinity of Jesus the more you risk getting it wrong. It is not the case that the gospels sanitize the real history of Jesus and replace it with a religiously convenient truth whose power is intended to silence difficult questions. Difficult questions abound in the gospels.
And that perhaps is pre-eminently so in the gospel according to John. The verse, which follows the end of this morning’s reading shows the Jews picking up objects with which to stone Jesus. In response Jesus continues to talk about his oneness with the Father, He is doing the works of the Father and so the Father is in him and he is in the Father and the work of the Father is love. But lest we think that we understand love any more clearly than we understand divinity, the path of love and divinity leads Jesus to the cross. With supreme irony the hour of glory in John’s gospel, the moment when the glory of God and Jesus’ true divinity is supremely revealed, is when Jesus on the cross lays down his life for his friends.
So how do we answer Pullman’s accusation, how do we respond to his claim that the gospels reveal the unanswerable authority of miracle and power which ensured the survival of Jesus’ memory through the propagation of a lie? I’ve already said that the gospels are not empty of powerful questions about Jesus identity, questions which lead us to talk about his divinity with enormous caution, but I would also want to say that the gospels are authoritative and that Jesus is divine – so how can we begin to understand this authority and divinity in a different way to the one represented by Pullman, acknowledging of course that tragically the church has often behaved in ways which deserve his powerful critique.
The authority that Jesus displays and which his followers recognize is a power to make them free. His ministry turns a politically and socially paralyzed situation up-side-down. He frees people from the demons which obsess them, from their sins and fears. He proclaims God’s forgiveness and love in a new way, which allows the old truths of Judaism to take on a universal significance. But then at the end the truth of his mission is put to the supreme test in the absence of God in Gethsemane and on the cross. His claims about God seem to have been dismantled. All language about God is put to the ultimate test. And so we are put to the test. Are we still prepared to see in this story a pattern for our own lives which could bring us freedom from the things which obsess, delude, constrain and limit us? And are we prepared to accept that emptying out, that radical self questioning which Jesus implies when he talks of finding life by loosing it? For make no mistake the resurrection, the new life at the end of the story in no way diminishes the cost, the loss, the self abandonment of the cross. When Jesus speaks of his oneness with the Father he presents us not with the command of an unanswerable authority but the invitation to risk all in a life of never ending vulnerability. And the real miracle, the real power resides in the new life that vulnerable freedom may bestow. And it is only if we believe that we will find this freedom by immersing ourselves fully and self sacrificially in the story of Jesus that we will come to acknowledge that Jesus and the Father are indeed one. Jesus is divine because he will enable us to find our full humanity. Amen.