If you have read this month’s magazine you will perhaps have noticed that I have been hoping to get a headline in the local papers. Something along the lines of, ‘Vicar says Da Vinci Code is a religious film.’ By the time that letter was written, however, it was perhaps old news and no-one was interested. The headline has not appeared. And yet I still think that the questions raised at the end of the film are important – far more important than the silly discussion about whether Jesus could have been married or whether the church has been involved in the biggest cover up in history. The final dialogue in the film – which isn’t in the book but is I think added to draw things together – gives Tom Hanks these words to say:
‘Why couldn’t Jesus have been both Son of God and a man, why couldn’t he be a father and still capable of all those miracles… why is it always human or divine? May be human is divine. One thing I do know. A living heir to Jesus Christ – would she destroy faith or would she renew it?…. What really matters is what you believe.’ Those words represent the most positive element in the film. It is the character played by Sir Ian Mckellan who wants to bring the church down, but he has been carted off to prison to face trial for murder. Here at the end of the film is a clear if somewhat ambitious intention to renew Christianity because in spite of all its historical failings there is something about the faith which demands renewal in every age. And the renewal comes perhaps out of the struggle to understand and live out the proper relationship between the human and the divine.
We see that struggle clearly going on in the epistle to the Hebrews. Apparently Dan Brown and his characters haven’t paid enough attention to Hebrews or they would have found its repeated and very clear references to the humanity of Jesus, ‘made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest…because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted.’ For the author to the Hebrews humanity and divinity are not mutually exclusive; but they are unequal because humanity needs saving from death and sin. The novel’s main weakness is not perhaps its feeble grasp of history but its uncertainty about what human beings need saving from. It sets up an argument about how Jesus lived and ignores why he lived, what his followers believed was the purpose of his life.
For the author of Hebrews the purpose of Jesus’ life is to save us from sin and death. And in this evening’s second lesson he gives us no less than four ways of thinking about how such salvation works. First we hear that Jesus ‘has been crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.‘ Though tasting death means in Hebrew simply to die, I cannot help thinking of that unfortunate imperial employee who had to taste every dish that came to the emperor’s table to ensure that it hadn’t been poisoned. Does Jesus taste death for us to take away the fear of death, to make it safe for us to die?
The second image used in this passage presents Jesus as ‘the pioneer of our salvation made perfect through suffering.’ The word translated as pioneer also means author, founder, leader, someone who goes ahead of us clearing the way which all must follow. The people of God have a journey to take to their place of rest and the one who leads the way shares their origin and is therefore also their brother, And somehow this pioneer is morally perfected by what he suffers. We follow him because he shares our suffering and temptation and so earns our trust and admiration.
The third image involves Jesus in conflict. Jesus shares in our nature so that through death he might destroy him who has power over death that is the devil and deliver all who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage.’ Fear of death enslaves us, makes life less than it might otherwise be. This fear is associated with the power of sin and both are defeated in the battle which is fought out in Jesus’ life death.
And the final image is of Jesus as priest, one who suffers and is tempted as we are and yet is still authorised by God to lead the worship which takes away sin. It is not that we need a perfect priest on a pedestal whose life is lead separate from contact with the world. Our priest represents us, takes our life as it is to God for his forgiveness.
So Jesus is shown as official taster, pioneer, warrior, and priest. They may, or may not, be images which we find helpful. All of them depend on a sense that this is one of us who does these things. But he is also more than that, because he is able to do these things for us in a way no-one else can. He is both human and divine.
Death is not now I suspect seen as something we so obviously need saving from, simply because our life expectancy is so much longer than in biblical times and we are not at least on our own doorstep so surrounded by images of death. We cannot imagine what it must be like to live in southern Lebanon. Nor do we see as the earliest Christians did a natural connection between sin and death.
Perhaps we can reconnect them by thinking about the way in which fear diminishes our humanity. Fear, not money, is the root of all evil. The parent fears for his or her child and the child learns fear. We learn very early to protect ourselves from fear. The defence of self is the root of selfishness. We compete for what we think will make us safe. And so other people either become those who compete with or threaten our security, or they become our allies, our protectors, those who convince us that we are safe. And in order to preserve this fantasy of invulnerability – death has to be kept at bay until the last possible moment. Is this the way we have to live – the natural life history of the selfish, self protecting gene?
The call to faith is a call to see such a way of life as fantasy, as anti human and therefore as sinful. Belief in God might be seen as the ultimate fantasy of absolute security. But the story of God as revealed in the Bible, as revealed in the lives of Job and Jesus, is hardly a picture of a securely defended self. The encounter with God in scripture is an encounter with a fundamentally challenging otherness. The divine puts question marks against all our defences. And yet the divine also stands with us at the frontier of the defended self inviting us to go beyond. The divine in Jesus challenges us to taste death without fear, to go beyond our safe places, to struggle with evil and sin, and to accept forgiveness when we inevitably fail. It is only the divine which can so challenge us; but the vehicle of that challenge has to be another human being in whom we see that the risk is worth taking and can be taken.
The Da Vinci Code with its preoccupation with the possibility of Jesus having been married and having children, misses the point of Jesus. The gospel is not about whether Jesus could have sex but about whether Jesus can give us hope in the face of sin and death.