Jesus Unplugged

As I continue in this little journey of mine I understand it’s been marked from early years by the cinematic figure of Jesus.

No, I didn’t go and see King of Kings when I was in kindergarten. When I say ‘cinematic” it doesn’t mean actual movies (although it doesn’t exclude them either). It’s more what people intend when they describe something and say “it was like in the movies.” For me the figure of Jesus was just that, larger than life, beautiful, embedded in imagination, and—most important, in the word at the root of "cinematic"—kinetic, which means he was moving amazingly in and through the human world.

For the longest time I used to think this experience was religious, and that had two consequences. One, I more or less kept it to myself. And two, I spent a large amount of my allotted years trying to find my vision of Jesus represented in and by religious organizations which claim him as their Lord. Now more and more I think what I saw was not religious, but actual and, yes, really cinematic.

So, let me explain. When we talk about cinema we know we’re talking about the most powerful contemporary medium of cultural imagination. As the saying goes, “The movies are truth twenty four frames per second.” And another one, “It hasn’t really happened until it’s on T.V. or in the movies.” So history isn’t just about who writes it, but also, and more and more, about who shows it and how they show it. What I’m saying about Jesus then is that he was the movies before the movies. He took hold of our cultural imagination not with the magic lantern and rolling frames but with two basic frames—the cross and the resurrection—which have played and played inside our world until little by little they have set the whole thing moving: toward something amazing, terrible, wonderful.

And I don’t mean this as just some kind of fancy metaphor. I mean it actually, concretely, dramatically, wholly. Here’s not the occasion to give a technical explanation of why this might be so. Enough to say that the thought of Rene Girard carries us a long way in this direction. But I’m not talking here about explanation, I’m talking about experience. The fact that I have connected with the thought of Girard has helped me understand a lot about my own world, but it didn’t give me my world in the first place. Jesus did. And I have spent my life trying to come to grips with it.

When I was twelve our family relocated from the Isle of Wight to Portsmouth on the south coast of England. It was Christmastime and there was no money, few and functional presents, and cold winter ferry rides across the strip of sea between the island and the mainland. My father was a corrections officer at Parkhurst, the maximum security jail on the island, and he’d got a job at another prison in Portsmouth. But we hadn’t yet found a permanent house, so we returned to Parkhurst for the break. I was walking home one night, under the fortress-like granite walls surrounding the prison. I’d walked that route all my schooldays but this time the walls towered to the stars and the stars were made of the same glittering, cruel matter. I was being sucked headlong into that gun-metal hole and I prayed God desperately to save me. Somehow, with the prayer, I made it back to the house, and there as always life went on. It was about two or three months later when a teacher in my new school made us read the Sermon on the Mount during Religious Ed. I’d never heard it or read it all in one piece before, and it completely blew me away. I could see the electric morning sky as Jesus talked. I could hear his voice, his cadent language, and its enormous confident authority. And I could feel the hard earth twist and reshape itself under the incandescent thrill of his words. It was cinematic, all the way. It moved and changed things in the world, and I knew then that the iron prison walls could never stand before the burning energy of his tongue.

That’s what I mean, and I have quite a few other stories like it. I am not a saint, by no means. Back then I was just some kind of scared kid with a strong imagination, and basically I’m the same thing now, just with a little more experience. I think there are many others like me, and steadily more and more of them. They are the people who are being drafted to play a part in the Jesus movie, by reading a book, by taking a class, by traveling to a country in the global South, by seeing a movie, by hearing a song, by surfing a website, by falling into a black hole which only Jesus can change into light. And by going to church? Ah, there’s the question.

There’s no doubt that many people who go to church connect to the cinematic Jesus. And they show up in the place that seems to know about this guy. But so much of the church tradition is to do with a negotiation with God for the sake of benefits, earthly or heavenly. The figure of Jesus gets sucked into a business deal with God, and the real/reel Jesus gets shut down in favor of a board meeting with the Almighty. I think the cinematic Jesus is really an unplugged Jesus, unplugged from the mainframe of the churches, perhaps showing up occasionally at coffee break or the local feeding program, but basically out of there. He’s out of there, playing and moving in the world where he can and does really change things.

I have come to think that we know nothing of God until we meet the cinematic Jesus, who is also the poor Jesus, the abandoned Jesus, the crucified Jesus, the changing-the-imagination Jesus. Everything else is religion and alienation. So what then is “church,” the ekklesia or “calling together” of the New Testament? Well, that’s just what it is, the calling together anywhere, anytime of some bit-part players of the Jesus movie who want to share a few of their favorite clips and celebrate. I really can’t think of a more fun thing to do!

Tony