Here is the first of the November Bible Studies - the second will be posted shortly -Linda.
NT- Time to Come 11/12/09
There are two ways to look at time. The first way is traditional clock time. Here time is measured movement. Like the movement of sand through the hour glass. The second way is experienced time. For example, time has a different feel for children. Things take more time, and there is always something to look forward to. Time for children is very future oriented. There is an excitement about what is coming, or just arriving. Children don’t have much of a past. Adults construct their own past. It is made up of others’ past, their nation’s past. Part of being formed by a culture is to receive a past. Time is constructed for you by your own experiences and by your culture. A child hardly looks back – they are always looking forward.
Children’s sense of time is closer to the Christian sense of time. The Gospels are full of this future sense of time, and this Christian sense of time has also entered into our culture.
In Mt. 24 Jesus gives his apocalyptic discourse (also in Mk. 13 but it has been expanded by Matthew). In it Jesus teaches about what is coming. There is a powerful, urgent sense of the coming of the new. There have been various interpretations of this text.
In the 19th century a former priest in the Church of Ireland, John Nelson Darby, began to map out a detailed timetable of how the events and tribulations of these end times were going to occur. He promoted what is called “dispensationalism,” a teaching about distinct phases and eras in God’s dealing with humankind, including Darby’s special contribution of a “secret rapture” of the just, leaving the earth behind to tribulation and chaos. His views were promoted in the commentary and cross-references of the Scofield Bible, an enormously popular U.S. bible version through the early part of the 20th century. They thus entered the mainstream of evangelical thinking in the U.S. Darby’s beliefs have become widely accepted as theologically sound and because of them a mythic view of the end times became entrenched. They depict a violent future in which Christians are on the winning side. The basic timetable he described include the secret Second Coming or Rapture; seven years of Tribulation (when God violently defends Israel against, its enemies Gog and Magog – often depicted as the Arabs and Russians); the Thousand Year Reign on earth of Christ and his saints; Satan’s escape from the pit; the Final Battle and the End of the World.
When the present is intolerable and the gospel of compassion is not preached, those who feel abandoned by society and history gravitate to this kind of message. It offers a mathematical control of the future, providing self-vindication buttressed by a kind of fate. Something similar is present in Nostradamus, almanacs and horoscopes. The most current secular version is the Mayan 2012 prediction of the end of the world.
Classical church belief has been a kind of virtual millennialism—the reign of Christ on earth becomes a mystical abstract thing. There is a backing away from any expectation of a real transformation in history. The Church itself becomes the embodiment of Christ’s rule.
It is necessary to read the Matthew passage in a different way. The time of Christ is a newness that we are being pulled toward, both individually and collectively. How it will work out we don’t know, but there is no doubt the pull of the new provokes crisis and challenge.
Jesus uses symbolism to open us to the possibility of something new. He uses several images to symbolize the coming of the end times. The fig tree, the flood, kidnappings, a thief in the night, and slaves waiting for their master’s return. (Interestingly vv.40-41: “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together, one will be taken and one left,” have been used as a reference to rapture by arbitrary connection to 1 Thessalonians 4:17. More traditionally they are linked in the sense of final judgment to the earlier v. 31 where the angels “gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other” The nearest sense, however, derived from the image of sweeping away in the flood [v.39], suggests forceful abduction– it is the ones who are left behind who are the lucky ones! In line with this, previous gatherings in Matthew are of the wicked from the earth [13:30 & amp. 40-41—“collect the weeds first,” and the angels “will collect out of the kingdom all causes of sin.”] In other words the “one taken” can be read either positively or negatively, with a suspicion toward the latter. It is mythical to derive literal descriptions from selective verses, rather than a broad description of challenge and crisis.)
Jesus’ metaphors are either from nature or from catastrophic events. They represent both sides of the coming change – it is organic but also shocking and dramatic, totally new. Or, like the images Jesus uses for the kingdom of God, yeast and mustard seed, which are completely natural but bring about huge changes.
Mk 13:32 is the original version of the parable of the slave watching for his master’s return. This includes the classic statement in which Jesus makes it clear that no-one – not even the Son – knows the hour of the end times. (Seems like Darby knew more than Jesus!) The message here is to stay alert and to keep awake. Mt. 24:45-51 expands the theme (the need for watchfulness) to include punishment of the unfaithful slave. Matthew’s audience was the early Christian community, and perhaps reflects a warning to church leaders who have become domineering and exploitative. Matthew’s violent language stems from his desire for authentic Christian community.
Mt. 13:24-30 gives another parable of the end times – the parable of the tares and wheat. Here the harvest gives an image of the end of time – again organic but momentous. The servants offer to pull up the weeds that are growing alongside the wheat – but are told to wait. There is no way to distinguish between good and evil people because we are all interconnected. While theologians like Augustine say this is because you can’t tell at any historical moment who is one of the final elect, the point is rather that we are all so intertwined. Separation is impossible now and must come at the end. As time goes on the choices we make—between goodness and evil, between life and death—will become more and more evident. It will be clearer what we need to do. Those who choose nonviolence, forgiveness and peace will live. In the growing crisis the clarity of choice will grow. Thus these parables are pictures of choice not predictions of outcomes. What is valued and is of the kingdom will last, what is worthless will be lost. The emphasis is on the choice. Matthew’s explanation of the parable at v. 36 (likely an editorial addition and exposition) shifts the emphasis from our interconnectedness and our choice to the final sorting. You can already see happening the temptation toward prediction and pre-emptive division!
A New Testament passage that crystallizes the gospel sense of time and the breaking in of the future into the now is 1Cor. 7: 29. It describes not a physical destruction of the earth, but rather the passing away of the forms of the world as they have been up to now. Not the world passing a way but the present form of the world transforming! What Paul is saying is that what has seemed important and valuable in worldly terms – marriage, mourning, celebration, wealth and dealings with the world are no longer important. What is coming is the key thing.
In the light of all this the thousand year reign of Christ may be understood as the continued pull of Christ on the world, shifting it toward compassion, peace, forgiveness. It is a subversive reign but it is a reign all the same, because it is the root guiding force of all contemporary history. There is no guarantee that the world will submit, and so the outcome remains uncertain. But in the meantime the subversive reign is real and the thousand years is now. It is contemporary with present history, as indeed all the images of Revelation are, including the battle of the Word against the kings and armies of the earth. It is the same movie plot played out again and again! Christians today are called to live into the future-now of the new thing Christ has brought.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Christianity As Pollution
I labor under a couple of disabilities, but I have compensating advantages! I mean this in respect of relating to churches and what you might call formal Christianity.
I was formed in the R.C. tradition where models of passionate relationship to God and the human are held up for emulation. They are often called saints, but the approach extends to imagery and art, that kind of thing. There was an undercurrent of sensate love celebrated and I do miss that, that intimate chapel feeling of being close to the divine. Or all those wonderful El Greco faces and their freaky flesh stretched out in ecstasy!
But who am I kidding? Those models are the ones that got past the censor, the ones that accepted the bargain of a huge world-historical organization where passion is only good when kept within the box. The Roman Catholic church is pure Plato’s Republic, a city ruled by philosopher kings with twenty-twenty vision of the eternal forms communicating their laws to all the lesser, clay-bound creatures under them. Augustine’s City of God practically said it in the title, but Augustine was also up to something else.
Augustine knew that there was no way you could perfectly identify the church with the heavenly city as opposed to the earthly one, and neither would you want to. First, God’s choice for salvation was insuperable and you could never tell who might actually be in the church but would not finally make the cut. But also—and this is a matter of opinion on my part, I have no real chapter and verse—I think Augustine secretly reckoned on some worldly types in the church’s ranks in order to bring it hard-nosed realpolitik in its long march through time. And whether I’m right or wrong, you do get the picture. Those Renaissance popes (and later too) certainly behaved as if salvation was secondary to worldly success.
Meanwhile, back with Augustine, the hordes of people then pouring into the church from the Roman Empire were told there was one sure thing—you may not be absolutely certain of final grace inside the church, but outside you are definitely damned. This was the message that got through: the church is the ark of salvation run by its captain priests; all those not aboard are going down. Hence, in that framework, a certain disability for me.
But then along came Luther. He fixed everyone a life-raft. Threw them out on the raging sea like there was no tomorrow. Everyone became the captain of his or her soul and they set sail for Paradise like an immense flotilla of migrating jellyfish. That really did a number on the Roman church’s pretensions, but in the process it also did a number on the solidarity of folk. They were no longer in the big boat together, very much the contrary. The whole thing of sensate love, of something happening in the human order that changed the human order, well this got definitively displaced to the individual and his/her happy hereafter. Hence, another disability.
For, as I say, Catholicism always had this undertow of real stuff in a real world—of the Word made flesh-- but to break the grip of the corporate guys who managed it all Luther individualized it precisely and exclusively to the soul. Gone was the solidarity of the flesh. Each individual instead had this other-worldly thing inside them communicated to directly by this other-worldly God, and bam! we’re all basically out of here. Now I don’t know if in some sense I’m still a Catholic but this individualism is completely foreign to me. And so if I find it hard to communicate with a lot of Catholics because of rejecting their church’s Platonic organization, I find it perhaps twice as difficult to communicate with a lot of Protestants who go even beyond Plato, reducing the human city to the dimensions of a single soul.
“Shoot,” I hear you say, “this guy has so many disabilities I wonder why he bothers.” Well, hold on, there are also the compensating factors I mentioned. These factors are in fact so strong that I think there is a complete renewal of Christianity under way, one which makes both Catholicism and Protestantism perhaps little more than bumps on a road of Christian history rather than the end of the road itself.
It’s to do with that sensate love I was talking about. My feeling that God’s love affects the real human world is not restricted to devotional images or works of art. And really it couldn’t be. If the gentle Spirit of self-giving love has touched human beings, and over the course of two millennia, then it has to leave traces in all sorts of ways. One of the happiest times in my life was spent in a town called Spello. I lived in a small community of manual work and prayer among the vine-and-olive hills of Umbria. The place seemed flooded, saturated with prayer. That special Italian light melded together with stories of St. Francis and produced a contemplative constant. But for me the light reached out beyond the silver hills. It said indeed we inherit the earth. It meant a whole different world, a world at peace, and in love.
Christianity is a pollution of light in the world, like Los Angeles from the air, where there is this bronzy pink haze over everything. That’s pollution, but it’s also a strange captivating light. Let me give you an example. A relative of one of the victims of the so-named “Beltway Sniper” said recently he had to forgive the perpetrator both because the bible taught him to do so, and because, related to this (his words), if he didn’t forgive him hate would eat him up from the inside. I’m not sure if he expressly intended this but I think his sense was that the Gospel can actually (paradoxically) make hate worse so long as there is not forgiveness. So long as the message of Christ is broadcast in culture there is something saying there is possible forgiveness for all sorts of killers and offenders, and our anger and hatred, if maintained, are prolonged. In a Christian-infected culture we are unable to consign these people to ultimate final darkness. Christ has entered the time of the earth, that is our time, and forbidden killing, and has done so in the very depths of our imagination. So, short of a complete surrender to the time of forgiveness, human culture can only experience a thicker and thicker haze of anger and hatred which at the same time continues to show strange mesmerizing tints of a beautiful light. That light is an earth at peace.
It is far too easy to dismiss these effects cynically, as too little to make a real difference or simply willed to show God’s judgment in an absolute metaphysical fashion but not to change anything. Either response—scandal before the Gospel’s weakness or turning it into some horribly inverted legal condemnation—flies in the face of love itself, of light itself. Love hopes all things, believes all things. And light which gives itself with boundless generosity, squandering itself on all things without discrimination, cannot change its nature. It can only be light. In contrast it’s only we who can change, from killing to peace, from darkness to light, and we in our time are constantly pressed to do so.
So, you see, the compensations way outweigh the disabilities! Who would want to go back to a Christianity of either Catholic or Protestant Platonism when we can have one of loving pollution transforming the human earth itself?
Tony
I was formed in the R.C. tradition where models of passionate relationship to God and the human are held up for emulation. They are often called saints, but the approach extends to imagery and art, that kind of thing. There was an undercurrent of sensate love celebrated and I do miss that, that intimate chapel feeling of being close to the divine. Or all those wonderful El Greco faces and their freaky flesh stretched out in ecstasy!
But who am I kidding? Those models are the ones that got past the censor, the ones that accepted the bargain of a huge world-historical organization where passion is only good when kept within the box. The Roman Catholic church is pure Plato’s Republic, a city ruled by philosopher kings with twenty-twenty vision of the eternal forms communicating their laws to all the lesser, clay-bound creatures under them. Augustine’s City of God practically said it in the title, but Augustine was also up to something else.
Augustine knew that there was no way you could perfectly identify the church with the heavenly city as opposed to the earthly one, and neither would you want to. First, God’s choice for salvation was insuperable and you could never tell who might actually be in the church but would not finally make the cut. But also—and this is a matter of opinion on my part, I have no real chapter and verse—I think Augustine secretly reckoned on some worldly types in the church’s ranks in order to bring it hard-nosed realpolitik in its long march through time. And whether I’m right or wrong, you do get the picture. Those Renaissance popes (and later too) certainly behaved as if salvation was secondary to worldly success.
Meanwhile, back with Augustine, the hordes of people then pouring into the church from the Roman Empire were told there was one sure thing—you may not be absolutely certain of final grace inside the church, but outside you are definitely damned. This was the message that got through: the church is the ark of salvation run by its captain priests; all those not aboard are going down. Hence, in that framework, a certain disability for me.
But then along came Luther. He fixed everyone a life-raft. Threw them out on the raging sea like there was no tomorrow. Everyone became the captain of his or her soul and they set sail for Paradise like an immense flotilla of migrating jellyfish. That really did a number on the Roman church’s pretensions, but in the process it also did a number on the solidarity of folk. They were no longer in the big boat together, very much the contrary. The whole thing of sensate love, of something happening in the human order that changed the human order, well this got definitively displaced to the individual and his/her happy hereafter. Hence, another disability.
For, as I say, Catholicism always had this undertow of real stuff in a real world—of the Word made flesh-- but to break the grip of the corporate guys who managed it all Luther individualized it precisely and exclusively to the soul. Gone was the solidarity of the flesh. Each individual instead had this other-worldly thing inside them communicated to directly by this other-worldly God, and bam! we’re all basically out of here. Now I don’t know if in some sense I’m still a Catholic but this individualism is completely foreign to me. And so if I find it hard to communicate with a lot of Catholics because of rejecting their church’s Platonic organization, I find it perhaps twice as difficult to communicate with a lot of Protestants who go even beyond Plato, reducing the human city to the dimensions of a single soul.
“Shoot,” I hear you say, “this guy has so many disabilities I wonder why he bothers.” Well, hold on, there are also the compensating factors I mentioned. These factors are in fact so strong that I think there is a complete renewal of Christianity under way, one which makes both Catholicism and Protestantism perhaps little more than bumps on a road of Christian history rather than the end of the road itself.
It’s to do with that sensate love I was talking about. My feeling that God’s love affects the real human world is not restricted to devotional images or works of art. And really it couldn’t be. If the gentle Spirit of self-giving love has touched human beings, and over the course of two millennia, then it has to leave traces in all sorts of ways. One of the happiest times in my life was spent in a town called Spello. I lived in a small community of manual work and prayer among the vine-and-olive hills of Umbria. The place seemed flooded, saturated with prayer. That special Italian light melded together with stories of St. Francis and produced a contemplative constant. But for me the light reached out beyond the silver hills. It said indeed we inherit the earth. It meant a whole different world, a world at peace, and in love.
Christianity is a pollution of light in the world, like Los Angeles from the air, where there is this bronzy pink haze over everything. That’s pollution, but it’s also a strange captivating light. Let me give you an example. A relative of one of the victims of the so-named “Beltway Sniper” said recently he had to forgive the perpetrator both because the bible taught him to do so, and because, related to this (his words), if he didn’t forgive him hate would eat him up from the inside. I’m not sure if he expressly intended this but I think his sense was that the Gospel can actually (paradoxically) make hate worse so long as there is not forgiveness. So long as the message of Christ is broadcast in culture there is something saying there is possible forgiveness for all sorts of killers and offenders, and our anger and hatred, if maintained, are prolonged. In a Christian-infected culture we are unable to consign these people to ultimate final darkness. Christ has entered the time of the earth, that is our time, and forbidden killing, and has done so in the very depths of our imagination. So, short of a complete surrender to the time of forgiveness, human culture can only experience a thicker and thicker haze of anger and hatred which at the same time continues to show strange mesmerizing tints of a beautiful light. That light is an earth at peace.
It is far too easy to dismiss these effects cynically, as too little to make a real difference or simply willed to show God’s judgment in an absolute metaphysical fashion but not to change anything. Either response—scandal before the Gospel’s weakness or turning it into some horribly inverted legal condemnation—flies in the face of love itself, of light itself. Love hopes all things, believes all things. And light which gives itself with boundless generosity, squandering itself on all things without discrimination, cannot change its nature. It can only be light. In contrast it’s only we who can change, from killing to peace, from darkness to light, and we in our time are constantly pressed to do so.
So, you see, the compensations way outweigh the disabilities! Who would want to go back to a Christianity of either Catholic or Protestant Platonism when we can have one of loving pollution transforming the human earth itself?
Tony
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Capitalism, Not The Whole Story
I just saw Michael Moore’s Capitalism, A Love Story. Weird, this movie is supposed to be about money and all that evil stuff (which it is), but I don’t think I’ve seen such a Jesus-centered film since The Passion of the Christ.
It’s a very personal film, perhaps Moore’s most personal. He has his father in it, an old guy in Flint, Michigan, pointing out where the factory used to be where he worked almost all his life but now raised to the ground. Michael clearly loves and respects his Dad. It also has a short grainy film from Michael’s first communion and the revelation that at one time, as a little boy, he wanted to be a Roman Catholic priest because of the priests he saw committing their lives to the poor. But underneath it all, underneath Moore’s shambling sweet-comic persona, there is a barely concealed, simmering anger.
He’s angry because of destruction of unions, because of banking deregulation, because so many people lost their homes and land, because of Wall Street dealing in “exotic instruments” and needing a massive bail-out from taxpayers (I understand “exotic” like this: you’re running a horse in a race that you’re sure is going to lose [because it’s actually people buying houses they can’t afford] and at the same time you’re taking bets in the form of huge I.O.U’s with a small but significant upfront payment against the time when the horse will actually lose and meanwhile you’re delaying the race and every week the horse doesn’t lose you’re paying out partial winnings and everybody’s happy because people keep placing the bets and there’s an astronomical amount of fictitious money pumped into the system until finally the horse collapses in plain sight and everybody’s asking where’s my money and of course there is none, and if that makes no sense then go see the film for the ridiculously funny bits when Moore gets a finance professional and a professor to try explain “derivatives” and they both get lost in the first sentence. It’s not meant to be understood.)
Michael is angry, and he’s also frustrated because he can’t figure out why the rest of us are not just as angry as he is, why in fact we’re not in a state of open revolt. He would like us to be but we’re not.
Now poor Michael, he’s is in a terrible bind. He knows the only way he can make his point and try to rouse us to action is by entertaining us, by making us laugh. He has to be funny, clownish, non-threatening in order in the process to inform us, provoke us, get us ultimately to threaten the massively vested interests that have got us in this mess. But how can that work? He runs the risk of being just about as subversive as Mary Tyler Moore. To make his point he has to be part of an entertainment industry whose business it is precisely to keep us with glazed eyes only half-aware of what really is happening to us and just too couch-comfortable to do anything. If Eisenhower back in 1961 warned of a military-industrial complex I think more likely he’d name it today as a military-financial-entertainment complex.
So where does that leave Michael Moore the filmmaker. What can he possibly show us to make a difference? Because that’s the thing about filmmaking, it’s about showing stuff, not primarily about abstract thought or ideas. It works at the level of the visual, of visual signs and the immediate impact they have. And what Moore shows us, unmistakably, out of the crisis of communication that grips him, is Jesus. The figure of Jesus runs through Capitalism, A Love Story like Best Supporting Actor, second only to Moore himself. He turns up in the priests and bishops Moore keeps interviewing, in hilarious clips from Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth with mashup voiceover in ripe Robert Powell tones (“I’m sorry I can’t heal you, it’s a pre-existing condition"), in an image of the Crucified strung up over the big banks, and finally in the stirring Woodie Guthrie song heard while credits roll, “They laid Jesus Christ in his grave.”
This is not liberation theology, telling us that Jesus is on the side of the poor. Sure, it is that on one level, but what difference is the theological idea going to make when we can’t even connect with the notion of $700 billion (and counting) being fleeced from the nation’s collective pockets? What is much more potent, and the only hope, is the abyssal truth of Jesus, crucified at the heart of the world system and slowly but surely subverting it with the earthquake of the innocent yet forgiving victim. You see what I mean? I mean it’s not about a political change founded in distributive justice and the struggle for such justice. It’s already too late for that. We’re like lobsters in a pot, cooked alive with lies and the violence of lies. But Jesus is faithful to the truth at a level deeper than any lie, and it is that faithfulness which calls us at this moment in time. He calls us to be faithful at this radical level, as individuals, as groups, as small communities, finding ways to live justly through love and forgiveness with each other. We do so in the knowledge that the world system is terminal and cannot be salvaged without a change that goes way beyond what any politician today can imagine or propose. It can only be helped at the level of the Crucified, the one who reveals all violence while offering it all forgiveness, and that means effectively, in the actual surrender of violence by humans. (For-giveness only really happens when the perpetrator gives in reciprocally to the giving of forgiveness.)
That is what Moore as artist and filmmaker understood and showed. And I take my hat off to him. Really there has always been capitalism, plutocracy etc. But the protest against it is a biblical thought—“let there be no poor among you.” What Jesus is doing goes deeper still. He says “Blessed are the poor,” meaning the absolute change in the world order has already occurred. Those who follow Jesus live that way, in an absolutely new way. For them the transformation has already happened, no matter what Fox News or Wall St. does. And by making Jesus Best Supporting Actor in his movie Moore really said that, even though he perhaps didn’t realize it. I am glad he didn’t get ordained. I don’t think the robes would suit him. But I’m sure glad he’s a filmmaker-priest, holding up the image of Christ deep in the world’s abyss.
It’s a very personal film, perhaps Moore’s most personal. He has his father in it, an old guy in Flint, Michigan, pointing out where the factory used to be where he worked almost all his life but now raised to the ground. Michael clearly loves and respects his Dad. It also has a short grainy film from Michael’s first communion and the revelation that at one time, as a little boy, he wanted to be a Roman Catholic priest because of the priests he saw committing their lives to the poor. But underneath it all, underneath Moore’s shambling sweet-comic persona, there is a barely concealed, simmering anger.
He’s angry because of destruction of unions, because of banking deregulation, because so many people lost their homes and land, because of Wall Street dealing in “exotic instruments” and needing a massive bail-out from taxpayers (I understand “exotic” like this: you’re running a horse in a race that you’re sure is going to lose [because it’s actually people buying houses they can’t afford] and at the same time you’re taking bets in the form of huge I.O.U’s with a small but significant upfront payment against the time when the horse will actually lose and meanwhile you’re delaying the race and every week the horse doesn’t lose you’re paying out partial winnings and everybody’s happy because people keep placing the bets and there’s an astronomical amount of fictitious money pumped into the system until finally the horse collapses in plain sight and everybody’s asking where’s my money and of course there is none, and if that makes no sense then go see the film for the ridiculously funny bits when Moore gets a finance professional and a professor to try explain “derivatives” and they both get lost in the first sentence. It’s not meant to be understood.)
Michael is angry, and he’s also frustrated because he can’t figure out why the rest of us are not just as angry as he is, why in fact we’re not in a state of open revolt. He would like us to be but we’re not.
Now poor Michael, he’s is in a terrible bind. He knows the only way he can make his point and try to rouse us to action is by entertaining us, by making us laugh. He has to be funny, clownish, non-threatening in order in the process to inform us, provoke us, get us ultimately to threaten the massively vested interests that have got us in this mess. But how can that work? He runs the risk of being just about as subversive as Mary Tyler Moore. To make his point he has to be part of an entertainment industry whose business it is precisely to keep us with glazed eyes only half-aware of what really is happening to us and just too couch-comfortable to do anything. If Eisenhower back in 1961 warned of a military-industrial complex I think more likely he’d name it today as a military-financial-entertainment complex.
So where does that leave Michael Moore the filmmaker. What can he possibly show us to make a difference? Because that’s the thing about filmmaking, it’s about showing stuff, not primarily about abstract thought or ideas. It works at the level of the visual, of visual signs and the immediate impact they have. And what Moore shows us, unmistakably, out of the crisis of communication that grips him, is Jesus. The figure of Jesus runs through Capitalism, A Love Story like Best Supporting Actor, second only to Moore himself. He turns up in the priests and bishops Moore keeps interviewing, in hilarious clips from Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth with mashup voiceover in ripe Robert Powell tones (“I’m sorry I can’t heal you, it’s a pre-existing condition"), in an image of the Crucified strung up over the big banks, and finally in the stirring Woodie Guthrie song heard while credits roll, “They laid Jesus Christ in his grave.”
This is not liberation theology, telling us that Jesus is on the side of the poor. Sure, it is that on one level, but what difference is the theological idea going to make when we can’t even connect with the notion of $700 billion (and counting) being fleeced from the nation’s collective pockets? What is much more potent, and the only hope, is the abyssal truth of Jesus, crucified at the heart of the world system and slowly but surely subverting it with the earthquake of the innocent yet forgiving victim. You see what I mean? I mean it’s not about a political change founded in distributive justice and the struggle for such justice. It’s already too late for that. We’re like lobsters in a pot, cooked alive with lies and the violence of lies. But Jesus is faithful to the truth at a level deeper than any lie, and it is that faithfulness which calls us at this moment in time. He calls us to be faithful at this radical level, as individuals, as groups, as small communities, finding ways to live justly through love and forgiveness with each other. We do so in the knowledge that the world system is terminal and cannot be salvaged without a change that goes way beyond what any politician today can imagine or propose. It can only be helped at the level of the Crucified, the one who reveals all violence while offering it all forgiveness, and that means effectively, in the actual surrender of violence by humans. (For-giveness only really happens when the perpetrator gives in reciprocally to the giving of forgiveness.)
That is what Moore as artist and filmmaker understood and showed. And I take my hat off to him. Really there has always been capitalism, plutocracy etc. But the protest against it is a biblical thought—“let there be no poor among you.” What Jesus is doing goes deeper still. He says “Blessed are the poor,” meaning the absolute change in the world order has already occurred. Those who follow Jesus live that way, in an absolutely new way. For them the transformation has already happened, no matter what Fox News or Wall St. does. And by making Jesus Best Supporting Actor in his movie Moore really said that, even though he perhaps didn’t realize it. I am glad he didn’t get ordained. I don’t think the robes would suit him. But I’m sure glad he’s a filmmaker-priest, holding up the image of Christ deep in the world’s abyss.
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