May 18, 2006.
So?!
To hear the promoters you’d think the Apocalypse had begun.
“This is the day that will ‘forever live’ as the turning point of religious history. The Da Vinci Code has been broken. The alleged expose of the greatest “hoax” ever perpetrated on our race is today transformed from the printed pages of a best-selling novel to the cinema screens of the world. The Da Vinci Code, the movie, is released today.”
So?!
Well, simply, it is a cultural event. “The book,” one observer notes, “is a page-turner that revolves around a centuries-old conspiracy that has the Catholic Church hiding the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.” It is, though, just a novel. The Author acknowledges it’s fiction. But his in-the-know posture, and the volume of historical figures and events he pens into his story – regardless of how accurately – have lured millions of readers to consider it fact. The Philadelphia Daily News, in a May 17 piece titled, Dissing Da Vinci, reports that, “A Canadian survey commissioned last year by National Geographic Channel found that 32% of the book’s readers believed it to be (anything but fiction).” This is a cultural event!
Whether we like it or not it matters to us. Bruce Fisk, Associate Professor of New Testament at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California warns that “Dan Brown – The Da Vinci Code Author – is attacking everything he sees as problematic within organized religion and its claim to have a singular version of the truth. It’s not a book against Jesus. It’s a book against the Church, charging that the Church is increasingly irrelevant.” Reacting to these charges Christian leaders are researching, writing, preaching, teaching, podcasting, even moviemaking in anticipation of today’s release. Darrell Bock, author of Breaking the Da Vinci Code, told the Philadelphia Daily News that since January he’s been “touring the country,” speaking to the issues Brown has raised. A Prep School Scripture Teacher, Bill Donaghy, says he’s done “12 dozen talks” about the Da Vinci controversy in the past two months. Even the little Church in our neighborhood mass-mailed a large, glitzy, card promoting a four week sermon series on the subject. Candidly, when news broke that Brown’s book was being cinematized I wondered about reading the book and following every trail of history and pseudo history it left; becoming a “Code Breaker;” and marketing my own lecture circuit: all of this for the integrity of Jesus of course.
Today I’m concerned about what appears to be a lot of “hype.” There’s a sense of urgency in the reactions to this event. You get the feeling that we must refute Brown or forever lose our credibility. Of course the guy who “breaks the code” most convincingly will be the new defender of the faith: all of this for the integrity of Jesus of course. The problem is that Jesus would quite likely want us to spend our time in other ways. He reveals his bias about hype, knee-jerk reactions, and drama laced appeals in a story. He used stories a lot to show where he stood on things. This guy died and went to Hell. The place was so bad for him that he just had to warn his Family to change their ways and avoid it at all costs. Somehow, in his desperation, he was able to speak with Abraham, who was resting on the other side of the eternal world, and pleaded with him to send a messenger to his loved ones. Abraham’s response is Jesus response to any suggestion that the spectacular or dramatic has any place in his strategy for convincing men to change their views and their ways. “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’ ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said. ‘If someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ Abraham said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’” In another instance St. John explicitly tells us that Jesus refused to take the bait of popular appeal surrounding his own emergence as “the Christ; Messiah.” “Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name. But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men.” He knew that men were energized and seduced by the “signs,” the “sensational, the spectacular, the successful.” He knew that his Kingdom was, to such men, a veritable upside down Kingdom where great things happen in ordinary, often imperceptible ways; where simple things like growing seeds and little children are most significant; where the humble are the greatest. He knew they’d never fit in his Kingdom.
Marva Dawn tells well what this has to do with us and all that’s going on in and around the media circus that seems to entice so many of us these days. Her book Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God is an incisive challenge to reconsider our relationship with the “powers” of our day and their ways of doing things. She cites Jaques Ellul. “Christians who are ‘conformed to the world’ … are defined by the sociological milieu.” She then recounts experiences of Luke Timothy Johnson in his encounters with the ever controversial and popular Jesus Seminar. Johnson’s book, The Real Jesus, strongly critiqued the “scholars” of the Seminar. He describes what followed. “(T)he sound of my whistle had been caught up into the surrounding noise and orchestrated as part of a continuing media event. … I found myself co-opted by the same process, with the points in my argument increasingly reduced to the level of comments on personalities, or position-taking sound bites. … I was confirmed in my sense that the media is the wrong place for such discussions to occur, not only because of its inability to deal with substantive issues adequately, but because participation in the media’s productions inevitably draws people away from their primary cultural involvements. … I found myself ironically guilty of the criticism I make in chapter 3 (The Real Jesus), that those who seek to influence public opinion do so at risk to the more fundamental and important transformation of minds by teaching.” “Christians still expect,” Johnson reminds us, “a proclamation of the Word of God that is, somehow grounded in the Gospel and pertains to the ultimate realities of their own lives … .”
Jesus and his early followers did not wait for their culture to define their mission. No secular poet or novelist set their agenda. Jesus said, that “anyone who hears the things I say and puts them into practice in daily life” is building on rock solid foundations that will withstand all the adversities, controversies, suffering, and losses that life brings. “I am,” he said, “the way, the truth, and the life.” Even more, he said, the life I provide is “everlasting.” Talk about a “singular version of truth.” This is not “my way or the highway,” as they say. This is, “My way is the highway.” His followers believed what he taught. They believed that he and he alone could salvage them and their fellows. Nothing was more important to them. They would not be deterred. They would not be distracted. Their message must be proclaimed. Their Master, the Teacher had died. And then he’d risen from the dead. Many of them had seen him. Some had seen him frequently for several days. Many of them saw him return to “heaven.” The second person in God, Jesus of Nazareth, returned to reassume his place on the throne of the Supreme Sovereign right before their eyes. No sooner had he “returned to the Father” then he sent his Spirit to be “with,” and “in” them. Inspired and empowered by what they’d seen, and the Spirit of God within them, these men and women went out to proclaim the message Jesus had given them.
This was that message. God has verified that Jesus is his “anointed,” the “consummate man,” by raising him from the dead. His Spirit, the “Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead,” has come to live in you. He “will, by that same Spirit, bring to your whole being new strength and vitality.” The Spirit will “guide you into all truth.” This truth is the body of things Jesus said. The truth is, actually, and, singularly, Jesus himself. As you “repent – i.e. – change the way you think about yourself and God and accept his way of life in preference to your own,” that “same Spirit,” will make you all over again. By degrees you will come to increasingly resemble Jesus. And, like Him, you will live forever in a gloriously renovated, rapturous world you can’t imagine.
Wherever they went, and with anyone and everyone they encountered, they spoke of Jesus; his resurrection, his Spirit’s arrival; the life he’s come to extend to any who will receive it. They had no other agenda. They were certainly not “defined by their social milieu.” They “turned it on its ear.” Before the last personal friend of Jesus had died there were Christian Churches in virtually all the major cities of the Roman Empire. Any opposing voices were discredited by the dramatic life-changing influence of these people whose “rock solid character” verified, beyond dispute, that they “had been with Jesus.” Sure they had their detractors. In many cases their enemies were very powerful. They were frequently killed because their message offended and threatened these power brokers. But they refused to be distracted by such things. They had a message that would, without doubt, lead to change in personal lives and human destiny. Nothing was more important in their minds than to say it over and over and over again. They had decided to stake their lives on it. Belief meant nothing less than this for them.
My contention is that, we, like them, must allow nothing to distract us from the proclamation of this message. We must teach what Jesus taught. We must provide personal support for the living of it. We must do this, by the Spirit who makes sense of it and empowers us, and all whom we influence, to live it. When we do this, one heart at a time, unhurriedly, providing all the instruction and attention needed for authentic life change, no charge of conspiracy or irrelevance will stand. Our defense will be our offense. Questions about the authenticity of Jesus and his way of life will be answered by the quality of lives made like him. Nothing will prevent us from achieving our mission to make disciples everywhere in numbers too great to count and far too focused on the ultimate to be distracted with things as paltry as a novel and another mystery movie.
