I was holding my breath Easter
Sunday evening as the live performance of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ
Superstar took the stage. Truth be told, I was prepared to be disappointed,
fearful that this most recent adaptation of what, for my life, is a true
classic in the telling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, would fall short of
the 1973 film version and the Broadway production which preceded it.
I need not have worried. The
multicultural cast was stunning in the energy and talent they displayed. Jesus
was black, beautiful and soulful. Mary Magdalene was self-assured and
provocative. The disciples included punkers and women, a depiction that I
believe is probably more consistent with history than the all-male telling of
the gospels. The multicultural Sanhedrin had flashy robes and incredible voices. And, as expected, Judas stole the show. More than any previous
Judas, he was spectacular.
Bravo, all!
“My Jesus…..”
Watching the show took me back
to my first encounters with the musical. My Jewish friend from my days at the
National Science Foundation’s summer institute at Virginia Tech had first
exposed me to the London version. After listening to the album together, she asked
me, “Is this what you believe?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer
then, and only slightly more capable of answering now. Beliefs have never been the
focus of my spiritual life then or now. I just knew what I didn’t believe.
That would crystallize for me at
an event in community college. I had gone with a friend to an outdoor Jesus
festival at the bandshell in nearby Eustis. A local pastor had promised to
speak about Superstar. I had just
seen the film and I thought perhaps he could shed some light on the vibrant,
enigmatic figure in the film who had emerged from the tepid constructions of “Jeeeeezus” whose last name was Christ and who had been reduced to the silver bullet for original sin that I had encountered most of my life and
found wanting.
Such was
not to occur that night. The pastor began by calling the film blasphemous. I
wasn’t even sure what that meant, it just sounded nasty the way the Southern
drawling preacher spit those words into the microphone. But it was what he said about Jesus
that made me realize that this figure he described was a force to be reckoned
with.
“My Jesus never screamed like a little girl. My Jesus was
not effeminate. My Jesus was strong, masculine. My Jesus was the king of kings,
lord of lords, not some whiny wimp.”
I was stunned. Indeed, 45
years later, I still remember his exact words. The unabashed projection of
redneck machismo onto Jesus seemed so transparent that surely anyone could see it. This was well beyond the muscular Jesus so beloved by far too many male
clerics insecure about their own masculinity given their profession. This Jesus
sounded more like a trash talking professional wrestler than a first century
Jewish peasant.
He wasn’t just angry and
hostile. He was barely human.
As the pastor
railed from the stage about a Jesus he found so objectionable, his vitriol punctuated by the blinking Christmas lights surrounding the bandshell, I
realized that his condemnations really weren’t about Jesus.
Truth be told, some
of that description applied to me, a college sophomore terrified that his dirty
little secret might accidentally leak out. But I was even more terrified
that should the Jesus the redneck reverend was describing be even remotely
close to the actual king of kings and lord of lords, I could be assured that he
could never ever love me, a man who kept four dreaded words buried deep in his
soul: “I think I’m gay.”
It was a very long evening.
But before the night was over, I realized that this man of the cloth - whom I
prefer to believe had good intentions - had clearly elevated his own prejudices to the
status of revealed truth. Ironically, in the process, he had unknowingly offered
me the very key to understanding not only the film in question but to the means
to make sense of its central figure, Jesus.
The pastor had begun each
sentence with “My Jesus….” At some point in that diatribe a blinding light erupted
in my head. Long before I would learn what words like “social construction” and
“hermeneutics” actually meant, in that instant I realized that what I was
hearing from this man was simply his take on this subject driven largely by the
perceived needs he had brought to the process of understanding it. His use of the word "My" indicated ownership. And while the actual Jesus didn't belong to this man, his own construction of Jesus did.
As I would teach my students
in later years, if something can be socially constructed in a given manner, it
can always be deconstructed and constructed in a different manner as well. As
of that night, my own deconstruction project was off and running.
It dawned upon me that what appealed
to me about this Jesus was precisely what terrified this man. He was human. He felt
pain and anger. He grew frustrated with stupidity (Let those with ears hear!) even as he demonstrated the patience of
Job for those who suffered. He spoke truth to power clearly aware of the consequences he would pay. Yet even as he resolutely strode toward his fate, he demonstrated the fears and
questions that any authentic human being seeking to live into such
a calling would experience.
This was a Jesus I could
relate to. This was a Jesus I could empathize with. This was a Jesus I could love. More importantly, this was a Jesus whose Way I would be willing to follow.
A Torrent of Celluloid Jesuses
Superstar
proved the first crack in the dam through which a torrent of popular films would
pour, all seeking to examine who this Jesus of Nazareth actually was. Within
months of Superstar’s release, Godspell would move from Broadway to a
made-for-television movie. Despite the meager quality of production, the lyrical
music of this play combined with the simplistic but loveable characters of New
York’s hippie population gave many fellow hippies like me a Jesus we could actually love.
This was a Jesus who
emphasized love of neighbor, the importance of not judging others, a Jesus who
invited the viewer to move from the surface to the interior to understand the
Gospels. And despite its occasional sappy numbers and silly affect, it was
effective at breaking through the shell of a cold, brittle religion which was obsessed
with sin – and thus with control – to touch the heart and the soul, the place
where G-d resided and where one was thereby connected to all of Creation.
Godspell was an unabashed
love-in: Jesus meets Hair. For someone who was slowly falling
in love with the Jesus he was finally discovering under all the suffocating
theological constructions of so many centuries, it was a tonic for a bruised
soul. When you’ve been told most of your life that G-d couldn’t possibly love
you unless you repent from your very being, being able to sing Richard of
Chichester’s prayer to see Jesus more clearly, love him more dearly and follow
him more nearly held out hope that even I, too, could be loved by G-d and
follow Jesus.
Gods Who Scare Little Old Ladies in Wheelchairs
There would be other celluloid
Jesuses along the way to feed my passion for discovering more about this figure whose Kingdom of G-d I
struggled to discern even as I regularly prayed for it to “come on earth as in heaven.”
In 1988 Nikos Kazantzakis’
provocative Last Temptation of Christ
was brought to the big screen. Last
Temptation employed a “What if…?” approach
to the life of Jesus. That included his possible decision to avoid the cross for the
comforts of ordinary family life. That possibility hardly shook my attraction to Jesus. If
anything it deepened it. But it was a demanding film requiring nearly three
hours of willingness to suspend judgment (as well as knowledge of how the story
actually comes out in the gospels) to engage this film.
Clearly there were many
unwilling to do so. My sister and her friend and I attended the showing of the
film in Ocala that winter. It was a cold, drizzling day. A group of
protesters stood out front of the theater holding signs whose majik marker
words had long since begun to run down now soggy poster board.
One of the protesters was an elderly
woman in a wheelchair. “Heaven is a
wonderful place,” she said. Against my better judgment, I replied “Yes, I know.” “And
e-e-e-everybody can go there,” she continued. “Yes, I know.” Then the kicker: “But
you can’t go there if you go see that movie,” at which point I temporarily lost
my mind and responded “And that is
unadulterated horse shit,” my sister now pinching my arm and muttering under
her breath “Let’s go before you get us
arrested….”
In retrospect, I regret my
lack of consideration for this woman. I can hear my Mother’s voice whispering
in my ears even now as I write about this (Now,
Son, don’t be ugly!).
What struck me about the woman’s comments was how
brittle her construct of Jesus was much like that of the Baptist pastor so many
years before. But, more than that, it was
the fear in the woman’s voice that troubled me.
Here was a woman at the end of
her life, incapacitated, feeling compelled to go picket a movie in the rain.
What was implicit in her actions was an all-or-nothing approach to faith that posited
that if her understandings were right, everyone else’s had to be wrong. And at
this point in her life and the level of existential investment she had in that
understanding this near the Pearly Gates, she had much to fear should she prove
wrong on that.
But what kind of god feels the need to scare little old ladies
in wheelchairs to death?
What kind of god drives otherwise reasonable men of average
intelligence and educational attainment like the pastor to engage in frothy public displays of
rage?
It was then that I began wrestling with a notion that continues to
feature heavily in my thinking today:
These constructions do not portray a god
worth worshiping or a way worth following.
Mentally Ill Messiahs and Theological
Snuff Films
The Jesus of Last Temptation would be followed by a Jesus of Montreal which sought to place
Jesus in the 20th CE North American context. It was a very fine though
disturbing film in which Jesus appears to become mentally unstable. This raised
troubling questions for me:
·
Do we not presume that persons
like Jesus who run around on our streets and subway systems talking about G-d,
proclaiming that the homeless poor are blessed, are mentally ill?
·
Don’t we slap them in
facilities as quickly as possible to fill them full of chemicals to make them
“sane” again?
·
Do we not dismiss such
persons as deluded zealots and ignore them so long as they stay out of our way?
· Could we ever take such
persons seriously? Should we?
In 2004 the guardians of
muscular Christianity would stage a cinematographic counteroffensive in Mel Gibson’s The Passion
of the Christ. A theological snuff film emerging from the dark recesses of the troubled mind of Mel Gibson known for bloody, macho filmmaking, this was Jesus in the Thunderdome. Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan would comment:
“The question is not whether scourging
and crucifixion were savage (of course!) or whether Jesus suffered terribly (of
course!) but whether this film's unrelenting sadism is pornographic.”
Thinking I must see it to have
an informed opinion to offer my students, it is the only film in my life from
which I have felt the need to run from the theater to vomit.
Not only was the empire of
atonement theology striking back, Gibson’s obsession with the suffering of
Jesus was calculated. The point of this portrayal was clearly to induce the maximum
level of guilt in every viewer deemed to have caused such suffering – Jesus was tortured because of MY sin (emphasis
on MY).
Conversely, the film was
designed was to evoke feelings of relief in the members of the tribe who
presumed that they would be spared such suffering because they had gotten the theological formula right: *I* am blessed because Jesus has saved me
from my sin! Along with this relief came a
largely unrecognized but presumed right to look with condescending pity toward
all those outside the tribe presumed to be headed for hell.
I sat with my feelings about The Passion for a long time after
finally escaping the darkness – both actual and spiritual - of that showing. What had disturbed me so deeply? To paraphrase Superstar’s doomed Judas speaking to
Annas and Caiphas, I found myself saying “It’s
a film, it’s just a film.”
But I was not the same young
man who had stood quaking in fear at the bandshell in Eustis so many years
before as a bombastic Baptist ran out all his insecurities about his
masculinity in critiquing the Jesus portrayed in Superstar. That night I had been teetering on the edge of simply
walking away from a Christianity that seemed to have little room for people
like me. But Superstar and Godspell had lit a fire in my soul.
While I found very little to appreciate in the theologies which constructed a
Christ who only dimly resembled the Jesus of history, who saved us from a
tyrannical punitive deity, the figure of Jesus had become inordinately important to me.
Who was this man who ate with
prostitutes and tax collectors, who wept openly at the death of a friend, who
confronted the injustices of the Roman Empire which crushed his people and called
out the Temple vassals who collaborated with them? How does a poorly educated
carpenter’s kid come up with parables that induce such cognitive dissonance,
drawing our understanding of reality into such question? What kind of man
demonstrates compassion as the predominate way of relating to a suffering world,
focusing on those at the bottom of the social pyramid most in need of hearing
their humanity affirmed, in the context of a soul crushing empire?
Finding Jesus in Unpredicted Places
My search for answers to these questions would lead me in the late 1980s to two years of diaconal training in
the diocesan Institute for Christian Studies before realizing I could never
trust those leading the diocese to actually ever serve under them. Yet, my soul
was restless and I began to suspect that I might actually be called to
priesthood. Within three years I had closed my law practice, left my home, my family and
five generations of roots in Florida and moved to Berkeley to begin seminary
there. By a miracle I connected with a parish in San Jose who agreed to sponsor
me for ordination and a bishop who agreed to ordain me.
Once there I would spend
hours in the Graduate Theological Library where I did my work study reading
everything I could get my hands on about Jesus. I would discover the world of
Jungian depth psychology and how the Jesus story was a gold mine of symbols and
life-saving archetypes. I would spend
weeks of my life in Central America at the end of Reagan’s Contra Wars
observing first hand what little ones crushed by empire looked like. The
gospels seemed so alive there.
In graduate school I would
discover Jesus in the developmental schema of ethicists from Lawrence Kohlberg
to M. Scott Peck to James Fowler whose systems spoke of authentic, autonomous
figures whose name we remember often because they were martyred. Fowler spoke
of the universalizing compassion figure who, ‘[h]eedless of the threats to self, to primary groups, and to the
institutional arrangements of the present order that are involved… become a
disciplined, activist incarnation -- a making real and tangible -- of the
imperatives of absolute love and justice.”
Yep. That sounded like the
Jesus I’d been seeking all my life.
Before it was over, I would
connect with the Westar Institute whose scholars of the Jesus Seminar were trying to ferret out the actual Jesus from the voices of the developing
Christian church of the next three centuries before anything remotely
resembling a New Testament would be assembled. There I learned two important
lessons.
The first was that the Jesus I
sought to follow was concerned with a way of being human called the Kingdom of
G-d, a way which reversed the wisdom of his – and our own – patriarchal world, focusing
on its weakest, suffering members. The second lesson was at least as important. Convener Bob Funk repeatedly reminded the Seminar scholars and attendees at their annual
meetings: Beware of a Jesus you find too
agreeable. Funk knew only too well that the same tendency to construct
Jesus in our own image that afflicts Baptists in bandshells and fearful elderly
women in wheelchairs outside movie houses also affects those who would seek to
know the “actual” Jesus in our own ways.
I have amassed a library of
several thousand books (most of them at least partly read) in my search for
this Jesus who sprang from my television set last week. On my walls are diplomas
from seminary and grad school, ordination certificates and the sacred folk art
I’ve collected across Central America from liberation theology spawned
collectives. My computer files are full of papers, sermons and commentaries on
various online sites about this figure over whom I have obsessed now nearly 50
years.
I cringed as I saw
the very troubling images Easter night of a black Jesus being whipped by an
empire who saw his people as the raw materials for exploitative production -
much as my own countrymen and women have historically seen persons who shared the racial
heritage of the star of this show. But I also found myself feeling something new: gratitude.
Like Judas, I still don’t know
how to love him. Indeed, I’m still not sure who he was or what he was really
about. And, like Bob Funk, I am cautious about any presumptions I’d make about either
question.
But I am grateful for avant-garde artists, writers, musicians,
lyricists, choreographers, playwrights and film producers who bring to life
imaginings of a Jesus not defined by stifling theologies based in guilt and fear.
I am grateful for the Jesus marked by complexity, humanity and compassion that
they have allowed me to see. And I am only too aware that my life long search
for Jesus - to know him more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more
nearly – began 50 years ago with a superstar, a hippie and an angry Baptist
pastor.
That search continues today. Deo gratias.
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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound
bites.
For what does G-d require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
Do not be daunted by the enormity
of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are
not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi
Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston 2018
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