Licensing of Robin Coutts as Priest-in-Charge, Hambledon, and Diocesan Director of Ordinands, SS Peter and Paul, Hambledon

Monday 12^th June, 2006, 7.30 p.m. (Feast of St Barnabas)

Readings: Ac 11: 19-end/Jn 15:12-17.

Some weeks ago I watched a programme on television about films about the Life of Christ. Although I’ve seen some of the recent productions and made my own comparisons, this was the first time that I had been able to take a number of them in. When I look at any film, of course, I can see the tell-tale signs of when they were made, whether it’s the kind of colour, or the background music (or lack of it!). But there was much more in the ‘message’ of the presenter. What he kept coming back to was how in virtually every decade since filming was invented, a screening of the life of Jesus of Nazareth would reach the box-office that mirrored to some extent the culture of the time in question. To take two examples: ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ matched the happy-clappy context of its time, just as ‘the Life of Brian’ picked up on the mixture of serious and burlesque of its particular era.

Two truths kept coming home to me, neither of them entirely comfortable. The first was the way that the presenter applied the recent Mel Gibson ‘The Passion of the Christ’ to today’s apparently limitless hunger for violence on the big (and the small) screen, but something was missing. And it wasn’t on film. It was Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’. Don’t worry: this isn’t going to be another clerical rant against the book. I got it out of my system the Christmas before last in the Cathedral – so I beat Archbishop Rowan to it this Easter! No: the real message about Brown’s thriller is the way it matches so clearly the other dark side of our culture. Not  violence - trust.

It’s difficult to preach about faith and trust these days, because we seem to find it so hard to put our trust in any of our institutions, the Church included. Oh yes, we talk about faith in Jesus, and some of us can do so until the cows come home. But when it comes to trust in ourselves and each other, then we are into a different climate. If you read some of the letters I sometimes get from quite serious and committed Christians, you would be able to read between the lines without much difficulty a basic assumption that there is a hidden conspiracy behind every course of action or plan, and whenever a truthful reply is given, a sneering riposte along the lines of ‘oh you would say that, wouldn’t you!’ is all that one might get in return.

I’ve long ceased to take any of this personally. But deep down it is a matter of concern that we as a Church are mirroring the culture in which we are set perhaps a little too closely, dressing it up with plausible (and at times loquacious) management-speak. The fact of the matter is that we deserve the ‘Da Vinci Code’ because that’s what we’re like – some of the time. I’m not pretending I haven’t read it, nor that I found it impossible to put it down, and it’s not just because I used to play the organ in Rosslyn Chapel when I was a student (I once had to keep playing for an hour before a wedding and a half because the bride was stuck in a snowstorm!). But it trashes Christianity on the slenderest grounds, with sex as the basic answer to everything, and we only have to wake up and believe this rubbish, helping us, in all our post-modern arrogance, to dismiss something enduringly true – the Christian faith - that the greatest minds of our civilisation have humbly wrestled with for two thousand years.

We do need to become a more trusting Church, because if we mistrust everyone in the community of faith, we shall start mistrusting God – and that will be the beginning of the end for us. I’m not pleading for blind trust, or uncritical trust. As someone who wrestled really hard with his faith during a very serious, potentially fatal illness last autumn, I am not speaking from one of those ivory towers people often comfortably put bishops in. I’m afraid I won’t fit there very well – never have, and certainly won’t now. But in a world of many images and perhaps far too many words, we have the opportunity of doing something unusually radical: select those images and those words that speak of God in this world – images of trust that debunk’s superficiality. That advice will, I know, ring bells with your talented new priest, with his long and deep interest in photography We can learn so much about ourselves and our faith if we only take the time to do two things not very popular in today’s ‘busy and hectic’ culture – be still, and think a bit.  It might save us from being a crowd of consumers, pressing for rights, so that we can become what we are really called to be, a community of faith, wrestling with God.

So much for trust, and the negative message of the ‘Da Vinci Code’. The other point in the film about lives of Jesus that struck me was an interview with Robert Powell, now better known on Saturday evenings in ‘Casualty’, who acted the part of Jesus in the Zeffirelli production of the 1970’s. At the time, I remember him saying to an interviewer that although he wasn’t a Christian, he was profoundly affected by the fact that this man Jesus had lived on earth, and had changed the lives of many people, then and since. Now in this more recent programme he gave away rather more. He said that in order to try to get inside the character of Jesus, he had read and read and re-read the New Testament, but he had failed to get any clue as to what Jesus was really like. His exasperation was palpable. At first I was a bit shocked (I’m not that easily shocked!), and I put it down to Powell’s agnosticism. But then he gave even more away when he said that it was the effect he had on others as he acted the part of Jesus that enabled him to carry it off. Bystanders in the film who took their roles, whether Mary, Peter, Andrew, Judas, Pontius Pilate, Mary Magdalen, all of them did their bit, and provided the space and the context for his portrayal of Jesus to shine through in that rather mutedly distant manner of his.

Perhaps we have here another clue to our following of Christ, that provides a  positive counter-balance to the judgement that falls on our culture in Dan Brown’s little offering. Perhaps to follow Jesus does indeed mean letting him speak and act through us when we are least aware of it. Perhaps contemporary Christianity is a mite too self-conscious, as if the game of faith were a kind of special hobby for which we need the right words and the right clothes. Of course the words and the clothes are needed for public liturgy, when there is a specific focus that links us with and enables us to part of a much larger community, the Church Catholic down the ages, larger than our own particular concerns and projects of the moment. Perhaps the Risen Christ, that figure who was often not immediately recognizable, and simply turned up and then disappeared, is just ‘there’, without any contrivance of our own, long before we are able to rush in with religious definitions and organizational jargon.

On this, the feast of St Barnabas, the ‘son of encouragement’, the companion to St Paul who could put up with his angularities, yet challenge them to the point of parting company with him for the less able or spectacular Mark – on this feast of one of the important backroom boys of the Early Church, we wish Hambledon well in its able new priest, and the diocese every blessing on its new Director of Ordinands!

+ Kenneth Portsmouth