As the snow covered most of the country in white this week, I took to my bed with a nasty cold. I was well enough to sit up in bed and read, but attempting to use my voice (which sounded like a Carlsberg advert or Hollywood trailer) in the school classroom was not a good idea. So I read the three contemporary plays from which we are going to present a selection of scenes, in a presentation called ‘Under a Spotlight.’ This is one of the series of arts events (“Visions in the Wilderness”) taking place during the season of Lent at my local church. I also took the opportunity to watch the DVD of Norman Stones “Tales from the Madhouse.” This will be screened on the first Saturday evening of Lent and will be followed by a discussion. It is set in a crumbling mental asylum -a surreal location evoking a nightmarish state of mind rather than a literal place. The film includes a sequence of dramatic monologues from some of the minor characters mentioned in the Gospels of the New Testament. Each of them tells the story of their brief encounter with Jesus of Nazareth, as they scuttle along dark, dank corridors in some God-forsaken wing of the asylum. Their sinister surroundings create an appropriate backdrop for the tragic tale of their rejection of the one man who might have set them free. Clearly the writers of the monologues have used poetic license to imagine what happened to them after meeting Christ. One of the three plays I read (“The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” by Stephen Adly Guirgis) also uses dramatic licence to tell the story of history’s most infamous betrayal. The play is set in Purgatory, which is imagined as a contemporary New York ghetto! Judas’s story is explored through a court-room drama in which characters from the recent and distant past such as Mother Teresa, Sigmund Freud and Mary Magdalene, provide their unique perspective on his betrayal of Christ. The play explores how it is, that Judas has come to be regarded, both in the Gospels and Church tradition, as beyond redemption. Like any good playwright, Guirgis asks more questions than he answers but as well as causing me to guffaw hoarsely throughout my morning in bed, he moved me and made me think. Both the film and the play, made me question how much dramatic licence should be taken with historical events, especially when they have been set down in sacred scripture. Shakespeare never allowed the facts of history to get in the way of a good story, such as Richard III for example. Perhaps as a result of this, his art reveals the human condition more profoundly than the pedantic chronicles of a medieval historian like Holinshed. But is the Bible different? Should artists be more circumspect, when using Holy Writ as their source material?
Well, strangely enough, the writers of the Gospels themselves did not seem to think so! When they write about the death of Christ, or even the Resurrection, they apparently ignore key elements of their primary sources, such as pre-existing gospels and oral tradition, in order to develop their own unique slant on events. St. John, for example, even goes as far to ignore the generally accepted day of Christ’s crucifixion, so as to present him as the Passover Lamb- slain along with the animal sacrifices on the day of preparation. (the day before Good Friday). Matthew appears to embroider the first starkly documented account of Christ’s death in St. Mark , with tales of earthquakes and bodies erupting from graves. The last words of Christ from The Cross in Matthew are subtly, but significantly altered too, so as to give a fresh new emphasis according to the overall theme of his particular Gospel. So Mark, who paints the darkest picture of Christ’s death, reports only that one cry of dereliction from The Cross: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ -and describes how, with a loud cry Jesus 'breathes his last.’ (Literally, ‘expires’) Matthew building on this original source material writes more positively how Jesus ‘gave up his spirit,’ while Luke has him still more purposefully say, ‘Father into Your hands I commend my spirit.’ John, the fourth of the evangelists, puts the most triumphal spin on the narrative, when he reports how Christ uttered ‘It is finished’ before ‘giving up the ghost.’ One might go as far as to say the Gospel writers are each taking artistic licence! This in no way invalidates their testimony. The point is that the gospels are far more than factual reports from the front-line. They are concerned with more than a blow by blow account of events. They are theological reflections, written many years after the actual event, and with a particular target audience in mind. John’s Gospel may have been written around half a century after Christ’s death, at a time of intense persecution for the church. His Gospel reflects a point in Church history when Christians were being thrown out of the Synagogues and brought before the Jewish authorities. John understandably wants to emphasize Christ’s victory at the precise moment of apparent defeat, to inspire his brothers and sisters with a vision of faith and hope in the face of death. If we subject these great artistic and theological writings to the somewhat reductive frame-work of historical documentation, we end up contorting our logical minds to make the different accounts tie up. There are plenty more incongruities in the Gospel accounts of the life of Christ if we look closely. However, the artist (and so too the theologian) shapes her material to get at truths beneath the surface of events. How can the evangelists (or anyone else)be absolutely sure what Christ said or didn’t say from the Cross on that bleakest of Friday afternoons? Even if they could, these enigmatic and resonant utterances of Christ would be open to a thousand possible interpretations. Yet God inspired the writers to recount the event, not so much by jogging the memory of eye witnesses, but by touching the theological imaginations and spiritual insight of the writers, as they sifted through their material. Somehow, guided by the Spirit, each of the four writers finds a unique way of penetrating the mystery of the most significant moment in human history. Their writings coax us to enter the scenes imaginatively. They help us feel the oppressive darkness descending on the bare hill of Calvary, as Christ hangs from the rough-hewn beam, to hear the shrieks of mockery from the crowds gathered there, to smell the sour vinegar dripping from the sponge offered to the thirsty victim, and to see the blood trickle down his contorted face from the crown of thorns. They transport us to the foot of the Cross and so transform us, as they expose the heart of darkness at the core of our fallen humanity. Luke’s description of the people leaving Golgotha beating their breasts, is there to prompt our own grief and remorse- to bring us to our knees!
Artists throughout the ages, from Bach to Francis Bacon, have taken whatever license their artistic integrity has allowed them, to explore the mystery of Christ’s life and Passion. The Spirit continues, in every generation, to inspire fresh revelations of a story that is inexhaustible. We must be careful not to turn such mystery into a tract, and stifle our creative response to this greatest story ever told. Norman Stone’s aforementioned film is a wonderful meditation on the life of Christ, which is both disturbing and confrontational, as his assortment of shifty characters peer at us through the camera. Like the Gospels themselves, the film challenges us. How far have we accepted or rejected Christ? What tale might we tell at the end of our live? What will become of us. Guirgis’s play about Judas is less orthodox, and yet equally valid. He too challenges us with awkward questions. Why are we so apt to find a scapegoat for the death of Jesus of Nazareth, when Scripture reminds us that each one of us is vulnerable to the temptation to betray and succumb to despair like Judas? How far can we imagine redemption, for history’s notorious villains? Why are we so quick to judge other’s failure, and so slow to confess to our own weaknesses? These are very real questions for the whole of humanity. We should be grateful for artists who nag us with such crucial issues. We might do better to engage with their artistic vision and imagination, rather than question their spiritual authority and integrity- as the church has been inclined to do in the past. The artist has all too often been revealed as the prophet whose message went ignored!
For further information on these and other arts events at St. John’s during Lent, go to http://www.thespaceproject.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment