Thursday, 04 December 2008
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a Jesus with gravitas
Darker is better.
That's the lesson to be learned from the Batman franchise. We went from a corny Batman in tights and external jockstrap(see above) to a stiff Batman with nipples (Clooney). Holy Cheese!
Then we got the Dark Knight (see above). Layered. Dangerous. Edgy. This we got. This was good.
James Bond got it, too.
Back when, he had a kitschy cool that came off a little goofy (see above). In his impeccable tuxedo, he played women like dominoes, always with a plastic smile that made you think of kitchen linoleum. He had his practiced one-liners, chock-full of hokum. He tried too hard.
Then we got Daniel Craig: cratered, craggy, crackling. A Bond with a past, with gravitas, a heart of darkness, a tortured soul who didn't let on. This we got. This was good.
Like Batman and Bond, Jesus needs a renovation. He needs to be darker.
This is Jesus today:
It's not that we need to create a new Jesus. But we do need to draw out a Jesus of the gospels who has gravitas and raw soul. Because the current evangelical Jesus does not inspire. This Jesus is an embarassing conglomeration of Homer Simpson and effable Buddha. He is insipid, irrelevant, clueless, naive. Holy cow, he would make for a great kindergarten teacher! Oh! the practical jokes we could play on him! But savior of a dark, damaged, deranged world and people? This Jesus? Not so much. This Jesus mollilfies the naive and sweety-sweet, yay Jesus church, but not so much the mud-covered urchins that most (all) of us are.
As your Jesus is, so your heart is. A blissfully clueless church has created a blissfully clueless Jesus (see above).
Fact is, the gospels depict a Jesus much, much darker and edgier than evangelical Jesus. One who is not quite so nice. One who has plumbed the depths of hell (literally), one who has stared evil in the eye and did not buckle, street-smart and people-wise, unwilling to entrust himself to anyone, lonely, brutal, prone to get into verbal and physical fights (he used a whip, maybe because there wasn't a switchblade on hand). There was a deep, dark side to him, one that would freeze your blood had he ever let it show. This is a Jesus who instills fear and awe in me.
I need less of the sweet-sunshine and more of the dark side of the Son.
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Comments (4)
haha Bravo!
great post - thank you.
hmm this is interesting.. nice post!
Good post but I cannot help but feel like it is just another post where the God we worship should be worth our awe. As in the whole Theos vs the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob rhetoric. You know the whole thing of who wants to worship a God that is a weed, a wuss. I apologise if I misunderstood, but as with most things we can only speculate what Jesus was like and no I am not defending the evangelical go lucky Jesus either. I think that we should follow Jesus as a opposed to believing in Jesus which just points us to discipleship and is not a bad thing, but if we are to believe anything should we not believe what Jesus believed? I digress.