A Picture is worth how much?

The recent conference on the Progressive Christianity Network (PCN), reported in the June issue of The Sign, was a valuable opportunity for reflection on the role of Christianity for our time and for our culture. In order to make us think about our own time and culture, the guest speaker tried to get us inside the minds of the people of Jesus’ time and his culture. She suggested that some of the stories attributed to Jesus, which we may find rather tame, were probably considered at the time to be very provocative, even shocking. As one of her examples she showed how the kingdom of god was compared to the hated “mustard” plant, a voracious weed, proscribed by the authorities because of its enormous consumption of precious water. Worse, when fully grown it played host to all manner of creature, both “clean” and “unclean”. Another shocking image was that of a woman, who may or may not have been ritually “unclean”, polluting her bread dough with yeast, considered to be a corrupting substance. What? The kingdom of god is like that?

Where are our dramatic and insightful 21^st century stories about the kingdom of god? Perhaps we could try out some homegrown stories in the pages of The Sign!

Stories of all kinds abound in the bible - some rooted in historical events, some not -but our culture seems to have lost much of the knack of seeing through and beyond the stories. How can we truly free ourselves from the burden of trying to read the bible stories as if they were ancient video recordings of the 24-hour TV news coverage of their time? Unfortunately, many of our fellow Christians insist that this is, indeed, the only way to read the bible. The media, by and large, also expect us to have this attitude. It is, surely, much more rewarding to see these parts of the bible as vivid, colourful, dramatic and imaginative stories created by passionate people to drive home an important message.

The delightful stories surrounding the birth of Jesus are a case in point. Sterile debate about the historical veracity of this or that element of the stories will lead us nowhere. By contrast, we can gain a lot through an open imagination. What powerful messages about this historical figure, Jesus, and our attitude towards him, were in the minds of the people who created the stories?

Maybe we should try to learn from today’s political and social satirists. They tell a story about a well-known public figure, or they act out the story in the form of a sketch, and they immediately have their audience roaring with laughter and sometimes cringing with embarrassment at the same time. The audience knows full well that the story is not “true” in the sense that the events never happened, but the satirist succeeds in penetrating through to an important “truth” about a real political or social situation. To explain that same “truth” might require several pages of closely argued intellectual reasoning, which would be read by a mere handful of people. The satirist gets through instantly to anyone who is embedded in the same culture.

The cliché is correct: one picture is worth ten thousand words. A story, then, is worth a hundred thousand!

George Haskell