(Delivered at Berowra Uniting Church on 4 May 2003)
The Power of Facts
I don’t know about you, but when I have read newspaper reports on the war during the past few weeks, I find it difficult to know whether to believe them or not. I wonder how many people have a similar uneasiness when they read parts of the Bible like today’s readings.
I recall how excitedly the media reported the success of scud missiles during the Gulf War, only to find several months later that the truth was quite different. The media has a reputation for deceiving us, if not by outright inaccuracy, then at least by extremes of bias. We even have a phrase now – ‘putting a spin on something’ – and a profession – ‘spin doctors’ – euphemisms for deceit and concealment.
You can’t trust what you read.
And you can’t trust what you see either. I want to show you a picture which was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times on March 31 this year. Now this looks like many of the war images we have been seeing. But the thing that may surprise you is that this is actually a computer-altered composition of two separate photos. The photographer didn’t quite get the picture we wanted, so he combined two photos to produce the desired effect.
In this case, he was caught out. The Los Angeles Times has a policy of not altering any of its news photos and the photographer lost his job. But one wonders how many of the images we see in newspapers, magazines and on TV have been similarly modified.
And you can’t even trust what you hear. In 1994 I worked in the R&D section of the ABC. They have developed a computer system for compiling radio programs that is quite amazing. One of the technicians demonstrated to me how easy it was to edit sound bites. He played a segment of a speech by an Australian politician; a speech that contained an uncomfortable ‘um’ in the middle of a sentence. It only took a minute or two for the technician to edit-out the ‘um’ with the result that the speech could go to air without the hesitation.
I can show you a less sophisticated version of this on Bob’s computer. (Demo of the Flash software that enables you to write a speech for George W. Bush using snippets of his real speeches.)
This software is no more than a toy, but with the ABC’s advanced technology, this type of editing can be done quite seamlessly. Like a perfectly crafted piece of patchwork quilting, they can cut many pieces of material, and stitch them together so that the seam is invisible, or in this case, inaudible.
What about today’s Bible readings?
In Luke’s reading we hear that Jesus, a man who had been gruesomely killed by Roman soldiers, was eating fish with his friends just a couple of days later. That reminds me of lesson in punctuation given to my Sixth Class at Berry Public School. The teacher said ‘King John walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off’ and then asked us to explain how this could be. The answer was, of course, a missing full stop – ‘King John walked and talked. Half an hour after, his head was cut off.’ Is our translation of Luke’s report similarly misunderstood. Did the writer of this passage truly believe that Jesus really died in fact, and really came back to life, in fact? Or was it just a particular spin on the events designed to make some metaphorical point? If such miracles simply cannot occur and this account isn’t factual, what is it’s value?
The same question can be asked of the second reading, from Acts. Did Peter really say ‘You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead’? And if he said it, did he think it was literally true? And even if he did believe it, did it really happen? Or is this perhaps the words of someone else, constructed well after the events; a myth built on snippets of fact interspersed with make-believe?
Where is the power of the Gospel if the resurrection did not, in fact, happen?
The Power of Myth
Let me change direction for a moment and say something about myth and make-believe, in order to restore some dignity to those terms.
I recently watched the second episode in the movie trilogy The Lord of the Rings and that has inspired me to re-read the original book by Tolkien. This is an immensely powerful story, but one whose power is based on something quite different from fact. The story is a fantasy about elves and dwarves, an evil ring forged by a dark Lord, a wise old wizard, and the journey of a small hobbit to save the world by destroying the ring. It is a story of rare beauty, of magic, of love and loyalty and courage and hope.
The archetypical battle between good and evil has led some to classify The Lord of the Rings as allegory, with the dark Lord Sauron representing Satan, the wizard Gandalf representing God, and the hobbit Frodo representing Everyman. But Tolkien adamantly denies this. In fact he wrote ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.’
However, Tolkien would not deny that the tale is mythical, and that is another thing completely. A myth is not a female moth, as some youngster is reported to have thought. But neither is a myth the same as an allegory. In an allegory, like Bunyans Pilgrims Progress, you find individual characters who personify specific elements of the conflict between good and evil. For instance, Mr Hopeful and Mr Money-lover.
Although myths nearly always address the conflict between good and evil, or between life and death, you do not see in myth this type of correspondence between the story’s characters and their moral meaning. Myths affect us emotionally and often unconsciously rather than intellectually. Think of the fairy-tales of your childhood – Sleeping Beauty, Snow White – and the moral lessons we learnt from Aesop’s Fables. The greatest myths of the ancient world – Midas, Oedipus, Icarus etc – still underlie much of modern thinking and culture, defining the assumptions of our worldview in ways we rarely become aware of.
There is great power in myth. Myths are not so much about what is actual or even possible, but about what is desirable. Such myths are no less true for being fictional. I have a great love of myth, and would never think that labelling something as ‘mythical’ is in any way derogatory.
Where is the Gospel’s power?
But now let’s turn back to the Bible readings and ask again whether they report the truth or not. Does their message to us depend on factual truth or mythical truth?
The readings, like the whole collection of accounts we have in the New Testament, use clearly mythical devices. The fallen world that longs for the Utopia that was lost. The Prince Charming Saviour foretold by prophecy who comes to break evil’s grip. The near-triumph of evil over good and the sudden joyous turn that brings a happy ending. The fulfilment of our deepest and most ancient desire, to escape from death.
The best myths and fairy tales always have this joyous turn, this miraculous grace that gives us a glimpse of a world beyond this one in which our heart’s desire is realised. Tolkien calls this a ‘eucatastrophe’ – a strange word, but he was a Professor of English Language and Literature, so I guess he’s allowed to invent words like that! The ‘eu’ means ‘good’, as in ‘eulogy’ (good words about someone who has died) and ‘euphemism’. So a eucatastrophe is an event that radically changes the whole story for the good.
There have been many attempts to demythologise the Bible – to remove the mythical elements and uncover those elements that really happened. I wonder why anyone would want to do that. Half the power of the story we have of Jesus is its mythical element! Why would we want to lose that? Sometimes we can try to analyse a story too much and miss the obvious point.
It’s like the story of that famous detective Sherlock Holmes and his off-sider Watson. They pitched their tent while on a camping expedition, but in the middle of the night Holmes nudges Watson awake and questions him: ‘Watson, look up at the stars and tell me what you deduce.’
Watson replies, ‘I see millions of stars, and if there are millions of stars, and if even a small percentage have planets, it is quite likely there are many planets like earth, and if there are a planets like earth out there, there might also be life.’
Holmes: ‘No, Watson, you idiot! Somebody stole our tent.’
I believe that the Gospel is a myth, and it reveals many truths to us precisely because it is a myth. But I also believe that the Gospel is true in fact. In this, the Gospel is virtually unique. It is the myth that we always wished were true; the answer to our deepest longing. And, as if by magic, it is true.
I won’t attempt today to explain why I believe in a real, factual, bodily resurrection. Much more can be said for and against, but today’s readings offers at least this one suggestion…
It is traditionally claimed that both Luke and Acts were written by a physician who was a travelling companion of Paul. There are modern doubts about this, but as I understand it, it is still generally accepted that both books were written by the same person. Whoever it was, they have taken great pains to write as a historian. There is an attention to detail that goes beyond other New Testament authors. For instance, Luke tries to position the beginning of Jesus’ ministry as precisely as possible – he writes ‘In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberious Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrach of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrach of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias Tetrach of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Anna and Caiaphas.’ (Lk 3:1)
In today’s reading, the mention of fish is another example of this attention to detail. The author never claims to have witnessed this himself, but does claim to have carefully investigated the accounts of those who were eye-witnesses (Lk 1:1-3). From those eye-witnesses he would have wanted to know what evidence they had that they had not seen a ghost or dreamed of a resurrection or fallen into wishful thinking. Jesus asked the disciples to touch him and when they still could not believe, he purposefully asked for something to eat. They watched him as he ate fish – not an act many attribute to a dead man! The author, Luke or whoever he was, very clearly believed himself that Jesus had really died and then really been resurrected.
It is this dual power of the Gospel – the power of fact and the power of myth – that allows us to give both our mental ascent and our heartfelt allegiance. In this is our consolation and our joy.
Tolkien says it in this way, much better than I could:
The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels – peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But the story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation [i.e. of story-telling] has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality’. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits.
We shouldn’t be surprised at this. Isn’t it typical of God that he gives us both the desire and the satisfaction of the desire? Hunger and food; the need for community and the people around us to provide that community; the longing for meaning and the means by which we can create meaning. It is God who ultimately placed in our heart the elements of myth – the hope that good would win, the need to take personal responsibility in the face of fate, the desire to transcend death, the anticipation of a saviour. And it is God who stepped into this world to make the myth come true.
With that in mind, lets us stand and sing Hymn 310 – Come down, O love divine.
Benediction
May the truth of the Good News inspire you,
the promise of a happy ending console you
and the glimpses we see of glory bring you joy.