Dear Friends,

 

Yes, I must confess that I read it, and even found it difficult to put down until I’d reached its rather pathetic end – I’m referring to that notorious novel by Dan Brown, ‘The Da Vinci Code’, which has attracted so much publicity. It’s alarming how even a bad book can be quite compulsive, once you get absorbed between the covers; quite apart from the religious issues it raised, I soon realised how dismally poor the quality of the writing was, yet despite the tacky descriptions and the ridiculous plot, I still kept racing ahead to the next and the next chapter – such is the power of the written word The film is due to be released very soon, and already the Vatican has urged Roman Catholics to boycott it, encouraging them to ‘speak out and reject these lies about the Church.’

 

What can explain the fascination of the Da Vinci code? At the heart of it lies the question of who Jesus really was; but Dan Brown has constructed his answer from dubious theories and speculative historical reconstructions, weaving them together to create an ultra-fanciful plot, which, despite the shallowness of the writing, appears for a moment as if it might just be true.

The trouble is that this is fiction, not fact, and in our world today, many people find it difficult to tell one from the other – you only have to think of the frenzied response when there is an affair or a death in a TV ‘soap’. The Da Vinci code is based on various misconceptions about the origins of the New Testament, which suggest that Jesus did not think he was the Son of God, that he was merely a human being, who made a great impression on people and gave some wonderful moral and spiritual teaching; that he may have been married (to Mary Magdalene), that he probably escaped death, and certainly didn’t rise from the dead.

 

This is not the place to go into detailed explanations about where these ideas came from; if you do read the book or see the film, and want to distinguish fact from fiction, I have books which you are welcome to consult. It is always fascinating to wonder about those earliest years of Christianity, and how the gospel writers came to write their accounts, which do, of course, differ, giving us a multi-faceted portrait of Jesus. What we do know is that the Christian faith was rooted, from the beginning, in the conviction that Jesus was more than a mere human being; that in him, God, in reality, entered our human world. Of course, it’s not easy to find language to describe this profound belief. We express it every time we say the words of the creed: ‘We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, true God from true God, of one Being from the Father…’ and we shall try to understand it more when we celebrate the mystery of the Trinity on Trinity Sunday on 11^th June.

 

But Christians believe, and experience in their lives, the reality of the Jesus of history, who is also the Christ of their faith, day by day, in the world we live in now: a living presence with whom a real relationship is possible. If you are tempted to wonder whether Dan Brown’s fantasies might be right, try talking to someone for whom this mysterious figure from the past has been someone more than a character from a novel. Someone whose life reflects the goodness, truth, love and toughness of a faith that is based on reality. You might even find just such a person in your local church…..

 

 

With love,

 

Rosey