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For the past few years I have writing a monthly column about the trials and tribulations of bringing my children up Catholic in the Catholic weekly, the Tablet. It is reproduced here December 17, 2011 Christmas is not the time to bash anyone – good will to all men and all that – but I do sometimes wonder about academics, and their apparent obsession with forensic sifting and testing of every last detail of the Christian tradition. If ever there was a moment just to let us be with the way things have always been presented, however irrationally, surely it is Christmas? This festive season, though, has been heralded by the unveiling of a new paper by Stephen Holmes, lecturer in theology at St Andrew’s University, which suggests that Mary and Joseph should properly be seen as asylum seekers, fleeing oppression and lacking proper health care facilities for their infant child. “The birth of Jesus,” Dr Holmes has written in a paper for Theos, the religious think-tank, “was a political event”. And there was me thinking all these years that it was about incarnation. In fairness to Dr Holmes – who incidentally has form in popular headline-grabbing, having previously described Harry Potter as a “Christ-like figure” – the tendency to draw parallels between the gospel accounts and today’s dilemmas has always been part and parcel of belief. Indeed, some argue that the whole point of the gospels is that they adapt to every set of circumstance and every time. Yet, surely, making those connections sits better on the lips of preachers straining for effect, and therefore speculating, rather than academics who, in theory, should present hard evidence for their theses? Now, this may sound very purist and head-in-the-sand, but I’ve grown heartily tired of a game that accompanies every Christian festival in our secular and sceptical times. The media feel they have to nod in the direction of the religious roots of these public holidays, but faith itself makes them nervous. So, instead, they lap up what seems like a ready supply of revisionist angles on the details of the narrative of Jesus’ life. There seems to be a small industry in universities around the world dedicated to coming up with new “insights” to show precisely how Jesus might have walked on water, without defying the laws of physics, or turned water into wine, or been born anywhere else but Bethlehem. Usually the “evidence” on which such theories are built is a small pile of sand, but that isn’t my objection. The whole game is just distracting background noise. For there is a crucial distinction between reflecting, sometimes prayerfully, on a gospel passage, and picking away at each and every word and detail in it to see if it can be turned on its head to make a headline. They say that as you get older you like your certainties, so perhaps my intolerance simply reveals that this will be my first Christmas in my fifties. But proverbial grumpy old man, or not, there is, I would argue, a line to be walked between exploring the context of a particular passage, and making it about something else. So, it helps to know, in the case of the Christmas story, the political backdrop of Roman occupation and Jewish resentment. It is sobering to realise that the familiar narrative is based only on Matthew and Luke (and largely Luke) and does not appear in Mark or John. What I don’t want, or need, is to be told that this is really a story about asylum-seekers. That may be one reading of the details, and undoubtedly makes it a very “now” story, but this anxiety to be achingly contemporary, for me at least, diminishes something that is essentially timeless. I am not, of course, arguing that the gospel accounts should be protected from analysis and questioning. It is what we all do every time we listen to the readings at Mass. We mull over the words, find some of them true in our experience, some of them redundant. And with particular narratives that are repeated regularly – such as the story of Jesus’s birth – we notice new details and emphases every time we listen because, with the passage of time, we are in a different place, mentally and spiritually. That is joy of the cycle of the Church’s year. It is why I go to mass every Sunday. There is always something new in something that is seemingly so familiar. But I want to be led, if at all, gently. There was a special showing last week at my son’s secondary school of
The Nativity, the four-part BBC drama first broadcast last Christmas (and to be repeated this year). It was a chance for parents and children alike to see it, on a big screen, all in one go, with the added bonus of a talk in the interval by its award-winning director (and school gates’ mum), Coky Giedroyc. I watched it first time round with great admiration, but had forgotten quite what a faithful, reverent, thought-provoking and deeply spiritual adaptation this is. It doesn’t even go there in introducing new angles, modernising the “tricky” details, or making laboured analogies between the story and present dilemmas. It leaves all that to us by telling, absolutely straight, a human story about incarnation. And is so much the better for it.
www.thetablet.co.uk
