The Gospel Inquiry

The first of the Play Pieces series of lunchtime plays - The Gospel Inquiry by Moray-based playwright and actor Sandy Nelson - was performed last Saturday at the Spectrum Centre in Inverness. 

This satirical play purported to examine the factual accuracy of the four gospels from the Bible in a Leveson-style enquiry. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were called to give evidence and interrogated as though they were journalists who had published their accounts of Jesus’ work.

Arguably the play was blasphemous in the way Jesus was spoken about and depicted, and in the words he was given to speak. The four evangelists were caricatures with little basis in fact, and the conclusions were controversial, but at least it was a thoughtful piece by a thoughtful writer raising important issues in the public square.

Under cross-examination, the four gospel authors admit to presenting Jesus as the Son of God and inventing the supernatural aspects of the changes Jesus made in people’s lives, in order to further the cause. Thus, for example, the miracle of feeding a large crowd was a colourful way of flagging up the generosity which Jesus inspired not a factual story of multiplying food.

Now it is true that people’s understanding of who Jesus was developed after his death, and that this growing understanding affected the way Matthew, Mark, Luke and John structured their works (in fact written decades after Jesus’ death.) But most Christians believe that the theology developed precisely because of the uniqueness of Jesus, the obvious presence of the supernatural in his life, and that fact that his words and actions pointed to him being more than just a son of God.

The Gospel Inquiry accuses the evangelists of massaging truth for a particular purpose. But the play itself, it seems to me, is a powerful example of how our presuppositions shape what we write. Sandy Nelson had already decided the outcome of the Inquiry before he lifted his pen.

I think we can deduce from the play that he approaches the gospels with the belief that there is no great Creator ‘out there.’  The words put into the Apostle John’s mouth may well reflect Nelson’s own view: ‘God is the world. God is living. Life! God’s only begotten son is he who understands life and what it is to live.’ So, God and creation are one and the same. To embrace life to the full is to embrace God. ‘Eternal life’ is a question not of the length, but its depth – a life of ‘unfathomable love and fulfilment.’

Sandy Nelson feels strongly that the real Jesus is concealed in the gospels among the miracles and claims of divinity. Nelson himself mentioned in the post-show discussion ‘how much I like Jesus, but the divinity gets in the way.’ He puts the following words into Jesus’ mouth – ‘I wanted to try to usher in a time of peace, love and understanding and forgiveness and the love of money being the root of evil. That is all I have ever said.’ This Jesus claims that the gospels misrepresent his mission.

It strikes me that we can only know of Jesus through the gospels. Sandy Nelson is inviting us to fillet these books, discarding everything we are not prepared to believe, and dividing things which seem irrational into those worth believing (eg the power of selfless living) and those simply unbelievable (eg the existence of the supernatural).

But in the light of the immensity and wonder of the cosmos is it, in fact unreasonable to believe in the possibility of a great creative intelligence? 

The Gospel Inquiry has no answer to the question of why, since the selfless way of life taught by Jesus is so desirable, most of us fail to embrace it. It also presents Jesus’ crucifixion as an accident. I believe those two facts are related. Only through the cross and subsequent resurrection can Jesus offer power to overcome personal and social evil and that richer, fuller life which is not, in fact, there for the taking. A Christianity where the cross is an accident is a much diminished faith.

The play reminds us that we each have a mental image of Jesus. ‘You are not seeing me,’ says Nelson’s Jesus. ‘I am just the idea of me that you have.’ In the post-show discussion, Nelson referred to a 15-year-old girl he knows who walked out of a church because ‘their Jesus is not my Jesus.’

Which begs the question –is the Jesus I am seeing the real Jesus? We each need to begin our own gospel inquiry, and those four books, and the rest of the Bible, are all we’ve got. We need to revisit them, all of us, inviting the real Jesus to make himself known.

 

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 9th May 2013)