Jesus

Many teenagers today find Christianity off-putting because Jesus seems too fond of "mansplaining." He appears to have a "God complex," while the Almighty is alienating on account of being "really violent and aggressive." These are the findings in the report Troubling Jesus, the third part of Youthscape’s "Translating God" project, based on a recent survey of British 14- to 17-year-olds. Drawing on five reading groups, in which teenagers reacted to passages of scripture traditionally understood as conveying "good news," Youthscape faced reactions "radically different" from what it says might have been expected. While Jesus was not only seen as a condescending male chauvinist and God the Father as a bully, many youths discerned other issues in the readings.

Some Jewish friends recently asked me: ‘What is Good Friday?’ At first, they said, they had thought it was so called because of the peace agreement signed in Northern Ireland in 1998. Then they had learnt that it was a Christian thing, but they weren’t sure what. They wanted to know why it was ‘Good’. This put me to the test. You cannot explain anything about Christianity without paradox. It was Good, I hazarded, because it was bad: Jesus had to die to rise. My friends were scrupulously polite, but I thought I detected increasing perplexity. Many films of Christ’s Passion have been made, but all from a more or less Christian point of view. The film I should love to see would be one made through the eyes of a practising Jew.

It’s been said that the Christian right is more “right” than Christian. And there’s probably some truth to that. But, seriously, have you seen the Christian left? Back in 2020, we had the saga of White Jesus. An ex-pastor named Shaun King urged Black Lives Matter activists to destroy images that made Jesus look European rather than Palestinian. The trouble is that ancient Jews actually did look Mediterranean, because…well, they were. The big blue thing to the west of Palestine? That’s the Med. Mr. King was probably thinking of the Arab Muslims who now live in Palestine. But they only showed up around the year 640, when the Rashidun Caliphate invaded the Levant and killed most of the Jews and Christians around Jerusalem. Awkward. Anyway, White Jesus is out.

Does Christmas send a shiver down your spine? It should. We seek at this time of year to reclaim the magic of Christmases past. We think of snow thick on the ground. Rosy-cheeked children skating on frozen ponds. Carol services by candlelight in draughty churches. In 2020, there has been very little magic and wonder. Instead there has been sickness, death and a ban on seeing our loved ones; lost jobs and lost hope. To compensate, we feel more urgency this Christmas to seek out the magic, to find those spine-tingling moments, to reach beyond the humdrum and the daily grind. But, lovely though the fairy lights and colourful baubles might be, we need look no further than the nativity itself to discover the real magic of Christmas.

It’s not the best of times to be a statue — or even an icon. Last week Shaun King, a well-known campaigner on racial issues, wrote that icons and statues which depict Jesus as white should be removed. 'They should all come down,' King said. These icons are 'tools of oppression and racist propaganda...all murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down’. King received an enormous amount of abuse and even death threats — including from a group of retired police officers in Long Beach, California. Shaun King is an influential figure.

‘No crib for a bed,’ says ‘Away in a Manger’ rather puzzlingly, since a crib is a manger. ‘No one paid me much attention, lying on the hard stones, a young child in a crib,’ says God made Man in the Old English poem ‘Christ’. At the beginning of his prophecy, Isaiah declares: ‘The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib.’ The crib as a manger lent its name to the whole Christmas caboodle of stable, ox, ass, Mary, Joseph and all the trimmings of magi and shepherds. Francis of Assisi was keen on building cribs that put the Christ Child in his surroundings, and the idea caught on.

Declarations of hope that Notre Dame can be resurrected have been much in evidence this Holy Week. Such is the lesson of Easter: that life can come from death. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, that other great emblem of Paris, Notre Dame provides the French with evidence that their modern and secular republic has its foundations deeply rooted in the Middle Ages. Notre Dame has always been more than just an assemblage of stone and stained glass. It is a monument as well to a specifically Christian past. Last summer, one of the world’s best-known scientists, a man as celebrated for his polemics against religion as for his writings on evolutionary biology, sat in another cathedral, Winchester, listening to the bells peal.