The Middle English version of our word gospel – and I’m a sucker for anything Middle English – has it as “God’s spell”. “Spell” entailed exactly what we might expect it to: a phrase or form of words with magical power, something captivating and irresistible. In the 1973 film version of the “Godspell” musical, written by a drama student called John-Michael Tebelak as his Master’s project, right near the beginning, John the Baptist appears in a trippy vision to all the hip, malcontent 70s New York kids, and in the end eight of them drop everything and follow him and end up dancing crazily and being baptized in a fountain. And all to the strains of “Pre-e-e-pare ye the way of the Lord; pre-e-e-pare ye the way of the Lord!” I was struck by the scene when I first saw it, for many reasons: one, because I genuinely believed the Christian life was that exciting and that authentic; two, because I may not have been born in the 70s but I was conceived in the 70s, just, and something runs deep within me that tells me I am about and am from wide print maxi dresses and long straight hair and mud and guitars and brown corduroy and neo-folk and all that is good about England; three, because I watched “Godspell” first on a tiny, rubbish TV set in a small, square back room in Hartlepool where all the furniture we had at the time was one bare mattress and a tiny inflatable Christmas tree. I was working there for a Christian charity doing youth work and schools work, and we were relying on donations for our meals, and having spontaneous acts of worship, and living in quite a hand-to-mouth way, but also following a fairly prescriptive programme about what was and wasn’t a good way to reach people, to do events, to speak in public; and seeing “Godspell” made me realize that what we were doing was important and real but that there was something in the good news, the God-spell, that was to do with an inner part of me too, that wasn’t alien to me except in the best of all bettering, provoking ways, that was there even when all the music had gone. Some of the “Godspell” lyrics run,
“Let your light so shine before men…
So that they might know some kindness again”.
“Earth shall be fair
And all her people one”
“Godspell”, that twentieth-century mystery play, then, is not the start of my gospel, nor the end of it, but it sums it up in so many ways. At the end of the film, after the parables and the clowning, after the dizzying episode on top of the World Trade Centre, after the betrayal, after Jesus is hung up on a chain-link fence, after the characters have solemnly carried his body off round a corner, the camera slowly follows them and on the other side of the wall they have… gone. The writer of the musical score of “Godspell”, Stephen Schwartz, wrote in 1999 that one of the pivotal moments of the play is when Jesus tenderly removes the clown make-up that the community has been wearing for much of the action, for “he is saying that they have assimilated his teachings into themselves and no longer need the outward trappings that brand them as disciples. And when Jesus is taken from them at the end, the rest of the company remain fused as a community, ready and able to carry forth the lessons they have learned” (http://www.geocities.com/cugodspell/scriptnotes.html). The actors, the disciples, the Son of God, all have been swallowed up in the commuter-crowds of New York City, and their stories are already starting to fade, except that they never will because they’re there amongst all the other people and their everyday stories. The chorus “Oh God, you’re dead” has segued into “Long live God” and, eventually, back full circle to “Prepare ye the way of the Lord”. What this told me, and tells me, is that God works in human beings, taking what is imperfect and using it anyway to show love and interconnectedness between people and the earth. The biggest move I think I’ve made from the evangelical outlook of my past is a shift away from any kind of certainty about who’s in and who’s out of God’s new order. I just can’t boil anything down to “Two Ways to Live”, or who has or hasn’t prayed a particular prayer. I’ve known so many people whose Christian lives have been journeys, and not the kinds of journeys where you ever really arrive, where you say unreservedly that before a given moment everything was bad and after it everything is good. Of course, there’s still a part of me that rears its head, usually when I’m sitting on a plane during sudden turbulence, when I desperately gabble the sinners’ prayer over and over, and when I hope against hope that if there is a hell, God won’t let me go there even though I’ve done something as evil as get on a plane in the first place. I don’t know if it’s a hangover of everything I once believed to be true, or the actual truth about sin and salvation trying to break through, or just pure unadulterated fear. Logically, what I believe about God is that God is love, and hope, and patience, and mercy, and diversity, and an absence of the fear that makes everyone cling to their categories of exclusion. I am happy in myself that I don’t have all the answers about who or what God is more exactly than that; to hold the tensions between that gentle, alongside-God and the God who, in the absence of a more compelling explanation, created everything we know to the farthest reaches of the universe. What I’m less happy to do is to drag other vulnerable people down with me. I can’t be so prescriptive as to say this is definitely the way things are, world without end, Amen. I do think that’s a problem for me, that I find it difficult to have the courage of my convictions long enough to attempt to persuade anyone else of anything, but it’s also a part of my genuine belief that the world is more complicated than Christians often like to render it, that I don’t have the right to condemn anyone, and that Jesus is profoundly for the people who lack status and privilege and the dominance of a voice given legitimacy and plausibility – so it’s a tension I have to live with.
For those of you who don’t know the film or stage versions of “Godspell”, a lot of it is drawn from liturgy and hymnody strikingly familiar to a church-child Anglican from the cradle. “We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land” – which my friend Ben says he unwittingly and unfailingly launches into every time he uses a lawnmower. “Day by day, oh, dear Lord, three things we pray: to see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, follow thee more nearly, day by day” – and so on. Other parts are drawn from the Psalms, and direct from Matthew. I heard and read those things throughout my life, against a background of whatever else was going on. That’s the cultural aspect of my gospel, that I was made by the good and bad of my family life and my church background, and that people are profoundly made by the good and the bad in their own backgrounds. To seek and nurture the good of human tradition, that which echoes God in everyone, is the key. No-one is beyond redemption, no-one has entirely lost the divine spark. Even if it is sometimes deeply hidden, it is there. God looks at us and loves the good in us, and knows that in us which is based in fear and hatred and small-mindedness.
Another thing about “Godspell” which has stayed with me is the interesting switch whereby the character of John the Baptist, all-round good-guy and maverick hero, imperceptibly switches, and suddenly he’s also Judas. It’s almost taboo, this notion that it should be his close friend and cousin who should be the one to betray Jesus, the one who was part of the mission, the one who helped people meet Jesus in the first place; but it’s a reminder to me both that even John wasn’t infallible, and that even Judas isn’t beyond redemption. All humans carry with them shades of Judas, betraying and letting down their close and distant human kin, and shades of John who attracts and brings out the excitement and solidarity of belonging to this profoundly human story. That’s been an important image to me, along with U2’s song “Until the end of the world”, which utterly communicates the pain of having done something which you instantly regret and which has such huge repercussions that there’s no way you can ever put it right. I’m pretty sure it’s Judas talking when the last verse says,
“In my dream I was drowning my sorrows
But my sorrows, they learned to swim
Surrounding me, going down on me
Spilling over the brim
Waves of regret and waves of joy
I reached out for the one I tried to destroy
You…you said you’d wait
’til the end of the world”.
This song says a lot to me about original sin, which is interesting because, of all the doctrines of orthodoxy, this is probably the one with which I have the most difficulty. I can just about accept the maxim that damaged people damage people, but I can’t attach any kind of cosmic consequence to that which would necessitate being hauled out of the fires of a literal hell. Sin is alienation and loneliness, but I don’t think it’s physical torture and being cast away by a spiteful God. What’s crucial to me is that, actually, there always has to be a choice about how to respond to what happens to us. This choice is more free in some times and in some situations than others, so that people who have had the education and the love and the nurture are far more culpable than those who haven’t; but Pelagius, my favourite heretic, resonates with me strongly. Pelagius claimed that the original acts of sin performed by Adam and Eve set a bad example and laid down an unhelpful precedent for the rest of us, but that since we were all originally made in the image of God, and reflect God’s rationality, we all still have a real choice about how to act and respond. We are not born into inherent sin; we are not condemned to be sinful until proven otherwise; we are responsible for our own sin (if we do wrong) and also our own redemption (if we do right). For Pelagius, Jesus was simply a counter-example to Adam, the one who did the right thing and whom we should seek to emulate. I think there’s something more to Jesus than that, something to do with being a site of redeemed incarnation and the blurring of the boundaries between death and life – but, other than that, Pelagius makes a lot of sense to me. However, it isn’t orthodoxy, because Augustine insisted that as humans we have nothing to do with our own redemption. It is a free gift of God, a grace, given by God to whoever God chooses. This is very attractive because it seems to absolve us as humans of a lot of our personal culpability, but for me it’s just too easy, especially in a world where we’re all too good at saying “It’s not my fault ice-caps are melting, it’s not my fault rich children are wearing clothes made by poor children” – and so on. Pelagius believed we can all somehow access what we see of God around us in the world, and it is that which should inform our decisions and behaviours.
We need to accept our part in breaking this world, socially, economically and ecologically, and our part in remaking it. Eschatology means that the new creation is not yet, but also that it already is. It is burgeoning. My gospel, my good news for the nations, is that everyone should have the chance to access fundamental human goods and it is everyone’s responsibility to make it happen. Jesus said he had come so people could have life in abundance, and I believe it can really happen and happens already. People have been freed to healed relationships and healed ideologies, to living gently, to raising their children, to communication, to societies without war and famine. Many other people have not. It is the work of all of us to celebrate the small glimmers of hope and humanity that we see, to speak out against systems which crush and oppress, to be alongside people who have nothing. In Luke 4, Jesus quotes Isaiah, saying,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour”.
What Jesus doesn’t cite here is the next part of the Isaiah verse; for Isaiah proclaims not just the year of the favour of the Lord, but also the year of the vengeance of God. What I found very difficult, through all my years of street missions and evangelistic meetings and CU events and “gospel talks”, despite repeating and really trying to believe the party line, was the notion that, if you didn’t repent and accept Jesus in the right way, God would have no choice but to send you to hell – despite God’s supposedly limitless love and reach. I’d like to be able to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour without the vengeance of God always having to follow hot upon its heels. I don’t want people to be frightened into abundance of life by the thought that otherwise they’ll be cast into the fiery pit. One of the “Godspell” songs says,
“Alas, alas for you
Lawyers and pharisees
Hypocrites that you are
Sure that the kingdom of Heaven awaits you
You will not venture half so far
Other men who might enter the gates you
Keep from passing through!”
I don’t want to be a Christian who prevents other people being able to make their own journeys, or who refuses to recognize a good or something beautiful unless garbed in a way tasteful to me.
I thus have a love-hate relationship with much of Christianity. I have a love-hate relationship with church services. I really want to find God in them. I really want to taste the mixture of transcendent numinous and concrete, centred here and now. I find many things difficult about them – their naturalized language of the male neuter; the dissemination in liturgy and hymnody of unquestioned discourses of power and control even though Jesus convincingly overturned them; their sometimes defeatist attitudes to all that is wrong in the world. I also love them because I am from them, but I want to learn to talk to God with other people without having to hide away half of my questions and half of my convictions. I want to believe that churches can be revolutionary places, sites of justice and prophetic vision, but I see so many caught up in navel-gazing and in-fighting. I don’t mean to say the small everyday things aren’t important – they’re crucial. That’s why it’s all about sharing lives and sharing frustrations and questions. God is speaking from so many different places, but it wasn’t until I stopped reading the Bible religiously every day that I freed up enough space in my head to recognize God elsewhere too.
Jesus is a site for hope, a locus for the redemption of every body and every life. The good news is that Jesus is for people, for where people are from, for pain and tears and struggles and laughter, for games and singing and getting up and lying down. Jesus is for the hearts at the bottom of the heap, for taking up and taking on all humans do that is beautiful, for the fact that we are not condemned to do and to be nothing. All that is false will pass away, but all that is true can never pass away. The cast of each production of “Godspell”, before they go on stage, are encouraged to repeat the play’s motto:
“Listen, be teachable, laugh at good stories and learn to tell them… for as long as you are green, brother, sister, you can grow”.
Susannah Cornwall
