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Reflection for Date June 11 2006

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To whom shall we go?

Obviously The Da Vinci Code won't go away and you might as well brace yourself for another blockbuster film based on the recently discovered (in 1978) Gospel of Judas in which Judas turns out to be Jesus' favorite disciple. But why should such stories or Gospels go away since it's the very nature of believers to meditate upon and explain the message and phenomenal impact of Jesus upon the world we live in? What baffles me is that people should be surprised that back in the 1st and 2nd centuries people were writing all sorts of devout accounts or interpretations of Jesus well beyond the boundaries of the New Testament as we have it. We've known for centuries about gospels attributed to Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, Nicodemus, Bartholomew, Mary Magdalene to name a few. We have also the Acts of Pilate, infancy stories about Jesus' mother Mary, the Gospel of the Nazarene and of the Hebrews and things like the Lost Letter of Paul - all such writings adding up to well over a hundred.

But when has Christian contemplation and imagination not produced writings and related movements that offer us one or another insight about Jesus and his message? Today we have documented spiritualities or interpretations of Jesus ranging from Opus Dei, the Legionaries of Christ, the Book of Mormon and Pat Robertson's homilies on the one hand to Liberation theology, Taize and our own small Christian community movement on the other. And what about the Imitation of Christ, the writings of Teresa of Avila and Therese of Lisieux and Louis de Montfort's True Devotion to the Virgin Mary and Catherine Emmerich's visions of Christ's Passion? And what about the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Aquinas or the take on Christ exhibited in medieval mystery plays or documented Ignatian, Franciscan, Jansenist, Quaker and Mennonite spiritualities?

I could go on. Christianity has been prolific throughout its history. Nor is the Holy Spirit entirely absent from all this literature. Insight can be gleaned from anything that's honestly trying to tell the truth, even where writers go haywire or range too far to the right or the left. But that's why the early bishops (who seem to be portrayed as sinister fellows in the modern press) saw a need to select out of this entire array the solid (and I might add readable) stuff to make it the "norm" against which all else should be measured.

And so the New Testament emerged to become the "Constitution", the rudder or compass by which orthodox Christianity makes its way through the pull of fantasy and the push of extremes across the fluid passage of time. They picked Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts, important letters of Paul and letters of Peter and James to counterbalance Paul. And how could they not include the spiritual Gospel of John and his letters, so emphatic about the incarnation of God? And finally from among the many zany apocalypses of the early Christian era they chose the Book of Revelation to sustain the hope of people victimized by totalitarian empires like Rome.

Just read the New Testament and compare it to the rest of Christian literature ancient, medieval and modern, including some pretty complex papal encyclicals, and may you not conclude that the early bishops - if you refuse to think they were inspired - certainly exercised a lot of common sense? I mean there were many playwrights in Shakespeare's day that kept audiences entertained by one comedy or tragedy after another. But it's Shakespeare who survived and transcended them all and will for all time to come. One can't help but say the same thing about the New Testament as the first and always the last word to be said about Christ.

-- Geoff Wood