The Good News according to Mary Magdalene

I enjoyed watching this new film centred on Mary Magdalene.    I thought it was thoughtful, humane, well crafted and sensitively acted.   I also think it is entirely in the spirit of the Christian Gospels and give thanks that it corrects the 6^th century libel that Mary was a ‘woman of ill repute’.    I will come back to that.

No single movie can be true to the narrative of the gospels because there is no common narrative.  Each of the Gospels tells its own story, and though there are some shared elements there are also elements particular to each one,  and the overall chronologies do not agree.    There are even direct contradictions.    It is as if each Gospel has its own point of view or POV, and Biblical scholars tell us that these POVs are essentially theological,  each of them reflecting the situations of early Christian congregations in different times and different places.

   

So here we have a Gospel according to Mary Magdalene.    Although it was made by a male director, Garth Davis (2016’s Lion was his directorial debut),  it was written by two women, Helen Edmundson (who wrote The Suspicions of Mr.  Whicher for TV and then adapted Journey’s End for the screen), and Phillipa Goslett, (whose previous script was adapted from  Neil Gaiman’s story How To Talk to Girls at Parties, a rather camp sf comedy.)   This film is made from their POV,  that of womankind.    I welcome this.   After 40 years as part of the struggle for women in my own Church to be ordained as priests – and then to become Bishops – and seeing the ongoing struggle of Roman Catholic women to simply have their voices heard in the Vatican – this film is timely.

Is it a ‘feminist’ version of the gospel?   I do not think so, because many men have seen the Good News preached– and lived out – by Jesus in a similar way to that presented here.    It is the Gospel that gives us hope in the struggle to love and the determination to meet the inevitable demands of compassion and forgiveness, rather than that of the seeking after purity, which inevitably leads to failure, blame and guilt, that have so often ruled in the Churches.    But if that is a feminist reading of the Gospel I am happy for it to be so. 

It is also about the rehabilitation of Mary Magdalene.   We know very little about the Mary Magdalene of the Gospels.    Apart from the fact that she came from Magdala, a village on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, she is not described in the Gospels as the daughter of any man, wife of any man, or mother of any man.  That matters, because most women’s identity in the Gospels is defined by their relationships to a man.   Luke simply tells us that she was one of the women ‘who provided’ for Jesus and the disciples, suggesting that she was a woman of means, possibly a wealthy widow.    The Gospels agree that she was with the group of women at the crucifixion, and John says that the risen Christ appeared to her before anyone else.   Thereafter she disappeared from the record.  The Acts of the Apostles does not mention her - which is significant because it was written by Luke, the Gospel writer most sympathetic to women.   

There is, however, evidence that she was highly revered in some parts of the early Church.   Doubtless that is why a ‘Gospel according to Mary’ appeared in the 3rd century,  saying that Mary had been the most enlightened of the disciples, the one closest to Jesus, and given ‘secret visions’.     This Gospel also described the jealousy and distrust of the male disciples.    When the official canon of the New Testament was put together in the fourth century this gospel was not included.   I do not think that is because it is pro-female (though the Church was already showing signs of misogyny) but mainly because it was pro-Gnosticism.  

Gnosticism was the movement in the early church that followed in the steps of Greek ‘mystery’ religions by making their faith one of secrets, secrets only disclosed to those initiated.   This was the kind of spiritual Freemasonry that the early church rejected.   For them (and for me) the teachings and gospel of Jesus were open, not closed.     Gnosticism also promoted the idea that the material world and human bodies were wicked, only the Spirit was good, a dualism that denied the sacredness of all Creation.  

And then in the late 6^th century Pope Gregory libeled Mary Magdalene, saying that she was ‘the woman of ill repute’ who came into the house of Simon the Pharisee as he was entertaining Jesus, and washed Jesus feet, drying them with her hair and perfuming them with expensive oil (Luke chapter 7.)   That assumption has no Biblical evidence to support it, but it stuck.  This ‘Fallen Mary’ became the subject of many paintings,  in most of which she is beautiful, often red-headed, and usually exposing a breast.    Any excuse for a bit of Church approved lasciviousness.  And of course this ‘Mary’ provided a counterpoint to Mary the mother of Jesus.   The Virgin and the Whore.  This film provides another plausible back-story  for her – and in a post Credits note firmly rejects Gregory’s libel. 

So what of the film itself?   Rooney Mara is Mary, a young woman of independent spirit, not willing to follow the traditional path of an early arranged marriage and serial motherhood.    In her time, and sadly even is some places today,  such an independent ‘spirit’ would be seen by her family (especially by the male members) as evil, something that needs to be cast out.   In Mary they hear that the Rabbi Jesus is a healer and ask him to help exorcise her.   But Jesus tells her ‘there are no demons here’, and his absolute acceptance is enough for her to leave Magdala and follow him.    She is with him to the end.    This movie is from her POV and Rooney Mara is quietly convincing in the role.  

The film is also quietly convincing.    Jesus himself, portrayed by Joachim Phoenix, is also quiet - but often intense.    One critic, Alexander Blanchett,  complained that “He played Jesus too rough and too edgy.  I mean edgy is good, but he often felt like a homeless vagabond preaching around with his not less weird followers.”   I don’t have any problem with that, and prefer it to Tab Hunter, Max von Sydow,  of even Robert Powell.     I think that Phoenix’s interpretation is entirely believable as he moves from compassion (his scenes with Mary are tender but with no hint of eroticism) to rage.   

Jesus’ Gospel of the Kingdom is simple, but it was not heard by the disciples who were looking for a political Kingdom, led by King Jesus after a popular rebellion against the Romans by the people.   Jesus and Mary see the Kingdom as simple obedience to the God of Love, achieved  not by violence but by forgiveness.   A Kingdom is a state where people live in willing obedience to their King.    

In order not to prioritize  any one of the four Gospels there are no ‘words from the Cross’ here.    The Gospels do not agree on what they were.   But Mary is there, in silent communion with her lord.   So is Mary the mother of Jesus, a mother who has already prepared herself to let go of her beloved son.   For some reason the woman who plays mother Mary is not credited.

There are subtle touches of scholarship in this script.   Jesus tells those he (and the disciples) baptize that his is the baptism Jesus received from John, and they are baptized ‘into Light’.   It is often suggested that John the Baptist was part of the Essene Community at Qumran,  where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.   These men were associated with ritual cleansing by bathing/baptism and with the title of Sons of Light, so John and Jesus may well have used that form of baptismal liturgy.  

Some have complained that the film is slow and ‘passionless’.   That is also fine by me.  I see no hint in the gospels that Jesus was in a hurry.    But his healings are deeply passionate.  When he brings the (un-named) Lazarus back to life it is as if he is dying himself, giving of his own self until he is exhausted, spent.   Of course we know that later he will be utterly ‘spent.’  

When Jesus goes into the Temple it is not only the trading that disturbs him, but the sacrifices.   When he sees the sacrificial lamb’s blood there is an almost subliminal flash of the Crucifixion.    I do not want another Mel Gibson version of the Passion dwelling on the agony of Jesus.    I really did not want the first.   Jesus does not matters to me because of his suffering and death, but because of his life and teaching.    I do not follow Jesus because he ‘suffered in death’ but because he lived in love.    His gospel of unconditional – and therefor always forgiving – love undermined the business of the 1^st century Jewish Temple, where people bought God’s forgiveness by making sacrifices.    I think that is why the High Priests needed Jesus out of the way.      I do not blame the Jewish authorities for that.   I am sure they believed that their sacrificial rituals were truly holy and according to the mind of God.   I think they were trying to defend God from Jesus’ blasphemy.   But I also believe that they were wrong, and that defending God can so often lead us astray – in Judaism, Christianity or any other faith.   Whatever God may be does not need defending.   

But nor do I accept the doctrine that God needed Jesus to die on the Cross for our salvation.    I do not think it was the Jews or the Romans that killed Jesus.  It was us, humankind.    We either willed it, complied with it, ignored it or – and this is where I stand apart from more orthodox Christian theology – now have persuaded ourselves that it was God’s will, not ours.    But as a prominent theologian once said of the resurrection, We willed that Jesus should die,  but God said ‘No’. 

It is so easy to project onto God – or Jesus – our own needs.  Judas (in a touching performance by Tahar Rahim) does so in this film,  looking to Jesus to bring in the End Time, when the dead will rise from their graves.   The dead include Judas’s own wife and child.    That is why he is so committed, so hopeful, and so impatient.  When Jesus does not seem to be in a hurry to ‘bring in the Kingdom’, or too frightened by the means needed to it, Judas does what he can to speed it on.   

There have been a number of theatrical interpretations of Judas and his motives over the last 50 years, from Dennis Potter’s  Son of Man to Tim Rice’s  Jesus Christ; Superstar.  Over the years I have produced/directed both of these in Churches in one form or another.  I do not I think that either of their answers to the ‘Judas Question’  is necessarily right, but enjoyed them because they open up a question that has haunted Christianity for two thousand years.

I do not want to end without mentioning   Chiwetel Ejiofor who plays Peter.  Ejiofor is a star who does not mind playing supporting roles, and always plays them well.  The music is composed by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, with Hildur Guðnadóttir whose joint work on Arrival was so important.   Greig Fraser shot this movie, as he did Garth Davis’ Lion.   Their work enhances this film, which has a continuity of tone in sympathy with the script and acting.

 Reading other critiques of this movie, especially those voicing disappointment with it, I wonder what it was these critics were looking for?    A reflection of their own ‘personal Jesus’?    Excitement?   Blood?   Dramatic miracles?   Sex?  Angelic choirs?   A more groomed Jesus?   Some other version of Mary of Magdala?  

I am not surprised that the more positive critiques have been written by women.  

I think this film provides a fresh perspective,  seeing Jesus through another pair of eyes,  and this POV may support, question or challenges our own views.    I welcome that. 

Marvel Comics does politics? Black Panther.

If you have not yet seen this movie I recommend it.  Even if you have not yet seen a Marvel movie I recommend it.  It stands on its own two feet.   It is also doing something new and good in the face of the racial and  gender inequalities rampant in our world – and of course in Hollywood and the world of cinema.   It is also sheer good fun - and a truly radical political movie.

Marvel Comics does politics?    Well, yes, it always did.   Politics is all about the structural uses of power, and Marvel’s Super-heroes and villains have always had differing kinds of power to use or abuse.   These range from Stark’s brain-power and the totally undemocratic freedom his billions give him, through the Godly (rather than God-like and also therefor undemocratic)  powers of Asgard’s inhabitants and enemies,  to the brute power of the Hulk and the secret power of SHIELD.   

Super-hero Captain America has a different kind of shield, and it contains elements of vibranium; which connects with Black Panther, a movie largely set on Wakanda, the secret African state that is powered by this rare and immensely powerful mineral.   

Lets start with the title.   The American Black Panther Party was formed just months after Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created their Black Panther in 1966 for Fantastic Four Issue #52. T'Challa (the Black Panther).   T’Challa  took on the Fantastic Four,  and by forcing them to split up  he defeated each individually, proving his superior strength and intellect.  

This was just a couple years after the Civil Rights Act was passed and just one year after Martin Luther King’s Selma-Montgomery March, the Watts Riots and the murder of Malcolm X.   Black Panther was Marvel’s first superhero of African descent and the first black superhero in mainstream American comics.  

Huey P. Lewis said the panther  was a fitting symbol for his movement because a panther doesn’t strike first, “but if the aggressor strikes first, then he’ll attack.”    We cannot separate the political questions that draw the current movie and the previous movement together.   

Vibranium itself has political importance in differing ways.   In the suit that Black Panther wears it absorbs  kinetic energy from incoming bullets, blows, and bombs, stores it and then releases it back into the world, turning the power of the aggressor back onto them.    That can be seen as a political allegory.   The stronger you beat me down the stronger I will rise.   Oppression will give rise to resistance and fuel rebellion.   

Vibranium is also a technological energy source.   Its very existence raises questions in Wakanda.   Should it’s secret power  be revealed and used to help the world’s powerless, bringing advanced Vibranium tech to those in need?  Should it be weaponised to bring about revolutionary change through violence?     Or would it be better for the world not to know about it at all – and also keep Wakanda safe?

And of course the fact that Vibranium is found in Africa reminds us of the diamonds and precious metals that the West has plundered from Africa over the centuries, and the rare minerals found in places such as the Congo  that are now essential to so much modern tech.  These parts of Africa  suffer from  “resource curse”,   the source of so much corruption and violence today, funding militias and civil wars.

As Helen Lewis wrote in the  New Statesman “Black Panther is not just smart and politically aware for a superhero film – it’s smart and politically aware, full stop.”   

So this film has enormous political relevance and valance.  But what is it like as movie?   I think it is hugely entertaining and exciting.  It was created from a thoughtful script written by two Black American writers, Joe Robert Cole and Ryan Coogler, Coogler also Directed.  It is very well acted with an obviously intentional bringing together of Black actors from across the diaspora.   It is beautifully designed by Hannah Bleacher,  photographed by Rachel Morrison and scored by Ludwig Goransson .    Black Panther  cost around $200 million to make, and it is all up there on the screen. 

I am not going to reiterate the plot.   Go see the movie to discover that, but I do want to praise the cast – and the casting.

T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) is the new king of  Wakanda.    Lupita Nyong’o is his ex-girlfriend and maybe future bride.   Danai Gurira as Nakia Okoye  leads his female bodyguard and is the Wakanda Special Forces’ General.

Letitia Wright is T'Challa's  sister Shuri and tech genius,  and Angela Bassett is  his mother Ramonda.   

Daniel Kaluuya is W’Kanbi, T’Challa’s oldest friend and  Michael B. Jordan is Erik Killmonger, his intended assassin and usurper.     Among the rest of the cast we see Andy Serkis (we actually see Serkis rather than just another of his brilliant motion-capture creations) as the rather pantomime villain Ulysses Klaue, pronounced Claw, Martin Freeman as the CIA’s sympathetic Everett K. Ross,  and Winston Duke as  M’Baku, leader of another Wakanan tribe.

So there we have a water-shed movie with a Black Writer/Director,  four roles for powerful Black actresses and four for Black males.    I do not want to distinguish these actors’ performances.   I think they are all excellent and a good ensemble.   I was, however,  pleased to see the British actor Daniel Kaluuya, who I spotted as a talent in the BBC’s series The Fades back in 2011, and who was of course nominated for an Oscar for his role in Get Out.)

There is no doubt that Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan are the headlining stars, but this dramatis personae  is a unique, radical and important development in a blockbuster Hollywood movie.   The Marvel team deserve the highest praise for getting it made – and for making it so well. 

And for a blockbuster this is a very subtle movie.   We might think that Killmonger is the villain, but wait; he has an MIT Degree and is an ex-US Navy Special Ops SEAL, formerly employed by his government to disrupt foreign governments by ‘any means necessary’.   He has vowed to kill T’Challa in revenge - I will not say for what -  but also to become King and use the power of Vibranium to bring about a Black Panther style revolution back in the USA.    He is not the villain.  He represents both the USA, with it’s diplomacy by assassination, and also the political Black Panther movement’s desire for inter-racial justice.   He believes that ‘death is better than bondage.’   Killmonger is the true Antagonist, and a worthy one. “I think the best villains are ones that have a point of view that’s relatable and that you can empathise with,” screenwriter Joe Robert Cole said in a recent interview.  

The casting of Michal B. Jordan in this role has reverberations.   In 2013 he starred in Fruitvale Station, Coogler’s first full length film dramatizing the last days and death of the black man Oscar Grant III at the hands of white San Francisco Police.   That movie was also shot by Rachel Morrison and scored by Ludwig Goransson.   Another good team.  Enjoy.

Ursula K. le Guin has died.

Ursula K. le Guin has died.  We will not hear from her again. The world is a poorer place.   But Ursula le Guin has lived.  We have her books.  The world is a richer place.    For nearly 50 years I have enjoyed giving people copies of her seminal novel, The Left Hand of Darkness.    Why?  Because ever since I first read it I was sure that the more people read it the better our world would be.   

I was sixteen I first read one of her short stories, Nine Lives, in which she explored the possible consequences of cloning humans.   What would it be like to have nine essentially identical siblings?   Pragmatically such a group could be of great exploratory, commercial or military value, especially working in very difficult or dangerous situations where their mutual bonding and precise understanding of each other’s capacities and responses would make them a highly effective team.  But what would be the effect of bereavement on such a family?  Nine Lives explored that, and I realised that science fiction is not just about science.  It is about people.  Her books have been my companions ever since.   

Her first published novel, Rocannon’s World, 1966, set out her educated palette of anthropology, sociology and psychology, painting carefully created thought-through worlds, set in an imagined future.    

The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969 illuminated me, challenged my understanding of gender, and of what I would later learn to recognize as agape, the non-romantic, compassionate love that binds us together – and prompts us to make sacrifices for the sake of others.   Agape is the Greek word used by early Christian’s to describe this unselfish love.  The book also introduced me to interesting Taoist and Jungian concepts.

The Dispossessed  (1974) explored the political and personal consequences of living in anarchist or authoritarian societies.   These latter two novels also raised environmental issues, later echoed in The Word for World is Forest, The Eye of the Heron and Always Coming Home.    Add her evolving feminism and pacific anarchy ('a necessary ideal', she called it), to the mix and you may see how  her work was not escapism but radical engagement with own world and situation.    Eight of her novels are set in the same universe, and are known as the Hainish Cycle.    This gave a consistency and depth to her creativity.

But Ursula may be most famous for her Earthsea novels and stories, A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968, The Tombs of Atuan, 1971, The Farthest Shore, 1972, and then nearly twenty years later in 1990, Tehanu, followed by Tales from Earthsea, 2001, and The Other Wind,  2001.  These are fantasy rather than science fiction.  Earthsea offers us an Iron Age culture, inhabiting an archipelago of islands on a watery planet.   Magic is employed here by those trained to handle it, mainly for practical tasks, such as repairing boats and buildings, and weather control – particularly useful for seafarers.    But magic is powerful stuff, and those able to use it’s great power carry great responsibilities.  (Spiderman’s Grandpa did not initiate that insight).    The early trilogy charted the education – and maturation - of young Ged, a gifted magician.   The Taoist theme is seen in the ways that Ged has to struggle with his own dark shadow, and the ways in which ‘good’ magic on works with nature, ‘bad’ magic works against it, as in necromancy.    And the ancient, powerful and mysterious dragons are always there, though rarely seen, and they have a deep wisdom of their own.    These three novels were mainly marketed for children and ‘young adults’. They certainly are ‘coming of age’ novels, but le Guin made no  compromises in her language, using her subtle and beautiful prose to construct sentences conveying complex ideas with perfect clarity.    They can give pleasure and insight to older  as well as younger adult.  

The later Earthsea books explored more adult themes, including childhood abuse – and death.   Her ‘land of the dead’, rather like that of Philip Pullman’s in His Dark Materials, resembles the classical Greek Hades, or the Jewish Sheol,  a grey land of shadows and shadowy beings.   Both le Guin and Pullman’s living protagonists try to free these trapped half-beings from their  impoverished states.     

Ursula understood her trade, wrote thoughtful literary criticism  and essays and books to help others develop their own craft.   She won dozens of awards, including five Hugo’s,  six Locus and four Nebulas, alongside a National Award for Children’s Fiction,  and in 2014 an honorary National Book Award.   In her acceptance speech she warned against the book trade 'preferring quantity to quality, letting profit define what is considered good literature'.  

Margaret Atwood has been a lifelong admirer of Ursula Le Guin  and hearing of her death she wrote in The Guardian that

“her sane, committed, annoyed, humorous, wise and always intelligent voice is much needed now.   Le Guin was always asking the same urgent question: what sort of world do you want to live in?  Her own choice would have been gender equal, racially equal, economically fair and self-governing, but that was not on offer.  It would also have contained mutually enjoyable sex and good food: there was a better chance of that”. 

I could live (more) happily in that world  too.   It does not have to be a fantasy.   But it takes work.    Ursula once wrote ‘Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new’.  

Thank you Ursula or your wisdom,  compassion, imagination, determination and craft.