Cracking the Da Vinci Code      a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at the First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, on May 21, 2006

 

A reading from the Gospel of Matthew:

“While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers were standing outside, wanting to speak to him.  Someone told him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”  But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”  And pointing to his disciples Peter and James and John, and to his wife Mary, he said, “Here is my family!  For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

A reading from the Gospel of Mark:

“He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, “Where did this man get all this? …Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary,… the husband of Mary of Magdala, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. Then Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”

And a reading from the Gospel of Luke:

“Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was his wife Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles.”

 

 

Cracking the Da Vinci Code

If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie and you don’t want me to spoil it for you, I’ll warn you when to quit listening:  Right now.

If you’re thinking you heard something completely different in those biblical passages that were read earlier, you’re right.  Though they are truly biblical passages, I took the liberty of adding just a couple of words to each one.  For instance, the phrase “his wife Mary” doesn’t appear in Matthew, “the husband of Mary of Magdala” is not in Mark, and Luke never uses the word wife when referring to Mary Magdalene.  For some reason, those few little words are appalling to some folks;  they firmly believe those little words would change the whole nature of Jesus and the meaning of his life and ministry.

That idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married with children is one of the central themes of the fictional novel, The Da Vinci Code, written by now-multi-gazillionaire author Dan Brown.  There’s certainly a lot more to the plot of the novel that’s now a Ron Howard-Tom Hanks movie than the possibility that there was once a Mrs. Christ waiting for Jesus to get home from work. 

But that seems to be where a lot of Christian churches are focusing their anger and frustration.  They overlook the fact that Brown plays fast and loose with actual organizations like Opus Dei and with fake ones such as the Priory of Sion.  They don’t mind him imagining conspiracies that involve thousands of people on more than one continent over several centuries.  They don’t complain that he sees symbiotic connections in unrelated pieces of fact faster than the mathematician John Nash, who was a character in another Ron Howard film, A Beautiful Mind.  You may remember that in that movie, Mr. Nash could lay out an entire newspaper and several magazines and find relationships between everything he saw there.  That story, though, was not only about Nash being bright but about his being mentally ill. That’s the feeling I had a hard time shaking while reading the novel - that the connections Brown makes are too numerous, too facile, too convenient to be healthy, and maybe too questionable to be what we might call ‘true.’

 

I am troubled about a couple of aspects of this story, and they seem to be pulling at me from two opposing directions.  In one direction, I struggle with the story because it purports to be based on what Brown says are facts.  In the other direction, I struggle with the story because I believe that stories should evoke the truth whether they are factually true or not.

 

My first problem has to do with the lack of a truly factual basis for the story.  Dan Brown begins the novel by saying on the very first page that the Priory of Sion is a real organization (which is questionable), and that the Catholic group Opus Dei has been the topic of recent controversy (which is true).  But he also says that, “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals are accurate.”  I can’t vouch for any of the rest of it, but I know that the way he describes some ancient documents is simply wrong.  And then having made these claims of a basis in truth, Brown goes on in the novel to misstate and rewrite historical fact and to base major plot points on these historically inaccurate assertions and assumptions.

There was a movie not so long ago, The Blair Witch Project, that was sold as a documentary of an actual event.  When the truth came out that it was a fictional story written for the screen and shot in a cinematic style designed to look real, some people still had a hard time believing it wasn’t real after all.  It was the lie they remembered rather than the ultimate truth.  And that’s the trouble with Brown’s truth claims that can’t be backed up - people end up fooled rather than enlightened.

Here are some of the facts that Brown gets wrong.  He says the Dead Sea scrolls contain writings from early Christianity that are pre-patriarchal and exalt the feminine.  The Dead Sea scrolls, however, are Jewish texts that never mention Jesus or Christianity.  And even if he has confused, which is likely, the Dead Sea scrolls with the Nag Hammadi texts - a collection of Gnostic writings found in Egypt in 1945 - he’s still wrong that early Christian writings were all celebrations of the feminine.  Christianity came out of a Jewish culture that was decidedly patriarchal.  One of the odd things, one of the brilliant things, about early Christianity was its inclusion of women to some degree and in some quarters, but it is simply wrong to say, as Brown does, that Christianity was once a bastion of the sacred feminine and that, at a definable place and time, the patriarchy turned the tables and wiped out its feminine opponents - women were never truly equal partners in the larger Christian community.  The sad truth is they are, in many ways, not yet equal partners, and another sad truth is the church’s collusion in keeping it that way.

Brown blames the emperor Constantine for wiping out the feminine in Christianity, and for single-handedly closing the canon of the New Testament.  Again he’s wrong.  The Nag Hammadi texts and plenty of others show us the plethora of different theologies and narratives that arose after Jesus’ death - there was nothing monolithic about the early church or its writings.  But to say that Constantine closed that diversity down is to ignore history.  The canon had begun to be formed as early as the late second century because competing communities argued about the truthfulness or usefulness of various writings.  And nothing was settled ecclesiastically for centuries.  Constantine was at best a bit player in this long process.  Diversity was one of the strong suits of Christianity early on;  it is not Constantine’s fault that orthodoxy took the place of diversity as time went on.

And it may be a small thing, but in what I found to be one of the ‘duh’ moments of the novel that thankfully didn’t make it into the movie, Brown makes the outrageous statement that “thousands of people” were writing about Jesus during his lifetime.  Au contraire.  Jesus’ impact during his lifetime was minimal:  he worked among illiterate peasants, people who had been fallen off the bottom rung of society, the homeless of his day.  No one besides the cultural elites could read or write, and that’s why it took so long for Christian writings to appear at all.

Finally, one scene in the movie really gets my goat.  That part of the book was treated a little differently and it wasn’t visual, so I didn’t get the clear picture that the movie shows.  At one point, the camera scans a small group of people and the dialogue identifies them as the descendants of Jesus.  Well, guess what.  They’re all white.  As if Jesus had been from the middle of Europe instead of from the Middle East.  As if only us white guys are truly children of God.  Come on, Mr. Howard, you had a chance to do something really interesting.

 

Now that I’ve worked myself into a froth, I must say that I enjoyed this book and this movie.  It is a quality of mature and open minds that we can critique things at the same time we celebrate them, which is what drives people like Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell crazy, because they can’t.

So let’s shift gears and look at some of the other aspects of this blockbuster novel and the film it has spawned.  I think the single best thing about the whole phenomenon is that people are thinking about and talking about stuff that scholars and historians have studied and debated for decades.  If people on the street and in the churches have not heard these things, it may be that the churches and schools have not done enough to spread the word. 

One of the protagonists in the story says that what has been keep hidden is, “(a) secret so powerful that if revealed it could devastate the very foundations of mankind.”  That powerful and supposedly devastating secret is that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife and the mother of his children.  Further, she was the disciple picked to carry on the church, not Peter, not James, not another man, but Mary Magdalene.  These are things we talked about in seminary and things that are written about in serious theological texts and sometimes make it into scholarly journals.

Now I guess those ideas are shocking to some people of faith.  Many people around the world are standing in front of theaters holding up signs and denouncing the movie as an abomination.  But to me, as a person of faith, it’s more hopeful than shocking.  Even though I have my doubts about the veracity of some of the facts the story is based on, it’s still a good story and something worth pondering and talking about with others, especially when it comes to defining the place of women in communities of faith, as well as in the larger world.

Speaking of which, looking more closely at: “(a) secret so powerful that if revealed it could devastate the very foundations of mankind,” maybe the keyword is mankind.  Maybe the secret should devastate the foundations of mankind, so that we can replace those old, oppressive foundations of mankind with new, inclusive foundations of humankind.  Maybe that’s the whole strength of this narrative - that the truth is deeper than most have been able to perceive.  That the exclusion of people based on gender is based on a hoax.  And by extension, the oppression and exclusion of people based on race or ethnicity or age or orientation is itself based on something other than the truth.

Yes, that would be powerful if we could find a way to dismantle racism and sexism and hetero-ism and ageism.  Yes, sing those new songs, tell those new narratives, bring on the battering rams!  Let’s get to work!

But, of course, we’re already at work.  And we’re doing what we can.  And we’d love to find that someone else holds the key, that someone else has squelched diversity, that someone else has withheld and obfuscated the truth.

But the truth is that until we unlock the secrets of the human heart, until we reach inside ourselves and tear down the walls keeping us apart from our brothers and our sisters, until we can connect the masculine and the feminine inside, nothing is going to change on the outside.  We’re not going to change the world until we change the way we are in the world, and the way we are in the world is not going to change until we recognize our part in oppression and exclusion and open ourselves to the truth.

 

The Da Vinci Code is an interesting story and I think Dan Brown has done a service to humanity in opening a discussion about the suppression and oppression of women and other religious groups by the church and other institutions, and I hope the discussion broadens to include all the other -isms that hold us back.  But to stop the work when we find someone else to blame is too easy and far too shortsighted.  We have to get at something in here while we’re doing battle out there.  Blaming Constantine or the church or Dan Brown for the state of the world doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility - it only means we’ve found someone else to blame.  We still have work to do, we still have a tough road ahead, we still have to find our way through competing truth claims and long, dark nights of the soul. 

 

May we find the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

 

So may it be.