Fifty years ago, Hollywood celebrated the tribulations of early Christianity: Robert Taylor, bound in the arena before Peter Ustinov, calling on Christ to save Deborah Kerr from a mad, bad bull; Richard Burton and Jean Simmons going gladly to execution for the sake of their new faith, accompanied by the rantings of the crazy Roman emperor Jay Robinson.
Fifty years and it's come to this? "God of God, Light of Light" in the arms of, hmmm, yes, Mary Magdalene? How came it to this, you might well ask. The consumer society that's been building for the past half-century hasn't been especially kind to unflinching affirmations of a spiritual order that trumps the material order. The culture likes what it likes. Best of all, it likes that which affirms the convenient, the personal, the profitable, the malleable. Dan Brown (I gather) gets a hearing partly because he tells a gripping story and partly because the story of a Jesus "like us" has great appeal.
Odd thing, the theologians might say: He was like us -- human as well as divine. But that's hard to grasp. Give us a Jesus with a wife and kids and maybe an SUV.
Does "The Da Vinci Code" matter in the great scheme of things? So much so that we're all atwitter waiting to see how the movie comes out?
Can a movie make Jesus other than as the creeds of the church say he was? That would seem the real question. Attempts to remold him after the mold maker's fancy easily preceded Dan Brown and Sony. And will continue. But the Jesus of the creeds, "God of God, Light of Light" -- it really should have struck us long ago that the likes of Dan Brown can't lay a glove on this guy.