From Logos to Christos: Essays on Christology in Honour of Joanne McWilliam

2 Jesus of Canada? Four Canadian Constructions of the Christ Figure

2 Jesus of Canada? Four Canadian Constructions of the Christ Figure1    MARY ANN BEAVIS Have you ever been here on a Sunday when it’s packed? Have you seen the Haitian charladies, the Guatemalan refugees, the elderly and forsaken? It’s a gathering of universal misery. They don’t care about the latest archaeological findings in the Middle East. They want to hear that Jesus loves them and awaits them—Does that justify selling plastic statues of Jesus and bottles of St. Joseph’s oil for $15?—That Jesus is less than a rock poster. And is holy oil less effective than cocaine at $125 a gram? Not everyone can afford psychoanalysis. So they come here to be told “Go in peace, your sins are forgiven.” It comforts them, a bit. That’s something. This is where we hit the depths ... loneliness, illness , madness. (Fr. Leclerc, Jesus of Montreal) RECENT SCHOLARSHIP on American popular culture has analyzed the role of popular representations of Jesus in relation to national identity. In American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, Stephen Prothero argues that since the eighteenth century, Jesus has become a “national icon” whose shifting resurrections and reincarnations have included the enlightened sage, the sweet saviour, the manly redeemer, the superstar, the Mormon elder brother, the black Moses, the rabbi, and the Oriental Christ.2 Stephenson Humphries-Brooks has examined the development of “cinematic saviours” in American Jesus movies (e.g., King of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus of Nazareth, The 19 Last Temptation of Christ) and Christ-figure films (e.g., Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Shane, High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider, The Matrix, Braveheart) as exemplars of a developing “American christology,” culminating in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004).3 The contemporary American Christ figure, Humphries-Brooks argues, is a “Jesus with a gun,” an action-figure hero who fits post-9/11 America, a Christ-like protagonist who skirts sacrilege by not being directly identified with Jesus of Nazareth: The fundamental structure of the Christ myth is broken apart and reassembled , but never directly attributed to the Jesus character. Hollywood has been happy to give us Jesus as the Christ who descends from the heavens , gathers disciples, teaches, works miracles, is betrayed, suffers unjustly at the hands of religious and political authorities, is crucified, dies, and is buried and resurrected to ascend to the heavens. It has not given us Jesus as the Warrior Lamb of God who returns to gather his elect and vanquish the evil forces that oppose him. The satisfaction of the final judgment instead has been provided by iconic heroes, never named Jesus, who are therefore free to explore at various points in their career the close connection assumed by America between justice and vengeance.4 The Passion, in contrast, fully conflates Jesus with the action hero, an idealized personification of America, bruised and beaten but ultimately triumphant over the enemy: “the adoption of the action movie genre to the Jesus story necessitates a thorough structuring of the film world into for or against, good versus evil. Jesus becomes the American action hero carrying with him the expectation of such heroes who always suffer silently and triumph in the end.”5 Prothero and Humphries-Brooks would agree that the American Jesus has become a product for consumption, in traditional Christian worship but even more as an iconic expression of American identity.6 Prothero asserts that while interest in Jesus is not limited to the United States, America has taken the cultural “immanentization” of Jesus to unprecedented heights, to the point that “Christians do not have a monopoly , even on the central figure of their tradition.”7 Over the past two hundred years, the American Jesus has been both a legitimator of mainstream American values and an iconoclast who challenges and subverts them, a figure belonging not to just one religious tradition but to many.8 As the Jewish New Testament scholar Samuel Sandmel observed, the “Jesus of Western culture” belongs to secular culture as a whole, irrespective of the religious commitments of its members; as a Jew, Sandmel had no religious relationship to Jesus, yet he acknowledged the impossibility of avoiding the cultural Jesus.9 20 CHRISTOLOGY AND TRADITION To date, no comparable studies of the role of Jesus as a Canadian cultural icon have appeared. The only example I have been able...