The Da Vinci Code: What We Believe Or Not! Part I
Sermon delivered by Rev. Charles Swadley, Lakeside United Methodist Church, Richmond, VA

Who has heard of the book written by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code or I should probably ask, “Who has not heard of it?” This book has been on the NY Times best seller list in the top 150 books for over 167 weeks? On Friday, May 19, 2006, the movie version of this book opened to the public starring Tom Hanks.

Undoubtedly, you have seen the news reports and heard some of the critiques of both the book and the movie. The religious community has been divided on just how to react to this phenomenon. Many have chosen to boycott the movie. Others have ignored it as a passing fad, while still others are attempting to capture the interest in the book and movie as a way to reach out to people who are hungry for a deeper spiritual meaning in their lives. It is this latter category toward which I tend to lean.

But, why is there all the hubbub? After all, it’s just a mystery fiction book! Yes, true enough that is what it is. However, because the subject matter is so close to what the Christian faith community considers sacred and holy, the reaction has been strong in many camps and even quite defensive in opposition. This is because the focus is on the central person of our Christian faith -- Jesus of Nazareth, whom we call the Christ and Risen Lord. That makes this subject controversial and highly charged. Perhaps we in the Christian community might have empathy now for the deep impact upon our Abrahamic brothers and sisters of the Jewish tradition when the Nazis desecrated synagogues and burned and destroyed the sacred hand-written texts of the Torah or upon the Abrahamic brothers and sisters of the Islamic tradition who have felt rage over the desecration of the Koran, which allegedly soldiers put in the toilet.

Jesus is our most holy sign of God, as is the Torah to the Jewish community and the Koran to the Islamic community. What is it that stirs up the Christian community’s anxiety and ire? It is articulated well in the scenes with Robert Langdon, Sophie Neveu, and Leigh Teabing as they talk about the essence of the Holy Grail which is at the heart of their search in France and England. The Grail, as it turns out, is not the wine cup of our Lord used in the Last Supper. No, rather, it is the idea that Mary Magdalene had been secretly married to Jesus, and pregnant with a female child delivered in flight from her home in the Holy Land and brought to somewhere in France, where a royal blood line is supposed to have continued to this day. It begs the question, “Could the Savior, Jesus Christ, have a living blood heir somewhere?” What would that mean to all the sacred ideas of Jesus as a celibate male? It also implies that Mary Magdalene revealed the female side of God’s deity just as Jesus revealed the male side of divinity in his earthly time.
However, it goes much further. The Da Vinci Code seems to imply are that Jesus was only human and that he was not recognized as divine, except by political necessity when Constantine, the Roman Emperor, made it happen through the Council of Nicaea in the fourth Century. In that line of thought, if Jesus were to any degree divine, he certainly could not carry that divinity to the cross. So that meant, he only appeared to be divine in human body. This brings about a much larger problem of the meaning of Jesus as the Christ.

If Jesus were not divine and not the Christ, then that throws into question, how we could have faith in Jesus as our eternal Lord and Savior!

Let me wet your appetite for Part II of this series next Sunday. It is important for us to struggle with the understanding and the importance of Christian faith that is cast in the life, the teaching, the healing, the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus. It is at the heart of the Apostles’ Creed which we affirm as the ancient confessions of our Christian faith. “I believe in God the Father, the maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his son, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, dead and buried. On the third day he arose from the dead and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”

The Nicene Creed which we will recite in a moment was the result of the council of Nicea in 325 of the Common Era or AD as many know it. The Emperor Constantine, contrary to The Da Vinci Code’s professorial expert, Leigh Teabing, called the Council of Nicea into being to resolve the question of how Jesus was both human and divine, not whether he was divine. That Jesus was the Son of God was a commonly accepted belief by the overwhelming early Christian community. The Gospels also showed Jesus as a man who felt pain, hunger, and sorrow and wept in love and grief. But, the Emperor Constantine needed to have both political and church stability after he embraced the Christian faith. This council gave him the core statement of early Christian faith to unify the church and solidify the empire. This core faith is that Jesus lived, Jesus died, and rose from the dead. This is the divine power that breaks the effect of sin and death.

It is, therefore, critical for us to have a distinct stance of faith that is much different from that view that we see in Dan Brown’s book and subsequent movie about the Da Vinci Code. Jesus, we say is human, but also divine. That has been a clear affirmation from the earliest testimonies of the Christian faith as it began to spread across the world from the witness of the Apostles in the book of Acts.

Why is this so crucial? The ancients put it this way about Jesus as the Christ, both human and divine. “What he did not assume, he could not save.” In other words, if Jesus were only human with great and profound teachings, then he could not save a single soul from God’s judgment of our sins. Jesus, if he were only divine, the body of Jesus upon the cross would be a sham and a shell of a person, since the divine Christ would be an ethereal detached and unaffected spirit. Some said that if the Christ were really in Jesus, he must have avoided suffering by going into the air as a spirit looking onto the scene of the crucifixion and laughing. Or, he escaped Jesus on the way to the cross and entered someone like Simeon of Cyrene, who carried the cross for Jesus. This means that God could not bear our suffering and our misery because Christ would have remained detached and aloof. Thus, he could not forgive our sins as an offering of atonement.

We, in the Christian community, both liberal and conservative, affirm that Jesus is both human and divine. We do not believe that Jesus was neither only divine, nor only human alone. The scriptures do not emphasize his humanity to the exclusion of his divinity, nor vice versa.

Jesus does not save by being a good teacher; Jesus is not merely a path of enlightenment for a select few intellectuals to learn a secret knowledge. Knowledge of or about Jesus does not save and free us from the prison of our bodies. Our bodies are not evil. It is sin that separates and condemns us. Jesus is our Savior because he alone has the divine authority to break the power of death, the greatest enemy. He has the power to save us not because we know him in some secret knowledge or enlightenment, but because he knows us and loves us through death to life. We are then empowered to live alive and it is our responsibility to live in response to that divine act of the Christ Jesus.

Next week, what about the Bible as Holy Scripture, the other Gospels that cast new light upon the time of Jesus and Mary Magdalene? Did she capture his heart?

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