Jesus is a Tube

Went to Rick Miller and Daniel Brooks' Bigger Than Jesus tonight with my friend Tom. A one-man show which uses creative media and simple yet effective cameral effects to explore Jesus from three separate, but similar perspectives.  All views are vaguely post-modern but one intellectual, one visceral, and one neatly immersed in humour.
 

First response: "hmmm... I'm ok with that, but what about Tom?" as Rick declares at the beginning of the show that he does not believe that Jesus was literally God. In actual fact, I can't remember just what he said he believed or didn't believe, but definitely not orthodoxy. In the playbill it says that Rick now attends services at the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity. But how much of the person portrayed on stage is Rick and how much is just theatre, we can not know. The progressive view of scripture is clearly articulated in the first part of the show, followed by a cleaver bit of post-modern spirituality presented through the persona of a preacher excelling in animal magnetism. The audience is admonished to find their inner Jesus, the inner "I".

Second response: At this point in the show I found myself both attracted and repelled by this presentation of true enlightenment as the awakening to relativistic pantheism. Attracted because of the honesty of such a position, and the freedom it seems to convey, but repelled by the obvious carnal aspects.

Third Response: People laughed at weird places in the show. Tom and I talked about this afterwards. Was it nervous laughter, or the kind of laughter that accompanies a bully's taunts of the weak kid, or just connections on a level I missed? I thought about how serious I am, about how reserved I am, unwilling to let myself go. A woman behind us seemed almost to be forcing herself to laugh, as if it was the right response. It is a funny show, and at times Rick has to wait for the laughter to die down, but this woman seemed to want us to know the whole subject was laughable to her.

Fourth Response: At one point in the show Rick portrays Jesus and talks to the audience like Jesus might have at the last supper - "Love one another... do not judge people... lift with your knees." General good advice for life. I think, "yes, so much of it comes down to that."

Final Response: On the drive home from Victoria to Nanaimo Tom and I discussed the show, the content, the quality - it is an extremely well performed piece, and at one point Tom said, "so what?" And that stuck with me. So what if Jesus is not the son of God, so what if evolution is real, so what if the gospel writers didn't actually ever meet Jesus, so what if people believe the gnostic gospels more than the synoptic gospels these days, so what if the crucifixion is more likely crucifiction - does it all mean anything? And if it does, then what? This is the place I am in perpetually now, trying to find meaning inside a wash of questions.

Tom said that he always thought Jesus was trying to be more like a tube to funnel God into the world and we have ended up spending a lot of time looking at the tube. I wondered to myself, "or making the tube into God." Is Rick just reversing the process, or is his own presentation just more words about the tube, rather than words from the tube? Jesus our tube. May we hear that distant echo.