Rhody Walker-Lenow’s piece in Comment, on the forgetful way we remember the flood narrative, reminded me of the great Aronofsky debates of 2014 — as in Darren Aronofsky’s 2014 movie Noah. I liked it, and I had so many conversations about it that I think I had honed something of a 3- or 4-point presentation on why Christians should watch it and talk about it.
I don’t recall getting very far with it. There were folks I knew who walked out of the theater mid-movie saying something like “That’s not the Noah I know” or “that is not the Noah of the Bible.”
And Idunno, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But I thought of that again reading Jim Harrison’s “A Dog in Heaven”:
An ancient problem never solved until this moment.
Did Jesus have a dog with him
during the forty days in the wilderness?
Yes. In the village the dog was called Cain
in jest. He would eat anything he could get
in his mouth. He would try to make love to chickens
to the laughter of the children who threw stones
at him, a great sin to throw stones at poor
stray dogs. So when Jesus left the village
at dawn with a loaf of bread and a bedroll
Cain followed and Jesus didn’t have the heart
to yell “Go away” to the woe-begotten Cain.
So Cain trailed happily along and at the end
of the first hot day he stopped, sniffed the air.
He turned left and waited for Jesus to follow.
Cain led the way down a gorge to a spring he knew.
The spring emerged from a tiny cave in the cliff
Cain and Jesus drank deeply and he filled his container.
Then they bathed in the cool water. At twilight they
were next to the north shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Jesus caught a fine fish with a hook and line he had packed
cooking it on a flat rock where they had built a fire.
He picked a bone out of the dog’s gum. A few years later
he told Cain to stay home because he had to be crucified
in Jerusalem. He actually put Cain in the tomb
with a chunk of camel meat and said he’d come back to get
him. On the third day Jesus’s tomb was empty.
Cain had been invited along for the Resurrection ride.
If your view of the Bible — or just of life, really — does not have space for the creative license of Aronofsky or Harrison… Eh. Why do I default to that wording? Why not put it more plainly and less threateningly: I believe our view of the Bible and this interesting religious life we lead should and does have happy room for such creative license. In fact, I doubt it’s possible to do without it — whether we know it or admit it or not.
I like to think about Jesus being the kind of guy who doesn’t smoke but who always has a pack of cigarettes on him just in case someone else needs one. But the point here isn’t so much about whether that’s a “theological accurate” view of Jesus, though I suspect it might be; it’s about how your theology of Jesus handles the offense and what that says about (your) Jesus.