Chocolate for Lent by Hilary Brand

Week Three

Getting Wise- The Possibility of Change

To Start Your Reflection

What answer would you give to the question: What is the movie Chocolat about? Take a few minutes to think about it before reading on.

One thing that has fascinated me as I have discussed this movie is the variety of answers I have heard to the above question. “It’s about Lent versus chocolate.” “It’s about self denial versus self-indulgence.” “It’s about traditional Christianity versus vaguely spiritual remedies.” “It’s about tolerance and welcoming strangers.” “It’s about what you do being more important than what you don’t do.”

Yes, it is all these things and more, and they will all come up during this program. But I want to turn now to something you may not have thought of, because I think that at its heart, this movie is about control.

The imaginary French town of Lasquenet is like most communities, especially religious ones. There is an unspoken pact between those who control and those who assent (even unconsciously) to be controlled. It is ruled by habits (be it Lenten observance, mistrust of the “river rats” or the widow Audel’s protracted mourning) whose original reasons may have been lost in the mists of time. The arrival of Vianne, the stranger who refuses to accept the town’s norms, throws everything into confusion.

Personal Reflection

Read Matthew 12: 1-21.

Pause for Thought

Just as the stranger Vianne questioned the “status quo” so it was in first-century Palestine. Only at that time the stranger was Jesus, striding across the Judean country-side, ignoring restrictions that had become petty, turning the tables, showing no fear for those who dominated or controlled. Strange then that the Church that bears His name (both Protestant and Catholic) is so often known as the most hierarchical and authoritarian institution around. Strange but true—sadly, there is no shortage of evidence to bear this out.

Playwright Edward Bond, writing in the 1960s, claimed, “God is a secular mechanism, a device of class rule.” Before you dismiss that as left-wing rhetoric, it is worth looking at his logic, drawn from the pages of history. He explains that for a long time, the Church’s teaching was used to “help enforce acceptance of the social order... To be saved, a man had to accept the church’s reaching on the way secular society should be organized... Leaders of church and state often came from the same families.”

Fortunately that sort of world—where kings could proclaim themselves head of their own national church and families like the Medicis could produce generations of dukes, cardinals and popes in equal measure—is long gone. Unfortunately, many share Bond’s view that the Church hasn’t changed since then!

Of course, “authority,” “tradition,” and “hierarchy” are somewhat demonized words in a postmodern, anti-church culture, and we may need to reclaim for them their rightful place. A society that totally jettisons any authority and tradition is a society without order or common values—a society adrift. An organization with no hierarchy is a confused and inefficient one. The point is that hierarchy should be both flexible and accountable: open to question and open to change.

What most people have a problem with in the Church is authoritarianism—authority without the possibility of challenge, authority claimed for the user’s own ends. When this comes into play, as in recent church scandals, then it is easy for the Church as a whole (and even God) to get unjustly tarred with the same brush.

Is it possible for the Church to renew itself with regard to this oppressive image?

Some say that the only way is to dismantle the old structures and create new ones. But new structures are often as full of authoritarianism as the old ones. The traditions are new traditions, that’s all. The new authority figure might be someone in a Hawaiian beach shirt rather than a robe, but might be just as controlling.

Others would answer that the only solution is to have no structures at all. “I can be a Christian without going to church.” Well, maybe, but the first thing Jesus did was to establish a group of followers and the last thing He did was to ensure it would continue. And humans are social beings. Even if every church were abolished tomorrow, the day after someone would start a club for people who don’t go to church anymore and the day after that someone would organize a committee and a set of rules!

Yet others, including a host of postmodern philosophers, would say that the whole thing is impossible anyway. They would draw on Nietzsche’s idea that any claim to possess absolute truth is an invalid assertion of power. Anyone who claims to have “capital-T Truth” must be on a power trip. Anyone who believes they know God must be mad, bad, or an oppressor.

It’s a tempting argument. Except that Jesus did make that claim, yet He wasn’t.

Unfortunately, the world at large doesn’t see Jesus... it sees us. It is looking at us Christians and evaluating Christianity on what it sees. And what the world sees is not always what we wish to show it.

I believe this issue of control and authority is huge. Recent scandals within the Church, plus the rise of fundamentalism outside it, have created a widespread atmosphere of mistrust of anyone claiming authority in the name of God. There is probably no issue more serious for the Christian church in this century. I also believe that the answer is there, staring us in the face, in the pages of the Gospels. The way for the Church to overcome an oppressive image is simple. We need to look at the words and actions of its founder and let them sink into our lives. Simple, yet radical... and far from easy!