A Spoonful of Sugar … or the Gospel

I know I may well lose friends over this issue which has hounded us for fifty years, but I need to say it. P.L. Travers was right. It’s out there now and I can’t take it back – so, bring it on.

Let me explain.

Ms Travers was concerned that Walt Disney’s film would make a mockery of her story, Mary Poppins, that Disney’s interpretation would trivialise the storyline.

And she was right. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, spoonsful of sugar and all-dancing-all-singing-chimney-sweeps launder a story of mystery, magic, sadness and wonder and create a silly, insipid movie.

If you’ve read the book, you’ll see what I mean – wonderful idiosyncratic characters (some of whom never even made it to the movie), shadowy storylines and this mysterious lead character, with a hinted-at past, led by the wind.

The movie was a mistake. I stand lonely and  resolute, in a group of one.

How easily we reinterpret the words of Jesus in the Gospel to suit us. We think we know the story and then repeat it, like that old children’s game of Chinese Whispers until it conforms to our shape, like that cushion on our favourite chair.

Jesus becomes a nice man, doing and saying nice things about loving God and ourselves and those neighbours we quite like. We see the broken people healed and forget the radical nature of what Jesus does when he heals – social acceptance, challenge for the temple and the community, confrontation for the powers that control their lives.

Sometimes we translate Jesus to fit our prejudices – whatever they may be. Jesus’ radical acceptance of others, like foreigners (female and male) and enemies, becomes entirely impractical, so we carefully leave it out. An online article this week asked why we can so easily refer to the ten commandments in our society, but not the Beatitudes … Blessed are you poor, who hunger, who weep, who are persecuted …  

A Disney Jesus would never ask us to sacrifice anything – let alone our families, or our own lives for something as insubstantial as discipleship for a kingdom that had not yet arrived. If Disney wrote the story, then it would all have neat and tidy, saccharine endings – with little substance and no real salvation.

When we hear the rigorous call of Christ, like this week’s reading, we need to attend to it together, as a community of faith. We seek to understand what it means, and we encourage each other when it appears impossible, or simply too much for us.

We can’t airbrush the call to discipleship, any more than we can smooth away the wonder of the miracles, or the astonishing grace of Jesus character, or the import of declaring Jesus as Lord, in defiance of the empire then and now.

When Disney trivialised Mary Poppins, he lost all the mystery. When we simplify, or smooth away the extraordinary words and story of Jesus, we make it about rules, or niceness and miss Jesus in the process. Read the story, don’t worry about the movie.