God as Tiny Tim
In the recent Exodus movie Moses
ends up dialoguing with the Great I Am,
otherwise known as God. I will admit
that for Hollywood it is a challenge to depict the Almighty but in this
particular cinematic venture God is portrayed as a young boy whose face is
often a bit grimy and who speaks with a British accent.
That is a bit of a reach since in
the Hebrew Bible God’s name could not even be written because it was so holy
and removed from human reach. The
writers of the sacred text would substitute “adonai” or “Lord” instead of using
the word “God.”
The filmmakers did not let such holy
otherness get in the way so God comes off as a mixture of a young Jedi Master
and Tiny Tim. Actually believe it or not
that is not the part that bothers me.
Portraying the divine has always been a bit of challenge and should be.
It is what “the kid” does that
concerns me. After Tiny Tim convinces a
reluctant Moses that he should return to Egypt to pronounce the famous “let my
people go” speech, Moses goes back and decides the way to free the long pent up
slaves is to teach them guerrilla warfare and how to shot bows and arrows from
ever position possible.
Tiny Tim is not pleased with this
strategy. It may be because according to
my Bible such beat’em by armed might technique simply is not there. So God gets mad and like an angry child tells
Moses to bug off and get out of the way.
Of course that part is not in the original story either but remember the
creators of this version never let the bible get in the way of a good story.
When Moses shouts at Tiny Tim and
asks how he is supposed to free the slaves without force “God” simply says, “I
don’t want you to do anything.” “What am
I supposed to do then,” responds an astounded Moses. With his best Jedi Master look God simply
says, “Watch.”
Then comes the part that is really
troubling. The plagues start happening
like some wild video game. The Nile
turns red with blood because huge alligators that resemble something out of a bad
Disney movie start chomping on unsuspecting Egyptian fishermen. Then come a series of calamities all getting
worse than the one before including frogs, flies, boils that no cortisone cream
can soothe, hail like the size of softballs, and finally a shadow that comes
over all of Egypt that looks very much like that scene in the War of the Worlds
when the aliens overshadowed all the good people on earth.
As the shadow passes over all the
first born of Egypt have sudden cardiac arrests including Pharaoh’s prize
possession, his only son. It is truly
awful.
God comes off as a very spoiled kid
who is used to having his way or else.
As a working theologian this kind of stuff is not good for
business. I have enough trouble trying
to deal with “why bad things happen to good people” without movies like this
making God out even more capricious and calculating than the original story
implies.
All this is to say that when I try
to interpret the Old Testament to people who say something like, “How this
angry and vengeful God can be the same God that Jesus calls “Abba, Father,” I
tell them that the Old Testament is a bit like the Grand Canyon. You cannot take one of the many layers and
dig it out and then say, “Now this is the Old Testament.” Quite frankly some of those layers need to
be mined and explored.
The realization that there are some
newer layers on top is good to know also. Some of those early layers in the Old
Testament are what you might call “heavily theologized” renditions of what
happened. It is often the theological
view of the writers and editors that we witness when we hear the story.
This Christmas again we will hear
the story of a God becoming a child.
This time it is not a Tiny Tim look alike but the real thing. What this child ends up doing helps us take
another look at those layers. It seems that one reason Jesus comes is to help
us get a better picture of the real God.
This child of Christmas does not say
“watch” but asks us to participate in the healing of the nations rather than the
destroying of them. An historical
examination of those plagues that were done with all those special effects by
Hollywood can reveal some rather natural explanations of how those “natural
disasters” may have happened rather than being the result of a vengeful, angry
God who acts like a spoiled child.
If you want to wrestle with what the
Bible means and not just what it says for God’s sake, and I’m not using that
phrase lightly, do not pay much attention to what you see on the big
screen. The recent Exodus movie makes
for good special effects but the Bible needs to be viewed absent the popcorn
version.
I know God will appreciate that and
Tiny Tim probably would too. God bless
us everyone.
