Stupor mundi updated: the wonders of preaching


Geoffrey Kirk on an earnest quest for the forgotten feminine as a theme for a Sunday morning sermon delivered as serious theology


C


lericus anglicanus stupor mundi, as they used to say. And certainly, in their sermons at least, the clergy


of our own day can be prety stupifying. Faced with


the Gosel for the Tird Sunday of Easter, Year C (with its puzzling haul of one hundred and fiſty three fishes) a priest of my acquaintance decided to give her congregation the benefit of an explanation. Why does John report so precise a number? In all


probability because the number was significant, though what its significance was is hard now to determine. Speculation has been rife and inventive down the ages. Hoskyns and Davey observe that it is the sum of the first seventeen of the natural numbers – but without explaining why that is significant. Origen (always quick with an arcane solution to an


insoluble problem) sees it as an allusion to the Sacred Trinity: fiſty, multiplied by three, plus three. (But he does not explain why fiſty.) Jerome (always more down to earth) claims that it is an allusion to the belief that there existed one hundred and fiſty three secies of fish, and the catch was parabolic of the Church’s universal mission. Our preacher was spoilt for choice, but selected none of


these. She turned from well-trodden pathways to a remoter source: Margaret Starbird. Te title of Starbird’s best-known book The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail probably tells you all you need to know about her. But the blurb helpfully sells it out. ‘Margaret Starbird’s theological beliefs were profoundly shaken when she read Holy Blood and Holy Grail, a book


Is it funny? E


that dared to suggest that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalen, and that their descendents carried on the blood line in Western Europe. Shocked by such heresy, this Roman Catholic scholar set out to refute it, but instead found new and compelling evidence for the existence of the bride of Jesus… In this provocative book Starbird draws her conclusions


from an extensive study of history, heraldry, medieval art, mythology, psychology and the Bible itself. Te Woman with the Alabaster Jar is a quest for the forgoten feminine – in the hope that its return will help restore a healthy balance to planet earth.’ Yes, you guessed it: 153 is a numerical encryption for


feminism’s own star bird! A review of the book explains: ‘Starbird finds the solution through analyzing the gematria value of the full Greek epithet, transliterated in English as h magdalhnh. Te numerical value of the name is 153.’ How all this fits with the miraculous draſt in John 21 is by


no means made clear. But you guessed it again: our preacher explained to her congregation that the New Testament was once litered with references to the women who were most closely connected with Jesus. A subsequent patriarchal conspiracy has removed all but


the most skilfully encoded. Tat would, no doubt, be the same patriarchal conspiracy which removed all reference to female commanders from Caesar’s Galic Wars, and the biographies of countless leading ladies from Plutarch’s lives. Clericus anglicanus stupor mundi. Te preacher in question


trained at St Stephen’s House. ND


Paul Griffin asks whether people are too quick to take offence at humour based on Christianity and the Bible


ach age is puritanical and licentious in its own ways. In our age, there seem to be many people who pride themselves on the speed and ease with which they are offended. A joke that would have passed unnoticed fifty years ago stirs up a wasps’ nest of letters to the Press. If Muslims object to references to the Koran, readers say, why should Christians be indulgent to mockery of the Bible? There are in fact a number of answers to that, one being that we are not Muslims, another that Our Lord


24 ■ newdirections ■ July 2010


himself on occasion made religious jokes. There are two basic types of joke: the type that is launched at a target, as in ND’s 30DAYS, and one that is just frivolous, like the old hymn joke: ‘Gladly the cross-eyed bear’. I doubt if this was intended as a criticism of hymns, or of a particular hymn. It is just a joke. Should a joke involve the cross? Probably not, but when I remember some of the jokes my sainted father-in-law used to bring back from Convocation, that even shooked


me, a young man of no particular piety, I am astonished at its moderation. The Old Testament, of course, is safer


ground. A book that contains Og the king of Basan, Ittai the Gittite, and Dodo the Ahohite, while being not in itself a bundle of laughs, cannot be immune from titters. In


our teenage, when sermons


seemed much longer and more focused on the Old Testament than today’s, the name Chedorlaomer leapt out at us as a relief from boredom, and we whispered


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