pat loughery

Easter weekend brings us two timely sermons on similar topics from wonderful communicators:

From Anglican Bishiop N. T. Wright:

And the reason that I labour this alternative worldview, and highlight the ways in which it represents not just a variation on the genuine path of Jesus and his first followers but a full-scale rejection and overturning of it, is because it has become, in our own day, a major if not the major alternative, in the popular mind, to the true path of the kingdom, the sacramental path, the path of healing and baptism and consecration to which we rededicate ourselves today. The reason for the astonishing popularity of The Da Vinci Code on the one hand, and for the huge current media hype about the so-called ‘Gospel of Judas’ on the other, is that so many in our day are eager for enlightenment, hungry for spirituality, and yet desperate to avoid the way of the cross, the genuinely revolutionary kingdom of Jesus.

(Link to full text)

And from Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams,

One of the ways in which we now celebrate the great Christian festivals in our society is by a little flurry of newspaper articles and television programmes raking over the coals of controversies about the historical basis of faith. So it was no huge surprise to see a fair bit of coverage given a couple of weeks ago to the discovery of a ‘Gospel of Judas’, which was (naturally) going to shake the foundations of traditional belief by giving an alternative version of the story of the passion and resurrection. Never mind that this is a demonstrably late text which simply parallels a large number of quite well-known works from the more eccentric fringes of the early century Church; this is a scoop, the real, ‘now it can be told’ version of the origins of Christian faith.

You’ll recognise the style, of course, from the saturation coverage of the Da Vinci Code literature.

(Link to full text)