Our footsteps echoed down a stone corridor as we were led through the halls of the Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan to see one of the greatest art masterpieces of all time. My travel companion, fluent in Italian, walked on ahead of me, talking excitedly with the guide.  Just prior to our arrival, the church had been closed, because the mural was being restored, he explained, but the restoration artists had just completed their work.  We were to be among the earliest visitors to the masterpiece.

            I had expected Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” to be an altar piece in a grand cathedral, but instead, there it was on an undistinguished wall in what amounted to the lunchroom where monks and nuns take their meals.  As is the case with all great art, I was stunned and absorbed by the fresco.   “Look there,” my friend said, pointing to Jesus.  “Look to the left of Jesus.  Doesn’t that look just like a woman?”  At the time, I didn’t give it much thought, until last year, when the phenomena called The Da Vinci Code made the best seller lists.

Recently, it seemed as if everyone was reading The Da Vinci Code.  One of the reasons I was inspired to offer this sermon was because so many of you have asked me “have you read The Da Vinci Code yet?”  It’s also been interesting to Wayne and me that the two “best sellers” dominating American popular culture right now are a fictional mystery novel that speculates about the life of Jesus and a movie about the death of Jesus.  When Wayne and I began to think about our sermons for Palm Sunday and for Easter, we felt compelled to focus on these two cultural phenomena of the year thus far: the vigorous conversations about the book, The Da Vinci Code and the passionate debates regarding Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” 

It’s amazing to me that Jesus life gets this much press coverage.  In truth, these two best sellers are a symptom of what is often described as “the culture wars,” between social and religious conservatives and social and religious liberals. 

            What I hope to do this morning is to first of all, unpack some of the claims behind the Da Vinci code and offer a historical and biblical analysis of those claims.  I want to look at some of the concerns that have been raised about the heresies found in this book, and explore what these heresies mean for religious liberals as well as their implications for the liberal church today.  And finally, I want to answer the question—“so what?”  How does knowledge about the issues in The Da Vinci Code affect my life and my faith as a Unitarian Universalist.” All of this in 20 minutes or less!  But first—a disclaimer:  If you haven’t read The Da Vinci Code yet—be forewarned that I am going to give away the plot and the mystery of the book through the course of this sermon.  Sorry, but I have no other choice, if I’m to explore in any depth some of the premises of Dan Brown’s novel. 

            For those of you who haven’t read the book, or need your memory refreshed, let me remind you of how it begins.  The book opens in the Louvre Museum, in Paris, at 10:46 p.m.  Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere has been fatally stabbed, but before he dies, Sauniere has stripped himself naked and arranged his soon-to-be corpse in the pose of Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawing “Vesuvian Man,” drawing a pentacle around himself with his own blood.  Then with invisible ink he writes a series of numbers and words that point to a cryptic message.  Robert Langdon, professor of religious symbology, was to meet with Sauniere before his murder, and is called in to help unlock the mystery of the symbols that Sauniere wrote and displayed in his bizarre positioning of his own corpse.   Sauniere’s granddaughter, Sophie Neveu, is (conveniently)  also a cryptologist who has been estranged from her grandfather for many years. She is called into help uncover the mystery.  Together, Robert and Sophie embark upon a 454 page journey through the streets of Paris and countryside of England, and a 2000 year old detour through such controversial topics as Gnosticism, the divinity of Jesus, the suppression of the feminine in church history, and the real story behind the Holy Grail,  to name only a few!  However, the heart of the Christian heresy hinges on two major questions:  Was Jesus married and was Jesus a daddy?

            That Jesus was married is a theory that has never been given much credence or air time in popular culture until Dan Brown’s book came out.  It was always assumed that because the New Testament makes no allusion to Jesus’ being married that he did not marry or even have a girlfriend.  One of the shocking claims that Brown makes in The Da Vinci Code has its major clue located in the famous fresco of “The Last Supper.”  In that painting, Brown suggests, the disciple that is just to the left of Jesus, the figure of the disciple often called “John, the Beloved” is in fact Mary Magdalene—in disciples drag!  The claim is that it would have been too shocking for Da Vinci, himself a member of the secret society known as the Priory of Sion  (that existed to maintain the secrets of the Holy Grail) to openly acknowledge that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s chosen disciple.  Instead, he painted Mary but called her John.  

            What other evidence points to any relationship between Jesus and Mary? A major source is the non-canonical collection of books known as the Gnostic Gospels.  Gnosticism came to light in 1945 when ancient biblical scrolls were discovered in mountain caves just outside of a small town called Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt. The Gnostics lived in monastic communities where they translated and rewrote their gospels so they could be disseminated around that part of the world. In one of those books,  “The Gospel of Mary, ” Mary Magdalene is the known as the Savior’s “beloved.”  She is possessed of knowledge and teaching superior to that of the public apostolic tradition.  Her superiority is based on vision, intuition and private revelation.  Written sometime around the 2^nd century, this Gospel reveals a much different vision of Mary than the faulty notion of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute.  Listen, for example, to this section, from the Gospel of Mary:

Peter said to Mary, “Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than the rest of women.  Tell us the words of the Savior which you remember—which you know.”    Peter spoke and questioned them about the Savior:  Did he really speak with a woman without our knowledge and not openly?  Are we to turn about and listen to her?  Did he prefer her to us?”  Levi answered and said to Peter, “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered.  Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries.  But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her?  Surely the Savior knows her very well.  That is why he loved her more than us.”

      In another Gnostic text, The Gospel of Phillip, it is written: “And the companion of the Savior was Mary Magdalene  He loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth.  They said to him “why do you love her more than all of us?  The savior answered and said to them “why do I not love you like her?”   This is not the image of Jesus most of us grew up with, for historically, Jesus has been stripped of his sexuality just as his companion, Mary Magdalene, has been reviled for hers.  Why?

In The Da Vinci Code, the answer to that question lies in the search for, and the mystery surrounding, the Holy Grail.  Most of us assume that the Holy Grail is the chalice that Jesus drank from at the last supper, that it is the actual, physical cup he held when he said the words “this is my blood, drink this in remembrance of me.”  However, the contention Brown highlights in his novel is that the Holy Grail is not a thing at all.   The Holy Grail is a person, a woman in fact.  And not only any woman, but in Brown’s words “Not just any person.  A woman who carried with her a secret so powerful that, if revealed, it threatened to devastate the very foundation of Christianity.”  Brown has his character, Grail expert Professor Teabing say: “Magdalene was not a prostitute.  That unfortunate misconception was the legacy of a smear campaign launched by the early Church.  The church needed to defame Mary Magdalene in order to cover up her dangerous secret—her role as the Holy Grail.” 

            It is at this point in The Da Vinci Code that Brown makes his second, shocking assertion.  Listen to this section from about the middle of the book:

“The Holy Grail is a legend about royal blood.  When the Grail legend speaks of “the chalice that held the blood of Christ…it speaks, in fact, of Mary Magdalene—the female womb that carried Jesus’ royal bloodline.”   Mary Magdalene carried the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ?  But how could Christ have a bloodline unless…” [Sophie] paused and looked at Langdon.  Langdom smiled softly.  “Unless they had a child.”

      There’s the bombshell that has upset many a Biblical conservative or literalist.  It’s bad enough to consider that Jesus allowed Mary Magdalene, the alleged prostitute, to hang out with them.  It’s still more disturbing to consider that Mary Magdalene was a powerful, resourceful woman in her own right, who was the most favored friend among Jesus disciples.  Still more shocking and heretical is the claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene may have been companions, or the Aramaic word for spouse.  But then, The Da Vinci Code goes one step further into heresy by saying that Jesus did in fact, father a child with Mary.  Mary’s womb was actually the Holy Grail and the secret that she bore was that Jesus and Mary started a new bloodline—the House of Benjamin. 

      Whoa.  When I got to that part of the book, my jaw dropped.  I had never even considered that Jesus could have been somebody’s daddy.  Professor Teabing, the millionaire historian and Grail expert, explains:

“Mary Magdalene was the womb that carried his royal lineage.   Mary Magdalene was pregnant at the time of the crucifixion.  For the safety of Christ’s unborn child, she had no choice but to flee the Holy Land…Mary Magdalene secretly traveled to France…there she found safe refuge in the Jewish Community.  It was here in France that she gave birth to a daughter.  The quest for the Holy Grail is literally the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene.  A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one, the lost sacred feminine.”  

Why should this be so shocking?  I can think of at least two reasons.  The first is the centuries- old struggle about the role of women in mainstream and/or conservative religions.  Women cannot be priests in the Roman Catholic Faith, nor may they serve communion.  Women are also barred from serving ministers in some conservative Christian denominations.  However, the mistrust of women goes even deeper than barring them from leadership.  Women in ancient times were seen as powerful creators. Women most closely resembled God in their mystical ability to give birth to new life. Women were turned into the enemy through the story of Eve's corruption in the Garden of Eden. And the entire process was flipped on its head as we are told that Eve was created from Adam. All of a sudden, a man is giving birth to a woman and claiming a higher place in the scheme of things. 
           Some say the earliest quests for the holy grail during the Crusades were actually quests to find and destroy the blood relatives of Jesus and any evidence of his marriage to Mary Magdalene. All of this is used to explain why the all-male Church leadership devised such a dogmatic and patriarchal religion. It's an issue of power and it's a corruption of the true life and teachings of Jesus. There has been plenty of published evidence and speculation that the leadership of the Roman church sought to control both women and sexuality. They did so in a concerted effort to demonize the sacred feminine and establish a patriarchal hierarchy.[1]

For centuries, women were told they had to remain silent in churches and be subordinate to church leaders.  They were reminded of sayings of the early church fathers, such the 5^th century’s St. John Chrysostom, who wrote: “The woman taught once and ruined everything.  On this account let her not teach.  St. Augustine wrote that man, not woman, was made in God’s image and woman therefore is not complete without man, while he is completely alone.”  Frankly, it’s messages like this that have shaped much of Christian orthodoxy and the more conservative platforms of the Catholic church and Protestant denominations.  Some women began to look around their churches and say “what’s in this for me?  Where do I fit in?  Where are my role models?  Mary—the virgin mother of Jesus?  Can’t do that.  Mary Magdalene---the alleged prostitute?  Not a career choice I’m willing to make.  Where do I go from here?”

It wasn’t until the 1970’s that feminist scholarship began to gain a modicum of acceptance in religious circles.  One of the earliest denominations to institutionally embrace the idea of the sacred feminine was Unitarian Universalism.  UU’s began to insist on using gender-neutral or gender-equal language.  Unitarian Universalist women began to explore the ways that women have been excluded from history, denied a voice and a presence in the larger religious stories we tell and teach.  Women began reshaping our movement by insisting that women’s lives and experiences be validated and considered as normative as men’s.  I think this is one reason that The Da Vinci Code is popular among Unitarian Universalists, and perhaps, most popular among women.  It spins out a story that we like to hear and that inspires us—whether or not we believe it to be factually and historically true.

So, The Da Vinci Code has received so much ire because of the elevation of Mary Magdalene’s role in Jesus life to wife and mother of his children – but the other major criticism levied against Brown is that his writing is just plain historically inaccurate.  As a novel—it’s interesting and entertaining.  But when you start messing around with scholarship, when you start making claims that you can’t substantiate, that’s when you incur the wrath of biblical and theological scholars.  In an article in “Crisis Magazine: Politics, Culture and the Church” Catholic writer Sandra Miesel sets out to “Dismantle the Da Vinci Code.”   She writes:

“[Brown’s] willful distortions of documented history are more than matched by his outlandish claims about controversial subjects.  In the end, Dan Brown has penned a poorly written, atrociously researched mess.   It may well do for Gnosticism what The Mists of Avalon did for paganism, gain it popular acceptance.  After all, how many lay readers will see the blazing inaccuracies put forward as buried truths?”

         Now there is the rub.  Maybe Brown’s book is full of “blazing inaccuracies.”  In the preface to his novel, Brown makes the bold claim that “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” Unfortunately, he makes enough broad assumptions and a few minor errors to open himself up to attack. Most scholar and art critics challenge his notion that Da Vinci painted Mary into the Last Supper; instead, he is St. John portrayed in a typical Da Vinci’s style as an effeminate youth.  Some Catholics have felt that the Da Vinci code is nothing more than an assault on their faith.  Again, I quote Ms Miesel:  “What’s more, in making phony claims of scholarship, Brown’s book infects readers with a virulent hostility towards Catholicism.” 

       So—what is the truth?  Did the church really cover up Jesus marital status and Mary Magdalene’s child so as to keep the sacred feminine from having equal power to men?  Or, is this just another good yarn meant to sell a lot of books. This is, after all, a novel—which is, by definition, a work of fiction! To answer this question I am reminded of something Biblical Scholar Marcus Borg often says when speaking about the stories in the Bible.  He’ll say: “I don’t know if it happened exactly in this way—but I believe the story to be true.”  The statement is a koan, a deliberate paradox to make us think about the nature of historical accuracy vs. our understanding of the truth.  What I believe to be the truth about The Da Vinci Code is this:  There are some facts that we know about the writers of the New Testament, their agenda, their biases, etc.  There are some facts that we know about the earliest beginnings of the Christian Church as documented in the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. and subsequent councils.  There is one fact of which we are certain regarding the life of Jesus of Nazareth: he was crucified under the reign of Pontius Pilate sometime around 32 C.E.   However, we will never know all the facts about Jesus, the early Christian movement, or Mary Magdalene.  We’ll never really know all the facts about the early goddess religions or the role of women in early culture.  Certainly we have some information, and from that we glean different conclusions.  But the truth?  As Pilate asked Jesus during his interrogation: “What is truth?”

        When faced with the absence of hard, cold, scientific knowledge, we create truths for ourselves interactively, bringing to what facts there are our own needs for inspiration, comfort and meaning.  The creation of “truth” in matters of religion is rarely an objective experience—it is more often a subjective gathering of ideas, beliefs, and history.  It is more often selecting the stories we want to hear because they enhance the meaning of our own lives.  So personally, I don’t care if the stories spun out in The Da Vinci Code are factually true.  If I were a biblical scholar studying these ancient documents the book refers to in their original language, I might have a different opinion.  But to entertain the idea that Jesus might have been married, might have even fathered children is far from a shocking and distasteful premise to me.  Instead, it makes me think about Jesus in a different way that has meaning for me —not the bloodied Jesus on his way to Calvary, but the one who was really “real,” who might have fallen in love, had been intimate with a woman he loved, and died not for our sins, but because that love spilled over into all that he did and all that he was.

        Historically, the greatest charge leveled against Unitarian Universalists has been that we’re “heretics,” which in Latin, simply means “to choose.”  In our chosen and choosing faith, we are given the right to decide how a story makes sense for us—and to choose which stories give our lives meaning, purpose, hope and comfort.  The story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is one that intrigues me from among the many stories told about Jesus. It’s not the story the traditional churches will emphasize during the Christian Holy Week that lies ahead of us. The other best-seller that’s out there this week in our movie-saturated culture will likely mean that churches will focus on the suffering of Christ as the primary source of his meaning for our lives.

       I choose differently. I choose to embrace a story of Jesus’ human love, rather than a story of Jesus atoning death. How about you? Which Jesus story speaks to you this Palm Sunday?  Which story do you choose?  Which story chooses you?