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| Purely by coincidence Motherwell fans |
A bigger stretch of the imagination would be to think that The House at the End of the Street is a good film, sadly after seeing it in the cinema, no less, it's not. As far as horror films go it's a tad predictable. There are two main reasons this fails as a horror film:
1) There is a lack of horror moments, playing out more like a teen drama in places.
2) The actual horror bits are predictable which means you know what's coming next and the shock factor is therefore missing.
My imagination was in over drive last week as I was asked to do the children's talk at church on Sunday. I went for the classic kid's favourite Bible story of Noah. There were two reasons for this.
1) I'd read an article on how we turn the story of Noah into the story of a floating zoo or something like Evan Almighty. In doing so we miss out all the bits about God being grieved that he made man and that ultimately this was part of His overall redemption plan.
2) I'd heard that the kids like multimedia presentations and I had the best ever idea on how to use this information. So I cropped and chopped 2012 into 6 minutes featuring flooding, animals, arks, and even a character called Noah.
Each of these three observations game me three insights to the Bible.
1) There is something surprising about the Bible even if you're not religious. There is a message of hope for all even the underdog and down trodden. Unless you're supporting a particular team there is something delightful about seeing the underdog win. Perhaps it's because we consider our self to be smaller than the 'man' and it gives us hope of a better future. Like the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the beggar, at his gate. Lazarus (not the back from the dead guy) was the poorest of the poor and the man whose gate he sat at was filthy rich, you could smell the money coming off of him. When they died the rich man was cast into Hell for his injustice and greedy acts in life. Conversely, Lazarus went to Heaven for his godly life. The whole story is found in Luke 16, starting at verse 19.
2) As Christians, or those who are familiar with the Bible, has the Bible lost it's shock factor? We know what's coming next, Jesus dies and is resurrected. There is something horrifying about the Passion account, not to mention Noah, the birth of the Hebrew nation, and the way that God, faithful to His word, allowed the nations of Judah and Israel to be over thrown. Yet we think of them in fairly sanitized and normal terms.
He was crucified - This is a savage way to die! And it's not just the pain and brutality of getting nails pummelled into you. There's they beating before hand with shrapnel laced whips and rods. Then there is the hanging around, literally you hang with your weight going through your nail punctured hands/wrists, the downside being you start to asphyxiate so you clench your teeth and through gut wrenching pain push yourself up via your mutilated feet. Your weight is being borne through a small section of your feet which has a giant nail driven through them, holding you to a plank of wood.
God's grace is shocking, extravagant even.
More over there is great drama in the accounts of the Gospels and Acts. There is beautiful poetry in the Psalms and wisdom in Proverbs. Somewhere along the road I feel we are losing this and in doing so we are short changing ourselves. At an Easter service this year, for the first time I can recall in my life, I heard a graphic account of the events that happened on the first Good Friday. Hearing that was not fun or something I rejoiced in out of some perverse masochistic need; instead it tells us how much God loves us.
3) In a world of a new i-pad, i-phone, and Kindle every year and movie reboots of franchises almost as often, it's remarkable that people still remember what the Bible is. Lying next to me is a reboot of the Bible, well the New Testament. It's got the books reordered for an age where many people despite knowing of the Bible, have never read it, fancy graphics that help understand texts more and cartoons to bring an almost multimedia feel to it. Despite all this and the contemporary language; the message is the same. In the same way my Noah retelling was there to communicate the story, which as a kid I loved, to a young generation today. It's a hard story to tell to kids without reducing it to a story of there being a big flood but hey God and Noah saved giraffes.
I mentioned the film 2012 above and as entertaining as it is there is something curious about it. For those of you who haven't seen it: spoiler alert. The plot is essentially about a group of people trying to survive a series of cataclysmic events that will end the world as we know it. Super volcanoes, massive earthquakes and mega-tsunamis bring around the aforementioned devastation which ends with global flooding. Humanity survives along with animals on board a series of international arks. In addition there's a character called Noah. Had they called it Noah and the ark 2012 it wouldn't have been less subtle. Hollywood seems to have a fascination with certain eternal stories and themes and that's not a bad thing, even if 2012 wasn't as brutal as the Genesis version. For that we may have to wait for Russell Crowe and Co.
The story may never change but that's not to say we can't use new and effective methods to engage with others. Tapestries were great in medieval times when people couldn't read but they're now relics in museums. I'm a very visual person, I can obviously read but in general I like to see a story unfold in a film rather than a book. We now have multimedia technology that can bring the ancient stories alive to another generation who prefer to see the story unfold and I'm sure in the near future we'll go one step further and be able to have interactive 3-D presentations.
