sustain:if:able kiwi

Holy week at the movies: Never let me go, then Invictus on Easter Sunday

The fact that popular media culture is an imaginative palette for faith … the church has to take that imaginative palette seriously… if part of the pastoral task of the church is to communicate God’s mercy and God’s freedom in a way that people understand then you have to use the language that they’re using, you have to use the metaphors and forms of experience that are already familiar to them. Tom Beaudoin

Never let me go: again
While at Hailsham, Tommy gives Kathy a cassette tape of a (fictional) singer Judy Bridgewater. Kathy grows to treasure one song in particular, titled, appropriately, “Never let me go.” She grasps it not as a love song, but as a mother’s plea to her baby. The song, a recurring musical note running the length of the movie, offers another way to understand the Easter experience. That in and through acts of perverse human brutality is the reality that in Jesus, we realise that God will “never let us go.”

Invictus

I’d want to focus on one stand out scene, when Matt Damon, playing Springbok Captain, looks out the bars of Mandela’s cell at Robben Island and struggles to grasp the impact of 27 years of back breaking hard labour:

“Thirty years in prison, cell and you come out and forgive the men who put you there.”

And Mandela’s understanding of leadership:

“The rainbow nation starts here. Reconciliation starts here. Forgiveness starts here. It liberates the soul. It removes fear. That is why it’s such a powerful weapon.”

Such is the power of “Invictus.” It offers a vision of the world in which forgiveness is centrally transformative, not just from the pulpit, but in leadership and through life.

Mark 16:6-7 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you.