Connections Archive
Devotional: After Easter
07 April 2010
Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church
Nick Cave is perhaps best known as a musician with his post-punk, alternative and garage rock (depending what era of his career you're talking about), but he's also a novelist and screenwriter of some note.
His music and his writing have been strongly influenced by the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, but more recently the New. He's said his music has mellowed as he has shifted focus to the New Testament.
He's claimed to be a Christian in the past, but in an interview with the Guardian last year, he said, "Do I personally believe in a personal God? No."
In 1998, Cave was asked to write an introduction to the book of Mark. It's an insightful piece of writing from someone who said he found the church presented an anaemic and uninteresting Jesus.
"The Christ that the church offers us, the bloodless, placid 'Saviour'--the man smiling benignly at a group of children, or calmly, serenely hanging from the cross--denies Christ his potent, creative sorrow or his boiling anger that confronts us so forcefully in Mark. Thus the church denies Christ his humanity, offering up a figure that we can perhaps 'praise,' but never relate to."
He adds, "Merely to praise Jesus in his Perfectness keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully bent. Clearly, this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator. Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the pull of gravity--our ordinariness, our mundanity--and it was through his example he gave our imaginations the freedom to rise and to fly. In short, to be Christ-like."
At Easter, we focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus, as we should. It's a time of reflection and rejoicing.
After Easter, it's time to focus on living out what it means. As followers. As disciples. In short, to be Christ-like.
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