Thought for the Day, 16 March 2006

The Rev. Dr Giles Fraser

Isaac Hayes, soul singer and the voice of Chef in South Park, has sensationally quit the TV show complaining it's become offensive to people with religious belief. Hayes is the latest in a seemingly never-ending succession of religious people getting offended - by cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, by the depiction of Jesus in the Jerry Springer show, by the depiction of the Pope in Popetown. The list goes on and on.

A number of years ago some Christians in America got all terribly worked-up about a small exhibition of traditional Catalan figurines called Caganers that went on display in California. The Caganer is a little figurine of a boy, squatting down to relieve himself, that's often tucked away at the back of a Christmas nativity scene. They're very common in and around Barcelona. Predictably enough, a number of Californian Christians were deeply offended by the presence of a shameless peasant within the holy stable. Theirs was an instinctive and visceral repulsion at the idea that the purity of God could share an intimate space with the messiness of the human.

I found this reaction fascinating, for it struck me that it was precisely the same reaction of many in the second and third centuries who first heard about Christianity and were themselves disgusted by its theology. "The word became flesh and dwelt amongst us" as St John puts it. And it was deeply disturbing stuff, for it meant that the sanctity of God was no longer to be sheltered from the grubby reality of human life.

Most of the time we don't appreciate quite how radical the Christmas story is - for its effect is to collapse the barrier between the sacred and the profane. God is no longer thought of as sealed off from the contamination of the world. And it follows from this that a God who chose to be born of a disgraced teenager in a grotty shed is not a God who needs protecting from humiliation - let alone from South Park, Popetown or Jerry Spinger.

Indeed, this extraordinary God-become-human figure that Christians know as Christ, grew up to make his life, not amongst the pious, but amongst those that decent religious people shunned: hookers, frauds, weirdoes and assorted low-lifes - the cast of a Jerry Springer Show if ever there was one.

No, those grim-faced, placard-waving Christians who get so easily outraged give the impression that they're trying to transform Christianity into something that it's not - a wholesome and protected space that affords sanctuary from a rude and nasty world. This, emphatically, is not the earthy religion of the word made flesh. For a religion that finds the almighty God, creator of heaven and earth, beginning human life in a smelly cowshed should never to be so easily offended.