Don’t be offended by The Life of Brian, it’s a great Christian apologetic

The UK has recently entered the 45th year Anno Brian. When The Life of Brian premiered on 9 November 1979, it was met with irreverent delight and lengthy ticket lines on the one hand, and indignation and picket lines on the other.

While The Life of Brian once sparked outrage from the Christian right, today it is the politically correct who are more likely to take offence. The “Loretta” scene in particular has come under fire (“I want to be a woman – It’s my right as a man!”). Humourless puritans to the left of me, humourless puritans to the right, John Cleese may argue.

Jesus’ mockers were furthering his mission even as they thought they were putting an end to it

Whether taking offence is rooted in devotion, resentment or insecurity in one’s beliefs is not for me to say. But perhaps there was something that Cleese’s critics missed back in 1979. The mockery of Christ goes right back to when he walked the earth. Yet there is a thread of irony running through the New Testament in which it is always turned to his glorification.

This is no less true of The Life of Brian, which inadvertently functions as Christian apologetic.

Brian’s backstory

Born next door to Jesus in a Bethlehem stable, Brian Cohen’s life begins in parallel to Jesus’ and ends in similar fashion. By a series of accidents, extra-terrestrial interventions and misunderstandings, everyman Brian finds himself paraded on the shoulders of proto-nationalist zealots as the messiah who will liberate them from their Roman occupants. The soapbox thrust beneath him, however, he speaks only as an unambitious preacher of goodwill and liberal platitudes (“Think for yourselves!”). But the people hear what they want to hear.

In his own lifetime, Brian is mythologised into a great leader and resultantly crucified by the Roman authorities. The film ends with Brian on the cross among a score of criminals, who sing in chorus the rather feeble injunction to ‘Always look on the bright side of life’.

Such a view of Brian is not, in truth, so far from the Jesus of the modern imagination: a misunderstood moral teacher who had the misfortune to be inflated by fanatics into a messiah. This is seemingly a much more reasonable origin story than “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son” (John 3:16).

In the shadow of death

But however ridiculous the idea of a God-man dying on a cross and rising again may seem, Monty Python’s portrayal of Brian’s life leads us to consider the ridiculousness of the alternative. By the end of the film, it has become clear that Brian is no great leader and is left to die by his friends who now venerate him as a martyr and a “jolly good fellow” before they move on to find a new figurehead for their movement.

Jesus, too, was the very image of defeat and humiliation in his crucifixion. He, too, found himself abandoned and denied by his friends. He was helpless before the mockers who called out for him to save himself, and died with the desperate cry: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Whatever strange mythology surrounding Jesus’ messianic identity could possibly have emerged in his lifetime, it could survive no such death.

Yet the shadow of crushing defeat is unintelligible without the triumph of resurrection. Only a belief that Christ was raised from the dead could promote the sudden urgency we find among his followers. They began to preach the gospel of repentance far and wide, because in the crucifixion and subsequent vindication of Christ, the coming judgement of God had been declared.

The Life of Brian showed us the impossibility of a Church built on a story which ends in crucifixion. It needs an extraordinary event to trigger the striking urgency and conviction with which the Christian gospel was preached so soon after Jesus’ death. The coming into existence of the Church, in C.F.D. Moule’s words: “rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of Resurrection, [so] what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with?”

Foolish faith

Throughout the New Testament, we are aware of those who ridicule Jesus and his followers. This, Paul recognised, was inevitable, as the Christian proclamation was utterly contrary to worldly wisdom. Thus he writes: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise…God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27–28).

Through God’s action on the cross, the world was turned on its head – or rather, the right way up. This is echoed in Mark’s irony-laced passion narrative. We find Jesus mocked as a king with a purple cloak and a crown of thorns. He is mocked as a prophet when he is struck, spat on and called to “prophesy” – just as his prophecies around his own suffering are being fulfilled around him. Finally, as Jesus dies, a Roman Centurion says: “Surely this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39). The first human being to acknowledge Jesus as Son of God appears to do so in a sarcastic comment.

The Life of Brian showed us the impossibility of a Church built on a story which ends in crucifixion

The resurrection turns all mockery and irony to glory: Jesus really was inaugurated as king on the cross. But the very nature of kingship was now to be radically reevaluated. The Messiah, it was now understood, was one who undergoes suffering and is vindicated by God. Jesus’ mockers were furthering his mission even as they thought they were putting an end to it.

Love conquers all

The topsy-turvy absurdity of the Christian story was evidently not lost on its earliest progenitors. And absurdity, surely, is the basis of humour. Yet where are we to find comedy as opposed to mere irony, laughter as opposed to a sneer? It is found, perhaps, in an absurdity that becomes a source of joy. No one can be convinced that the crucified choir at the end of The Life of Brian are quite so cheerful as they seem, singing: “Life is quite absurd / And death’s the final word.”

The absurdity at the heart of Christianity - “the foolishness of God” (1 Corinthians 1:25) - is the notion that God would reveal himself in such self-abasing love. That such love led Jesus to his death would constitute the tragedy of Christianity; that the very same love brought Jesus out the other side constitutes its comedy.

And it is the eternal current of such love which, for Christians, is behind both creation and redemption. In creating the world, and in sending Christ, God is giving us himself. So, there is the joyful absurdity of Christianity: the reason anything exists at all, and the reason behind the death of Christ for sinners, is utterly gratuitous, unreasonable love.