I was surprised to be asked by a close friend of the Beaker Folk,the vicar of a greenhouse in Hertfordshire, whether I thought "Q" was a source of the Gospels.
Which is odd, when you consider it. I mean, we thought he was much more famous for inventing cigars that could shoot down helicopter gunships, and wristwatches that concealed high-explosive ostriches. And surely, we wondered, wasn't he a little on the young side - even old as he was - to have writen parts of the Gospel?
Rewind to 47AD, somewhere in an early Christian Community in the Middle East....
"Now pay attention, Matthew. This may appear to you simply to be a list of the kind of people we need to keep happy if we're going to keep them under the thumb and stop them questioning authority. The hungry, the mourners, the poor, those who are desperate for righteousness. It could just look like we're offering them "pie in the sky" so they'll shut up and be grateful while their lords and masters are riding rough-shod over them. But if you press this button marked "liberation"... you'll see that in fact what you've got there is a manifesto to overturn common presuppositions, make the first last and the last first, send the proud down to the dust and raise up those who've been ground down since the day the world began."
"That's brilliant, Q. But don't you think somebody's gonna spot the cunning disguise?"
"Maybe one day, Matthew. Maybe one day."
Ah, Comrade Archdruid, your reflections warm my heart. Keep on clasping those pebbles and light those tealights... and then chuck them at banks, parliament, MOD installations, palaces... take your pick.
ReplyDeleteCheerio,