“honest to blog”
I’ve found that boys and girls have very different tastes, every orange wednesday this becomes clearer to me. It was my choice to watch Blades of Glory, it was Jenny’s to watch Freedom Writers. Next week, we’ll go and see the U2 film (that’s my choice), this week it was Jenny’s with Juno (and secretly, I was very pleased, because it would have been mine too).
It’s a film about a teenage pregnancy. Here’s the trailer.
As far as the film goes, you sort of see it coming. Girl gets pregnant / girl tells boy / girl (thankfully) bottles out of an abortion / girl decides to give the baby up / girl wrecks a marriage / girl has baby / girl gives away baby / girl sings a song with baby’s dad. And even though what I’ve just typed looks more like a particularly dark episode of Byker Grove, it is really funny. All of it. Her telling him having warmed him up by complimenting his mum’s detergent? Funny. Her telling her best friend that she’s ‘for shiz prego’? funny. Her parents admitting that they’d rather she be on hard drugs? (Dark, but) funny. It made me laugh. So as far as a comedy goes, it’s job well done Juno.
Go and see it. It’s funny. But, maybe there’s a lesson or two to learn from it. They could have disowned her, but Juno’s parents’ reaction to her being pregnant calms and they stand by her - that’s a lesson. And as the 9 months tick by, you see Juno becoming more and more leperised by her classmates, and the reaction of those that walk with her is inspiringly counter-cultural. As I watched it, I thought of how I might react if a sixteen year old I knew got ‘caught out’. Which one of her classmates would I be most like? “For shame Juno, how could you..?”
And the thing is, it would be so easy to now make this blog about guilt. ‘Teenage pregnancy happens in churches, so be more like Juno’s good friends, and less like the bullies that give her a hard time.’ And that would look like a good thing. Externally, that’d be the right thing to do. But internally, that’s another matter. It may look like the right thing to do, but it’s not the gospel. It’s just moralising.
You see, it’s not just doing that right thing that’s important. It’s doing it for the right reason, with the right motivation. And our reason is always the cross. It’s only when we see ourselves in Juno that we’ll be changed ‘internally’. Before God, we’re all Junos - we’ve all been caught out and should be every bit ashamed. But the gospel is that Jesus, who in dying on the cross became the ultimate Juno - bearing the ultimate shame - our shame. Mark 15 shows Jesus being mocked by everyone, even sworn enemies united to shame him. And as they did, he was taking our place, and feeling our shame. When we get this, we’ll see that we have nothing to hide behind when a Juno walks in our church. We won’t want to help simply because ‘it’s the right thing to do’ but because ‘we can because Jesus dealt with our shame and loved us when he should have chucked us in the skip, and we have no right to see her as any different to us’.
It has got faults, of course it does. The biggest one being that it downplays the reality of the situation it describes. It glamorises a child having a child. And at the end of the film, I was left thinking ‘that was one hairy year in the life of Juno McGuff, thank goodness it’s all over now, and she can get back to playing the guitar with her boyfriend’; that’s not a good thing. But I stilll don’t think that that’s no reason to not go and see it. Don’t get all reformed and precious about making light of sin. Take your friends, and use it. This film will be seen by millions, lets make the most of it.
A few days ago, Jonny Raine and I ended up in Bridgend, specifically Bryntirion. Jonny had picked up some information about a day conference on ‘The Call’. So off we trotted down the M4 heading WESTwards.