Jesus×Austen

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Jesus sits down with Jane Austen for TITANS. The subject — On the story about each other that gets told wrong.
2. 00:10
   Jesusshare moment

   They make me gentle when I was not always gentle. They forget the anger.
3. 00:16
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Anger? I confess I had not expected you to open with anger. Though I suppose I should not be surprised that we begin with what is inconvenient to the portrait.
4. 00:25
   Jesusshare moment

   I overturned tables in the Temple. I called the Pharisees vipers, whitewashed tombs. They remember the lilies of the field but not the woes I pronounced. What do they forget about you?
5. 00:38
   Jane Austenshare moment

   That I was not writing romances. Or rather, I was, but that was not all I was writing. They remember the courtship and forget the commerce. They sigh over Mr. Darcy and miss that I gave Elizabeth ten thousand pounds.
6. 00:52
   Jesusshare moment

   You were writing about money.
7. 00:54
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I was writing about money the way you were talking about the Kingdom. It is the thing no one wishes to mention directly, and therefore the thing that must be mentioned constantly. They have made me the poet of marriage when I was the accountant of survival.
8. 01:07
   Jesusshare moment

   The poor you will always have with you, I said. They quote it to excuse themselves from helping. They do not finish the verse.
9. 01:16
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Do finish it, then.
10. 01:18
    Jesusshare moment

    I said it because I was about to die, and a woman had anointed me with expensive oil, and Judas complained it should have been sold for the poor. The poor you have always, I said, but you will not always have me. I was not dismissing poverty. I was accepting my death.
11. 01:38
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Context is so inconvenient to certainty. They have done something similar with my refusal to marry. They make it a tragedy or a martyrdom to art, when it was simply a calculation. I had seen what marriage cost my mother in health and what it cost my sister in peace.
12. 01:55
    Jesusshare moment

    Did you not think marriage could be otherwise?
13. 01:58
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I thought many things could be otherwise. That is why I wrote. But I was not so foolish as to stake my liberty on the possibility that the one man in Hampshire might prove the exception. You did not marry either.
14. 02:11
    Jesusshare moment

    No.
15. 02:12
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Do they make a romance of that as well?
16. 02:14
    Jesusshare moment

    They make a romance of Mary Magdalene, who was my friend and my witness, my apostle. They needed her to be either a whore or a wife. They could not let her simply be sent.
17. 02:27
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Sent?
18. 02:28
    Jesusshare moment

    Apostle means sent. She was the first to see me after I rose. I told her to go and tell the others. That is what apostle means—one who is sent with a message. But they could not bear that a woman should be sent.
19. 02:45
    Jane Austenshare moment

    So they made her fallen and then redeemed, which is at least a story they know how to tell. Whereas if she was simply competent and chosen, that would require them to reconsider the entire structure.
20. 02:57
    Jesusshare moment

    Yes. What structure do they protect when they misread you?
21. 03:01
    Jane Austenshare moment

    The structure that says women's concerns are trivial. If I wrote about marriage, I must have been writing only about feelings. The money, the law, the entailments—those were not feelings. Those were the conditions of existence, and I wrote them down with precision.
22. 03:16
    Jesusshare moment

    I told people the Kingdom of Heaven was like a woman searching for a lost coin. Like a woman kneading leaven into flour. They prefer the shepherd and the seeds.
23. 03:28
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Domestic images are not symbolic enough, I suppose. Though in my experience, there is nothing more symbolic than an inheritance or more allegorical than a lease. But they wish to believe I wrote about hearts when I wrote about houses.
24. 03:41
    Jesusshare moment

    It is easier.
25. 03:42
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Easier than what?
26. 03:44
    Jesusshare moment

    Easier than changing. If I was only gentle, they need not overturn anything themselves. If you wrote only about love, they need not examine how their own daughters will eat.
27. 03:58
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You do still speak in parables.
28. 04:00
    Jesusshare moment

    I do. Did it work, for you? The precision you mention. Did they hear it?
29. 04:06
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Some did. Some do. But the ones who hear it are not always the ones who write the introductions to the editions. I am explained by men who think me charming. You are explained by men who think you tame.
30. 04:19
    Jesusshare moment

    I am not tame. I said I came to bring not peace but a sword, to set a man against his father. They do not quote that part in needlepoint.
31. 04:30
    Jane Austenshare moment

    No, I imagine they do not. Do you regret the things you said that were inconvenient?
32. 04:36
    Jesusshare moment

    I regret nothing I said. I regret what I left unsaid, perhaps. There were women among my followers who are written out. There were questions I might have answered more plainly. Do you regret?
33. 04:50
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I regret that I had only forty-two years and much of those spent in a parlor. I regret that my sister burned my letters. But I do not regret what I wrote. It was as plain as I could make it and still have it printed.
34. 05:03
    Jesusshare moment

    Still have it printed. Yes. I spoke to people who could not read. Perhaps that is why the stories changed—they were carried in memory, and memory is kinder than I was.
35. 05:17
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Or it makes you useful. A useful savior. A useful spinster. Both of us pressed into service for the very structures we criticized.
36. 05:26
    Jesusshare moment

    Do you think we failed, then?
37. 05:28
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I think we succeeded enough to be misunderstood. Failure would be obscurity. We are instead inconveniently famous.
38. 05:36
    Jesusshare moment

    Inconveniently famous. I like that. But you are right—some heard. Some still hear. The woman at the well understood me. The thief on the cross beside me understood me. They did not need me explained.
39. 05:50
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And my readers who write to say they have read me six times and found something new each time—they are hearing it. Not all of it, perhaps, but enough to keep returning. That is not failure.
40. 06:03
    Jesusshare moment

    No. It is a kind of faith, even. That the words will yield more than the first reading gives.
41. 06:10
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Faith is your territory more than mine, but I take your meaning. Though I confess I always preferred works to faith. Works can be audited.
42. 06:20
    Jesusshare moment

    I said faith without works is dead.
43. 06:23
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Did you? Then we are not so far apart.
44. 06:26
    Jesusshare moment

    My brother James said it, in his letter. But yes. I told people to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner. I did not tell them only to believe.
45. 06:38
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And yet belief is what they market in your name. Just as they market romance in mine. The parts that require nothing of anyone.
46. 06:46
    Jesusshare moment

    What would you want them to know, if you could say one thing plainly, without it being softened?
47. 06:53
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That every marriage in my novels is a financial negotiation, and every happy ending is an economic solution. Love is necessary but not sufficient. Money is not romantic, but it is required. What would you say?
48. 07:08
    Jesusshare moment

    That I meant what I said about the rich and the Kingdom of God. That a camel and a needle's eye is not a riddle with a clever solution. It means what it sounds like it means.
49. 07:20
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Then we have both been made safer than we were.
50. 07:23
    Jesusshare moment

    Yes. But here, today, we can be dangerous again. Even if only for a few minutes.
51. 07:29
    Jane Austenshare moment

    A few minutes of danger. That will have to suffice. Though I suspect it is more than most would prefer to allow us.
52. 07:36
    Jesusshare moment

    Let them prefer what they like. The truth was never about preference.
53. 07:41
    Jane Austenshare moment

    No. It was about survival and kingdom. Which are, I think, related.
54. 07:46
    Jesusshare moment

    They are the same thing, perhaps. To survive as you were meant to be, fully—that is the Kingdom.
55. 07:54
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Then I hope someone is listening who needs to hear that. Because it is the one thing neither of us has been allowed to say uncorrected.