2nd European John Templeton Film Award 1998
The 2nd European John Templeton Film Award was presented to "My Name is Joe" by Ken Loach. The award ceremony took place on 14 February 1999 at a church service in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche during the Berlin International Film Festival. The award carries a prize money of CHF 7.000, donated by the John Templeton Foundation.
Laudation
The struggle against social depravation, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse are the concerns shown in the film which has been awarded the 1998 European John Templeton Film Prize.
“My name is Joe” is described as a love story full of humour, passion and danger. It was filmed in the heart of one of the poorest and most neglected neighbourhoods of Glasgow, Scotland, and depicts the struggle of Joe to reenter the real wolrd after years of alcohol abuse, and his relationship with Sarah, a socialworker. Joe is passionate about coaching a young team of soccer players, vulnerable after giving up alcohol, facing the violence of loan sharks and the insidious world of drug running. Above all the film is about responsibility. Peter Mullan (Joe) was named as best actor at the Cannes film festival 1998.
Sermon
held on the occasion of the presentation of the 2nd European John Templeton Award
by Hans Werner Dannowski, Hannover
during the International Berlin Film Festival
Sonntag Estomihi, February 14, 1999, in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche
As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!"
"Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed.[a] Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."
Luke10, 38-42
Dear congregation,
this story of Martha and Mary is so easily remembered that it has often been reduced to straight formulas. One thought to see not only two kinds of female way of life, but also two ways of a Christian form of life: the active and the contemplative life; and the superiority of the one over the other. The one faith that makes one act purposefully and the other one that makes one turn to his inner self – a faith deeply moved by the basic questions of Christian existence. I will have to defamiliarize the story a bit. I want to draw attention to the fact that the way Mary avoided being the serving woman who wants to prepare everything for the guests invisibly, must have been outrageous to the eyes and ears of Jesus’ contemporaries. Mary claims a male privilege: the freedom to learn and listen. The freedom to sit and listen to the master. Even worse: Jesus defends her when Martha tries to put her back into her female role. “But only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better.” We underestimate the emancipatory parts of the Christian traditions again and again. But this observation does not upset anyone today. At the most, the other one could: if today, men insist that hospitality was a female thing alone.
The different representations of women, the different forms of existence of Christian faith is not my topic. It is more the other one that the whole 10th chapter of the gospel according to Luke suggests: “a successor to Jesus?” In Luke’s gospel, the question of a succession to Jesus has been experienced in a very sensual, physical way. To succeed Jesus means to follow him, to give up everything and follow him day and night, from Capernaum to Jericho, from the boats on the Lake Genezareth to Golgotha, or nearly there. And I would like you, dear congregation, to look at this scene in Martha and Mary’s house in this sensual concentration.
One day, Jesus comes to Martha and Mary’s house, in a village – the text says. He calls in for a while, he talks, teaches. You could call it conversations at table. Martin Luther did it the same way. And Mary sits at the master’s feet and listens. That she “sat down at Jesus’ feet” doesn’t mean that one has a higher position and the other a lower one, on the floor. Jesus, as was the custom in those days, lies at table. Sitting at his feet is meant metaphorically. I can see Mary in front of me: She has discarded everything that could disturb her listening. There’s nothing in her hands, nothing next to her and nobody in front of her but the one she’s listening to. She concentrates on him, with all her senses; concentrated on the one who talks to her and the others around her.
Funny, this human need and necessity to concentrate on the other. Man is not content with his own company. “ You cannot say Good night to yourself!” I read in one of Max Frisch’ works. Or as it says in an African proverb:
“ You cannot till the land in your own heart
You cannot find the way to yourself
You cannot speak the helping words yourself.”
There is a dependence on the fact that someone comes along and talks to you. It would be grotesque to ask oneself questions and to give the answers at the same time. People who are on their own most of the time start talking to themselves or to their cat, their dog. That is natural. But talking to oneself corresponds to a need that it cannot satisfy. The word that reaches me, that frees me, that takes me further - it has to be spoken by the other. And I see Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet, fully concentrated. “ Faith comes from listening”, Paul will say later.
Let me linger with the listening Mary. What happens when we become aware of another human being – as we say? When I am deeply moved by the encounter with a human being, by the line of a poem, by a film, by a landscape? When I become aware - it is mostly a mixture of terror and delight. I am far beside myself; I am thrown out of my normal ways; I say: how great! or how terrible!. I feel some kind of self-defence coming on, step back for a moment because I need to find a counterpoint to what I’ve just seen, to what came close. But there is some fascination. You are courageous enough to become curious - and so I step forward again and take a closer look. I start circling the person opposite me, “sniffing out” – as we could say with another expression concerning our senses. And suddenly, there is another dimension of terror or delight: in the person opposite me, I find another shape of myself. Out of the words, the shape of the other, a face emerges and it is – in a completely new way – my own. From being moved I turn to being someone who tries to seize this new chance of life. Mirror communication – that’s what psychoanalysts call this. And I see Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening, fully concentrated, fully given over to his talk. On her face and in her posture, everything is mirrored: terror, prudence, change. Listening to Jesus’ words is not a state, is not stasis. It is a process and change. In this moment of intense listening, she is probably – and later stories of women up to the resurrection allow this conclusion – she is probably been given a new self in this moment.
I want to take you one step further, dear congregation. It is surprising how little interpretations of this story notice that not one word of what Jesus tells Mary and the others is ever mentioned. I admit it – I would have loved to know. Did he tell parables like the one of the wayward son or the self-growing seeds? Did he repeat the Beatitudes, his “blessed are the poor”, as it says in Luke’s gospel, this paradox that every generation has to think about? He has certainly talked about God, about his closeness, his friendliness, his forgiveness. About his kingdom where everything is different from what we experience in our world; about God’s reign that is there and comes with him. But it is certainly no coincidence that we do not learn anything about the content of what Jesus has said in Martha and Mary’s house. We think it is easy to get hold of the emotion of an encounter, the blow to faith in a word, a doctrine or a dogma that we can take home like a definite possession. This is important – otherwise we would not have anything. But doctrines and dogmas – they’re there for us so that we do not use them to shield ourselves. No, it’s that we expose ourselves again and again to this process of listening and becoming aware. This process in which the self is always determined by the other. I am to become a subject, in the truest sense of the word: there is an element of subjugation, but that does not mean being at someone’s mercy, it is a deliverance, a finding of myself. And thus I see Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet, and if I understood everything correctly, I feel that she changes with the help of Jesus’ words. Being a successor to Jesus does not only mean meeting him, but that he takes shape within me. This complete other will become the self-definition of my faith and my life.
These days, the Berlinale takes place next door at the Zoo-Palast, the Kino Delphi and other cinemas. And later on in this service, we award a film award, the European John Templeton Film Award, with which the Conference of European Churches in cooperation with INTERFILM, the ecumenical film organisation of Protestant origin, wants to honour extraordinary European films of the last year. The award goes to the film “My name is Joe” by Ken Loach – a film that tells about the terror and the miracle of encounters and about the thus threatened, but also newly given definition of the self. It is, among other things, the story of former alcoholic Joe, a lively man from the Glasgow underclass, whose passion is being the trainer of a soccer team that plays in the German dress of the World Championship of 1974 and always loses. And it is the story of Sarah, a social worker, who comes from a completely different milieu and who looks after children of alcoholics and prostitutes. The encounter between Sarah and Joe is – in all its prudence – full of terror and delight. “Could you never forgive yourself?” Sarah asks Joe when she feels that he is still ashamed about his past. Nobody has ever asked him that. And Sarah and the others notice how Sarah reaches her limits when she cannot at all understand why Joe goes back to the drug scene for the sake of his friend Liam – only temporarily as Joe believes. This is the moment when she abruptly ends their relationship, and Joe takes up drinking again. The film has got an open end. When walking away from Liam’s grave, Sarah walks at Joe’s side. Maybe this is the step further, a new self-definition in the face of the other: that forgiveness belongs to life, that forgiving oneself and being forgiven by the other is as important as an understanding that the other in his/her otherness is the horizon of my life.
Yes, dear congregation: this is Martha and Mary’s story and that of Jesus and of Mary today most of all. I see her sit in her house in an anonymous village in Judea and listen to Jesus words. I would like to sit down next to her, and I suppose so would you. It’s then that we listen to Jesus. And I’m becoming aware of the “gap in being” – as a philosopher said. The sorrow over all the terrible things, over brutal abuse of power and a longing for death that are - up to the present day - dominant in this world that God created. And at the same time, there are anger and disappointment, but no sign of resignation or cynicism in view of the state of the world. There’s a warmth coming from Jesus’ words, an expression of an all-embracing love that does not leave anyone or anything out. Yes, this is God, Jesus says. And I hear it, I become aware of it, step back and then go forward again, I am moved and start seizing my chances and suddenly I know: Thus, my life can start anew.
Amen.