Chocolat - A Parable

Had the pleasure of watching the movie Chocolat this week. If you've not seen it - here is the trailer - i recomend you do see it.


Essentially it's about a small town whose religion centres around maintaining their tradition, discipline, rules, penance, self-righteousness and exclusion. Or as the character Jospehine explains:

You don't misbehave here. It's just not done, did you know that? If you don't go to confession, if you don't dig your flowerbeds, or if you don't pretend that you want nothing more in your life... then you're crazy.

The village attitude was best summed up by the poster put around town when a group of out-of-towners show up in the village, and the mayor initiats a boycott - encouraging people to have nothing to do with the 'morally contaminated outsiders'. A sentiment exactly the opposite of the Jesus the town pretends to follow. Jesus was criticised for engaging too much with people of dubious character.

Perhaps Jesus would have identified more with Vianne:

Roux: I should probably warn ya - you make friends with us, you make enemies with everyone else.
Vianne Rocher: Is that a promise?
Roux: It's a guarantee.

But the greatest part came when the priest (having previously been told what to preach) delivered his own message - about actually following Christ.

I'd rather talk about His humanity. I mean, you know, how He lived His life, here on Earth. His kindness, His tolerance. Listen, here's what I think. I think that we can't go round measuring our goodness by what we don't do, by what we deny ourselves, what we resist, and who we exclude. I think we've got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include.

Even better was that the people of God actually went and lived out that message.