The .Plan

He was also asked a question that he is asked repeatedly about his film career: What’s with all the nudity? Though Ferrell does not appear in his underwear in “Stranger Than Fiction,” in “Talladega Nights,” for instance, he runs around a racetrack in his underwear twice. “The journalists would ask me, ‘Is it in your contract that you have to be naked or in your underwear for every movie?’ ” Ferrell said, looking frustrated — which is as close as he gets to looking angry. “Sometimes I say that Unicef gets a percentage of the box office if I’m naked.”

Ferrell has been taking his clothes off since “Saturday Night Live.” In one sketch on the show, he rolled up a pair of star-spangled short shorts until they fit him like a thong. While filming a nude running scene in “Old School,” he refused to wear a robe between takes. Even in “Bewitched,” perhaps the most conventional comedy Ferrell has done, his character appears naked.

None of the nude scenes would be funny, of course, if Ferrell were in tiptop shape. “Skinny is not funny,” Ferrell said. “When I take my clothes off, it’s not to show off. It wouldn’t be funny if I was ripped.”
–Lynn Hirschberg, “A Wild and Uncrazy Guy”, New York Times Magazine, November 12, 2006 (boldface added)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminded us that grace is free but not cheap, gratis but not banal, gratuitous but not superfluous. The reformers of the 16th century defined the cost of grace by a single word: repentance. Repentance comes about when “terror strikes the conscience” (Melanchthon). Only thus can grace be truly free: in recognizing our sin, we are left without any bargaining chips, without appeal and defenses.

The incipience of grace requires us to move away from the protected hideouts where we refuse to see, to hear, to talk about the truth. Consider this definition of an idol: that which arrests the gaze so that we don’t see or hear or speak the truth. For the idol to be smashed, our protective hideouts need to be exposed. Exposure frees the gaze and gives us a true vision, a vision that strikes our conscience with terror at what is happening and makes us confess our share in it…

Repentance, the bearer of grace, can come only when we expose ourselves and are exposed to the wounds of the world. This is what repentance means — literally to bow down, to be bent over (re-pendere) by the weight of the pain of the world…

Chrysostom criticizes his fellow Christians for excusing themselves from meeting Christ because the church charities were doing it for them. He asks: if the priest prays, does that mean that you do not need to pray? If the church cares for the little ones, does that mean that you need not care and receive Christ in your own home? In other words, the great preacher was saying: You want a Christ without first meeting John the Baptist. You want a cute little babe in a golden manger, a fair and kind teacher, a glorious resurrected Christ now seated in the splendor of heaven at the right hand of God’s throne. But you avoid the filthy stable, and have paid little attention to the homeless preacher without a place to lay his head. You have not endured the explosed body on a cross, tortured as the worst sinner and killed as a political criminal, who cried out words of abandonment.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas once observed that the marginalized are the fragile side of a society, and that is why they must be kept hidden. The centers of power see their own weakness in the margins, and they don’t want those margins exposed. Exposure would hasten the transformation of the status quo, and that is the last thing that those benefiting from the status quo want.
–Vitor Westhelle, “Exposing Zacchaeus”, Christian Century, October 31, 2006