Jesus Creed
Last Sunday, however, I did see a good play about Jesus, though it was not so described. It was simply the Gospel – this year, St Mark’s – for Palm Sunday, the last Sunday before Jesus was crucified, in our local church. Every Palm Sunday, the story of the Passion is read, and because it is much longer than the usual Gospel, it is voiced as if on stage. A member of the congregation reads the narrative; others take the other parts, such as that of Peter; the rest of us call out the cries of the crowd (“Crucify him!”), and the priest speaks the words of Jesus. This method recognises the inherent drama.
Nowadays, I find I can absorb these so often repeated words more readily than in the past. When I was a boy in that semi-Christian, respectable, peaceful England which the Sixties was in the process of undermining, I found the story moving, but somehow improbable. Why on earth would people want to kill Jesus? He was blatantly a peaceful and decent chap, it seemed to me. Wasn’t it all just a silly mistake, or at least the result of a fanatical culture so remote from my own experience as to be almost incomprehensible?
It seems much more believable today. Every week, a charity called the Barnabas Fund sends me a “persecution update”. This Holy Week, its reports include a Muslim mob in Egypt storming a village where Christians were recently beheaded, and two motorcyclists opening fire on a church in Lahore. On Maundy Thursday, the Feast of the Last Supper, al-Shabaab invaded a Kenyan university and killed 147 students for being Christians. In the Middle East, Christians (and not only, or even chiefly Christians) are murdered in scenes that resemble the punishments on Golgotha, although the technology of death is more advanced and the executioners have the additional fun of filming it.
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