Looking back through an old diary I was surprised to discover that my life sometimes runs more in sync with the cadences of the Church’s liturgical calendar than those around me might imagine. In particular, and without any great consciousness about it, I have ended up finishing off and contributing to two books on Easter-related themes in the months of March and April.

Right now I’m tidying up an overdue manuscript for Darton Longman and Todd called Threatened with Resurrection, examining the true cost and vocation of peacemaking in the Christian tradition. A couple of years ago I co-edited Consuming Passion, which looked at the way in which the doctrine of the Cross can be abused to excuse or even institutionalise retributive theology and ideas of messianic violence.

Neither of these books is exactly controversy free, but they are unlikely to get me drummed out of any ecclesiastical club (because I studiously avoid the gold-studded membership cards) and also because, well, not many people know or care what I think! You need to be someone like the former Anglican Bishop of Durham, Dr David Jenkins, to make those kinds of waves - and with the cultural climate around religion growing both more hostile and more disinterested all at the same time, even that’s getting a bit difficult.

Every so often someone repeats the old canard that Dr Jenkins, now retired but never retiring, “doesn’t believe in the resurrection” (he most certainly does, though not in the simplistic way it is usually affirmed or dismissed) or that he “said it was a conjuring trick with bones” (his point was precisely the opposite - namely that the kind of life God offers is not reducible to magic but is about a thoroughgoing transformation in and beyond the material world as we think we know it.)

The whole ‘Durham saga’ was over 20 years ago but won’t quite stay buried. Ironic.

This year, Easter controversy is thin on the ground so far. There isn’t even a tacky Channel 4 documentary ‘proving’ that the bones of Jesus have been found underneath a pub in Walthamstow. What we have instead is some relatively polite jousting about historical details in the BBC’s dramatisation of The Passion, an altogether less blood-lusting rendition than Mel Gibson’s film noir. It began on 16 March and ends on Easter Sunday.

I haven’t yet seen the programmes, but that’s not going to stop me commenting on them - in a sideways kind of way. What’s caught my attention is the wildly varying nature of the verdicts from both the religious and non-religious. Many of these parallel, in less extreme ways, the treatment Gibson got - ranging from devotional adulation right through to accusations of anti-Semitism and ’snuff religion’.

When I was completing a chapter for Consuming Passion (which eventually ended up tackling the juxtaposition of blasphemy and salvation in the gospel and in modern culture), I almost wrote a piece called “On not watching The Passion”. The aim would have been to depict people’s radically different views about Gibson’s portrayal, and to ask just how far the psychology of the viewer can ever be separated from the forensics of what is viewed - which is much less than we are accustomed to think.

In that vein, back to The Gospel According to The BBC. This, first of all, is precisely the accusation the National Secular Society has thrown at the Beeb over its Passion: preaching. According to a certain mindset, any programme about religion that doesn’t denounce it, or doesn’t provide a sufficiently stark delineation between description and experience, is tantamount to ‘propaganda on the license fee’. I think we should have a bit more faith in the ability of an audience to discriminate. It’s also good to find out how people of different life-stances tick, as well as what they tick about.

NSS president Terry Sanderson makes a useful observation: “We live in a religiously illiterate society,” he says, “so people are not going to know the backstories of characters who pop up without explanation. [The Passion] makes far too many assumptions of knowledge at a time when most children think the origins of Christmas are as Santa Claus’s birthday.”

That’s dead right. Naturally the churches have been trying to produce material to accompany the mini-series. But whether this reaches out beyond their own language, mindset and communal type is another question. Within the institutions of formal Christianity there is little comprehension of the true scale of the erosion of religious understanding in modern Britain.

For Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney and prolific commentator, writing in The Guardian and on Ekklesia, the problem lies more in the narrative. The BBC’s primetime production, finessed by a host of advisers, “presents the inoffensive Liberal Democrat Jesus: Nick Clegg with a beard”, he declares, entertainingly.

This means that “the political, polemical Jesus is spiritualised into oblivion… it’s tough to see why the story proceeds to the cross. The kingdom of God is not just an inner glow of general benevolence. Jesus believed it to be nothing less than God’s reign on earth. Which is why the story ‘nice guy enters Jerusalem and causes chaos’ makes precious little narrative or historical sense.”

That isn’t quite the conclusion of Catholic bishop Kieran Conry (”very interesting”), Muslim viewer Maulana Shahid Raza (”a tolerant and loving man”), Michael Barnes SJ (”brilliant story-telling”) or New Testament scholar and consultant on the show Mark Goodacre (”a fine piece of work”), but it resonates somewhat more with Rabbi Julia Neuberger (”the dialogue seemed to pull the whole thing down into being a kind of domestic drama in a wonderful, historical setting”.)

Meanwhile, writing in The Big Issue, the paper that benefits homeless people, Ben Deedes is quietly impressed - and he detects precisely the kind of Jesus who for Fraser is all but absent: “[t]his is Jesus…the iconoclast and rebel, sticking it to the man, be he pompous temple grandee or Roman tyrant. Like the disciples, you’ll find yourself hanging on his every word - it’s quite uncanny.”

Wrapping Up

Uncanny indeed. Four accounts, one drama, numerous angles and myriad readings. Remember that the next time someone gets cross about religion and tries to pass it off as ‘nothing more’ than this, that or the other. The truth is, life is always much more complex and demanding. In that simple realisation lies the possibility of redemption from totalising ideas. Or the possibility of being had up for blasphemy and subversion, depending on where you are and who you’re talking to.

Tags: simon barrow, thinking aloud, ekklesia, terry sanderson, giles fraser, maulana shahid raza, michael barnes sj, mark goodacre, rabbi julia neuberger[tags]simon barrow, thinking aloud, ekklesia, terry sanderson, giles fraser, maulana shahid raza, michael barnes sj, mark goodacre, rabbi julia neuberger[/tags]