On the Wednesday of Holy Week last year I saw the Messiah! Well, I watched the dramatised version of Handel's masterpiece from the Bristol Old Vic at my local cinema. Unlike the conventional presentation, this one featured not just awesome singers and incredible soloists but an ensemble who acted out the words as they sang them. The fear, the hope, the loss, the pain; the whole range of human emotions was on show. I was, I admit, moved to tears in places.
On the stage for the whole two hours was an actor portraying Jesus (the Beloved). It began with his body carried in, covered in blood. The singers then gently washed him as the opening section told of the Old Testament prophesies and the yearnings of the nations. As they did so, with the close-ups available on the big screen, some of us were thinking, rather cynically perhaps, that the body clearly wasn’t very dead!
Then, at the end of the first part, Jesus began to move, first his fingers, then his arms, then slowly, painfully, he stood up. Not, at this stage a resurrection, but a birth of the man who would become Messiah.
It now became clear that the actor had cerebral palsy. His body and arms were bent.
He twitched. The effort to stand unaided was clearly considerable. Later, while the contralto sang ‘He was despised’ the point of casting an actor with a disability became even more poignant. He lovingly washed the feet of the front row of the audience before, suddenly, the music brings the awful scourging. Every cast member dipped their hands in blood and smeared it over him. With every blow he jerked and we winced. Then his damaged body was hoisted high above the stage like Dali’s ‘Christ of St John of the Cross’. Finally the cast washed their bloody hands clean and new life, forgiveness, healing returned. ‘Amen’ indeed.
Why is all this so moving for someone who does not believe that this was a sacrificial transaction between a God and his Son to get us of the hook of our collective guilt? That was no doubt what Handel (and his librettist, the almost unknown Charles Jennens) had in mind at the time. But for me the experience was informed by what had happened earlier in the same day.
Arnaud Bertrame was a gendarme on duty when gunmen took people hostage in a French supermarket. He offered himself in exchange and was then killed. 'Nothing is more important than to give your life for another citizen' President Macron had said at his funeral. I don't think such sacrifices are anything to do with a God; they are about us.
I have heard many Easter sermons about how Jesus was unique; the only begotten Son of the Father. The one true mediator. The only way to God. How this one death is different from all other deaths. But for me its value is that it is the same. Why did Jesus die? Because, like so many others, he became an inconvenience to those who think that life is all about power. When it’s actually about self-sacrifice; self-giving. About finding our full humanity.
We are all responsible for the unjust deaths of others. Not personally in a way that means that God will punish me when I’m dead, unless I repent and claim some special treatment not given to others. That’s just a selfish quest for my own survival. Not even collectively because I cannot escape my sinful nature without him. But because we all share one humanity.
To set Jesus’ death apart as a ‘one off’ entirely misses the point. That’s why seeing it all enacted again still hurts, as it should. Sharing in the three hours’ passion narrative in my local Cathedral on Good Friday is a similar experience. Both make me think of the losses, pain and sadnesses in my own life, and those that I have been complicit in by turning a blind eye to the sufferings of others.
It opens my eyes to all those who also live and die unjustly like Jesus. It’s all about solidarity with the many, not salvation for the few. Jesus is one of us. Therein lies the hope.
Ben Whitney recently retired after a long career in education welfare.