Easter is the greatest mystery told

Remember the terrible cry of Christ from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’

Peter Levi, the poet who was then a Jesuit priest, stood at the pulpit of Westminster Cathedral in London, preaching at the funeral of that great poet David Jones, and he said of the person he considered the founder of his religion: “He was murdered before the beginning of time.”

That’s one stark perspective on Easter that I suppose goes back to St Augustine: that the sufferings and death of Christ, all that “He died for our sins” stuff, was grounded and fated in the structure of the universe: it was all bound to happen.

Easter is the greatest day in the Christian calendar, or perhaps we should say cycle of days. Easter Sunday, when the figure in radiant white comes from the tomb, is the greatest feast day. The Greeks and the Russians, the Orthodox Christians say to each other “Khristos anesti!” “Christos voskres!” (Christ has risen). And everyone in those cultures, however schooled by generations of Soviet communism or KGBism, or anti-clericalism, replies: “Alithos anesti!” (He has risen indeed). It was St Paul who said: “If Christ be not risen our faith is vain.” Yes, it depends what you mean by risen; yes, it depends what you mean by vain; but let’s not undervalue the mysteries we’re contemplating.

Good Friday is the starkest day in the Christian calendar, the day on which no breaking of the bread or consecrating of the wine, none of that “This is my body … This is the cup of my blood” can be celebrated. No Eucharist, no mass, no nothing. It’s the day Christ died, the day when God himself — whoever and whatever that may be — seems to withdraw from the world. TS Eliot, arguably the greatest poet of the 20th century to be a committed Christian, enunciates a depiction of the Sacrament and the enactment of the mass — which is traditionally thought of as a re-enactment of Christ’s Passion on the cross — as if it were a thing of nausea: “The dripping blood our only drink, / The bloody flesh our only food: / In spite of which we like to think / That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood — / Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”

Good, you think. I remember Barry Jones telling me that he had seen Matthias Grunewald’s image of the dead Christ, The Entombment of Christ, from the Isenheim Altarpiece and thought it was one of the most remarkable things he had seen. If ever there is a death of God painting, if ever there is a De profundis image, it is this representation of the Son of Man as a scarified hunk of dead meat. Of course, Grunewald had his resurrection around the corner, but we shouldn’t forget the desolation that precedes it.

Michel Foucault, that French meditator on the order of things and on madness and civilisation, says in the book whose English title echoes that last phrase that we scarcely glimpse the suffering face of Christ from the time of Shakespeare (or at any rate the later 17th-century tragedy of Racine) until the advent of Dostoyevski.

He is making a point about art and literature and reinventions of the world, but it is interesting that the greatest intimations of a tragic sense of the world — bearing in mind that tragedy is, as with the Greeks, the zenith of dramatic literature and by extension of all art — can be so closely associated with our sense of the figure of Christ, his fall and then his rising.

David Jones, the poet we started with, wrote a great book-length poem about World War I, In Parenthesis, and then — hyperconscious of his Welsh inheritance — The Anathemata, a poem about the matter of Britain, which WH Auden, another poet not easily impressed, thought was the greatest long poem of the 20th century. Well, according to Levi, Jones was one of those Christians who thought there were a lot of people in the church who didn’t know they were in it.

These days, with all these scandals about the sexual abuse of children, a lot people would run a mile from that perspective of inclusion. But can they in the end?

Last year, every fortnight, I found myself in a group with three other people, a famous writer and an eminent publisher, reading the Psalms aloud — the immemorial and foundation poetry of the Jewish and Christian people — and what a load of horror and tragedy, of vengeance and lamentation, with great flashes of lyrical beauty and exhilaration through a voice that tradition ascribes to David, king of Israel, from whose house Jesus sprang. Yet we know at the same time this is a collective voice, a tribal voice, in all its barbarism and wisdom and grandeur.

This is the voice of the folk: in all its confusions and and clarities. This is the voice of you and me. But do we defy the whisper that says it is also — however mysteriously — the voice of the Most High, and what overshadows it is a spirit that cannot be denied if you acknowledge the power of words?

Is there any need to talk about the Word, the Logos, that which shines in the darkness that darkness cannot overcome? That’s the start of St John’s Gospel, the super-long one, which some people would have heard read or sung yesterday on Good Friday.

But we don’t necessarily have to invest in an extensive way in dogmas and theologies. We do have to admit that throughout the Psalms and in the different, slightly varying, accounts of Jesus’ trial and execution darkness is forever seeming to overcome; it’s given a pretty good innings.

Remember the terrible cry of Christ from the cross, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? — to give it in Aramaic, which Mel Gibson resuscitated for his film The Passion of the Christ — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

It is the unanswerable, the imponderable question, and its dramatisation is at the heart of the Easter story, at least in the Passion narratives, the account of Christ taking on the sins of the world, which clearly takes the form of taking on the agony and the pain of the world. That story we know like the backs of our hands.

Remember the story of the young, brilliantly brash Oscar Wilde being required when he first went to Oxford to do a viva in which he translated aloud — and it would have been very easy for him because it’s the simple Greek of the New Testament, the koine Greek which was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire — the Passion according to St John. His examiners stopped him after a moment and said, “Very good, Mr Wilde.” But Wilde according to legend — and it can only be legend — said, “Oh, please sir, I want to see how it turns out.”

We all know how it turns out. Just as we know how it starts with the Last Supper in the upper room and the agony in the garden when he prays for the cup to pass knowing it can’t. Then Judas’s kiss and the way poor old Peter, the man who has been given the keys to the kingdom, betrays him and the cock crows in fulfilment of the prophecy.

The high priests rend their garments and he is taken before Pilate. We know the timbre of the patrician voice that drawls ironically “Am I a Jew?” and — a bit differently — stares into the eyes of the God Man and says, “What is truth?”

Just as we’re with Pilate in desperation when he says, washing his hands — but how will those hands ever be clean? — “I am innocent of the blood of this just man.” There’s the scourging, deriding, the way of the cross, the stations of the cross depicted in so much high and mighty art. The curtain of the temple is rent. Darkness seems to fall. Jesus has said to John, the disciple he loves, and to Mary, who will come to be known as the Mother of God, “Mother behold thy son. Son behold thy mother.”

And then Pilate, almost as if he thought words could make amends, has written at the top of the cross, in Hebrew and in Greek and in Latin, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” And the high priests say not to say that, to say that he claimed that, and Pilate replies, if you want the Latin of St Jerome’s famous version, Quod scripsi, scripsi (What I have written I have written).”

There are worlds of magnificent representations of every aspect of the Easter story which is the dramatic climax of the life of Christ. Think of the enigmas of Leonardo, the sense of an exultation and sublimity of Raphael, the extraordinary sense of election in the great risen Christ of Piero della Francesca.

The Italian Renaissance gives us more than a lifetime of meditations of the mystery of Easter. And the northern Renaissance with its different emphasis — sometimes, as with the Grunewald, so stark in its unassuageable realism — gives us something else, equally real, equally strange.

Then there’s the music, and the greatest piece of music inspired by Easter is Bach’s St Matthew Passion. It’s appropriate that the greatest oratorio by Bach should be this extraordinary meditation on the Easter drama. My own preference because it’s what I first encountered is the version by Otto Klemperer, which will sound very Beethovenian and romantic to the ears of people used to original instruments and sprightlier rhythms, but who could touch Peter Pears as the Evangelist or Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Jesus or the way in which Christa Ludwig or Elisabeth Schwartzkopf reanimate (via the signature of genius) the implicit sublimity of those Lutheran hymns of grief and consolation.

If there is an essence of Protestant Christianity — at the heart of all old-time religion — it’s in this music, just as so much of “the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation” of Catholic Christianity is in Italian Renaissance paintings.

If you want to listen to the words of the Easter stories you can get audio versions of them with James Earl Jones (The Lion King and Darth Vader sounding very much like the voice of God) or Atticus Finch himself, Gregory Peck.

Then there’s Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew. What was it Bob Ellis said about Pasolini? “Pasolini only makes masterpieces, damn his eyes.” Well, the remarkable and boggling thing about Matthew is a neo-realist doco somehow spies on the life of Christ. No wonder it’s dedicated to John XXIII and encapsulates Bach as well as the Missa Luba.

It is a million miles from Raphael but it offers a vision of the drama of Easter which uses in the most fundamental way an idiom that we think of as essentially truth telling. And somehow the wobbling cameras and all the circumambient roughness of Pasolini’s technique only add to the overall effect of realism. And so does the fact he uses virtually every word of Matthew and creates a very credible view of Christ that is at the same time clearly a partial view: this is the fiery zealot above all images of the Messiah.

When it comes to the resurrection, however, Passolini’s beautiful boy angel does come across, luminously, like an intimation of bliss.

And the extraordinary thing about the resurrection image of Christ is the way he glides with such spiritual authority. Remember the meeting with Mary Magdalene, who had washed his feet with his hair, and the way she fails to recognise him at first, and how he says to her “Noli me tangere” — “Touch me not”. And she recognises him and says, “Abba, master.”

The risen Christ is a radiant, all but untouchable figure and the fact he is apparitional in one way doesn’t stop him from coming across in terms of this extraordinary Easter story as real. There’s doubting Thomas, who can’t believe unless he can put his finger into the wounds. And it makes sense that Jesus says blessed are they who have not touched and seen yet believed.

There are some people who instinctively sign up to the Christian package because — not least in its Easter aspect — this is the greatest story ever told. As the great Irish poet WB Yeats said, no face is more familiar to us, no face is more intimately known to us, than the face of Christ.

And, OK, the whole triumph of walking out of the tomb, luminous and triumphant like a god; well, like God: really that nourishes one of our deepest human needs and offers the supreme vindication of the deepest yearning, the one that can be perceived as most hopeless. St Paul put it starkly, with great rhetorical power, “Death where is thy sting? Grave where is thy victory?”

We know the sting remains, we know the grave wins, yet a lot of people want to say with John Donne, that great poet priest, “And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”

Yet, as Auden says, an afterlife would be unimaginably different and therefore the sense of loss is huge, resurrection or no resurrection. So what can Easter mean to us? All of these things, which have been wrestled with these last 2000 years.

Yes, Easter was a fertility cult, older than the coming of Christ, and northern. Other parts of the Roman Empire had cults of Mithras and dying gods. That need not be discrediting. Jesus said he did not want to lose one jot or tittle of the law of Judaism but to bring it to fulfilment, and a sense of the Christianity implicit in our own heritage can make us extend this to the whole of religious and metaphysical culture.

When Robert Oppenheimer, the atom bomb man, quotes the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”, or when we read the Buddha saying to his disciples, the children of his flock, “Be ye lambs unto yourselves” we know we are in the vicinity of a comparable tradition and a comparable wisdom. Who wants to deny Allah the compassionate, the merciful one, which is just another appellation of the Good? Who can read of the death of Socrates without thinking of the death of Christ?

Easter is the fundamental myth of our civilisation. It is the tragic realisation of death and the expression of our hope in what can triumph over darkness.

You don’t have to pin labels on yourself to realise it’s the most comprehensive vision available to us. And what we are is grounded in centuries of faith in it.

Peter Craven is a cultural commentator.