Easter story always enough to keep the kids awake at night

Depiction of Christ’s Passion still exerts unusual power

HAPPY Easter, folks. Given that all of the last year has been like Lent and that this week doesn’t bring us out of it, the festive occasion is likely to pass with less notice than usual.

Lent was the time of sacrifice, though that could be as minimal as giving up sugar in your tea, and easter was a time of indulgence (though that word has another meaning in the Catholic lexicon) and that usually amounted to making yourself sick with chocolate.

There was, of course, more to it, though the “more” never entirely dampened the pre-eminent considerations of restraint and greed.

I grew up, as I suspect you know, in a Catholic culture in times when faith was stronger.

Aside from having to give up sweets, or — one painful year — Children’s Hour, we had to attend the Lenten Mission.

We now think of the Redemptorist priests at Clonard on the Falls Road as the softer, more genial, face of the Church, but back then they were the heavy squad. They took over the parish for a week to get serious about religion and particularly about sex and hell.

And we packed the church every night to be thundered at by these horrific men and the stories they would tell about decent Irish boys who went to work in London and lost their faith and sullied young women and were only saved in the end by a mother’s prayers — if at all.

With Good Friday approaching, they could deliver a real shocker around the crucifix, detailing the suffering of Jesus.

The Passion of Christ was set out in its stages through the Stations of the Cross and the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. There are Joyful and Glorious Mysteries, too, but these needn’t detain us for now. Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The priest would detail the pain of his Scourging at the Pillar. The thorns in the crown were hard, sharp and long and they didn’t just rest on his head, but were pressed down.

We were treated to the fullest possible description of how painful it was to carry a cross on your shoulder, how it rubbed on the skin and piled new sores on other open sores.

And on Good Friday at three o’clock you might feel that Jesus was dying in real time and that for the next couple of days the world would be bereft of His love, a grief symbolised by the covering of the crucifixes and icons in the churches and grottos with purple cloth.

I am bringing this up now because Easter is coming. This is Holy Week, which in the past felt like a build-up to the key drama of the crucifixion and the relief of the resurrection and to remember that that story had unusual power. This was serious and it mattered.

People do like a good horror story and the Passion of Christ as told by the Redemptorists in my youth was a powerful grabber of the imagination, the sort of story that could keep you awake at night.

Of course, the point of the story was that we were all to blame for Christ’s suffering.

The priest gave such lurid descriptions of the thorns and nails and the whips because he was holding us sinners entirely responsible and wanted us to have the deepest and clearest sense of the effects of our misdeeds, even 2,000 years before it had occurred to us to commit them.

I suspect some of my generation may be embarrassed to recall how deeply they engaged with that story and that others may find it hard to credit that it meant so much to us and tempered the mood of this whole period.

It was a guilt trip. Young people deferred their sex lives for fear that they would be sinning if they succumbed to the sin of lust. For most of us, I hope, nature found its way through the tangle of indoctrination and horror.

Tempted to pinch a bar of chocolate from a shop, or to rub yourself up the wrong way? That might seem a minor sin to you, they said, but what you are actually doing is driving nails into the hands and feet of another man — and not just any other man, but one who loves you. The mature approach to guilt is to understand what you actually did that was wrong, not to fantasise it into something else, whether to diminish it or inflate it. And holding us accountable through our peccadilloes for the crucifixion of a man was some inflation. But, still, there is power in that story.

The Easter story was so important that both republican tradition and peace-processing grafted their own mythologies onto it, giving us the Easter Rising and the Good Friday Agreement.

This week, orchestras and choirs around the world will be recreating one or other of Bach’s Passions, the St Matthew and the St John, in some of the most moving music ever written.

The story of the Passion in John’s Gospel is still, for me, profound and engaging, a fine piece of literature.

Much else in the events around that arrest of Jesus is bewildering, the cursing of a fig tree because it bore no fruit, for instance.

Jesus defends Mary wasting expensive ointment that Judas says could have been sold to help the poor: “The poor you will always have with you.” That is a cynical remark by any reading I can put on it.

And I think there is a simpler way of understanding the sharing of bread and wine than thinking of it as initiating a sacrament.

So many of Jesus’s stories are about farming and food production that one might suppose this is, too. Perhaps he said, “My body is this”, rather than “This is my body.”

For what are all of us composed of but what we consume, the bread and the wine, the fish and the cheeses, too?

I know this is all horrifically blasphemous for sincere and thoughtful people who are still as enthralled by the Passion and Easter as I was when young. But the old Lenten Mission and the darkness of the Easter story never fully put me off reading it occasionally and revising my thinking.

I even wrote a novel about it some years ago and self-published it on Kindle. It’s called Iscariot.

Look it up on Amazon and you’ll see that lots of other writers have found the story of Jesus fascinating and creatively reworked it.

That’s what happens with great stories.