蜜芽传媒

For those of us of a certain age, watching TV in the 1970s, Robert Powell is Jesus. Never mind his later appearances with Jasper Carrott or on medical dramas, his piercing blue eyes shone out of Franco Zeffirelli鈥檚 Jesus of Nazareth and for me, his face is forever associated with the story. I once took a baptism at which the actor was a godfather. As part of the service I had to ask him 鈥渄o you repent of your sins鈥� and I kept feeling I was doing something terribly wrong.

Today鈥檚 guest editor Michael Sheen did something else with the same story in his film 鈥淭he Gospel of Us鈥� released in 2012. The central character is called The Teacher and is never named. Contemporary interpretations of the feeding of the five thousand or the Last Supper find the Teacher in a park sharing out sandwiches or in a nightclub having a party with his friends. Thousands of extras were used in an intense scene of the film as the crucifixion was staged in public in Port Talbot and The Teacher died, surrounded by a huge crowd pressing in on him, holding up their smart phones, recording the execution.

Sometimes referred to as the Greatest Story Ever Told, the story of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus has shaped the cultural contours of European societies for 2,000 years. And while many may not have attended a church service this Christmas, the power of the story remains. And even told simply as the destruction of a peaceful teacher by frightened politicians it finds contemporary resonance and meaning. Although for most people the festival of Christmas is now over, for the church it has just begun. Christmas Eve signalled the start of the season rather than the end. And in a series of important days in the week after Christmas Day, today is the feast of the Holy Innocents, recalling the crime recorded in the gospels as being committed by Herod, echoing the crime recorded in Exodus as being committed by Pharaoh of ordering the killing of boys under two.

For Christians, the wonder of the festival comes not so much from the descriptions of miraculous happenings or ethereal beings on one night, or even from the politics of the day that made Jesus鈥檚 appearance so disruptive, but what theologians call the scandal of particularity; the breaking into time of the God who lives in eternity. That鈥檚 why, long after the last of the turkey has been curried, Christians will continue to celebrate the season of Christmas well into the New Year. Unlike our contemporary celebrations, the events marked by Christmas Day were not so much an arrival as a departure into a new future where things would never be the same again.

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