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Every story invites us to take an imaginative leap. The story of Holy Week invites us to take two. The first is to see in each character aspects of ourselves. Peter’s all mouth and no trousers, promising everything but denying when it matters. Pilate’s all procedure and no conviction, claiming to be even-handed but washing his hands of innocent blood. Judas is a mixture of motives, but whatever he was trying to achieve ends in disaster for him and for everyone. The crowd lurches unpredictably from praise to fury and awe to ridicule.

It's not all bad: Mary sticks it out at the foot of the cross with all its horror, the centurion who oversees it all recognises the true glory of the dying man, and the women who go to the tomb on Easter morning are faithful beyond death. The point is, all human life is here. Every element of this story – violence, betrayal, fear, denial, grief, horror – is part of our daily news cycle. This is everyone – good, bad and ugly.

The second imaginative leap is to see the man at the centre of things as God. God is widely associated with thrones and power and glory. But there’s none of that in this story. This man rides a donkey of peace not a stallion of war. He’s beaten and mocked, not praised and lauded. He’s dragged through the streets and nailed to two pieces of wood. He’s executed among criminals and abandoned by his friends. The curious thing is, even though this is the way he’s portrayed in this fundamental story, both those who uphold Christianity and those who keep their distance still default to a picture of God as high and mighty. It’s as if Holy Week is sealed off, and the rest of the year everyone forgets this is what the definitive Christian notion of God is like.

We live in a culture saturated with information and obsessed with judgement. When we hear something bad about someone, we quickly unfriend them, cancel them and put distance between us and them. This is a very different story. It displays everything bad about humankind. But amazingly, counterculturally, foolishly - the man at the centre of the story doesn’t retreat from this reality. He walks towards it. This is a story where God says, ‘I will never let you go. I am dying to be with you; come what may.’

To embark on a project and invest everything in it and see it get into terrible trouble is to face a moment of truth. It’s a very human problem. This story says it’s a divine problem. It’s the divine problem. It’s what Holy Week is all about.

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