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Good Morning, How do you tell a story that has a largely invisible protagonist? How do you make plausible a character who is beyond our powers of description, One who is utterly alien to us? Making God believable is a particular challenge for the visual arts and perhaps a reason why so many films inspired by the Biblical narrative have such a hard time personifying the One who lies at its heart. Despite the technical (and aesthetic) challenges, God is back once again in 72 mm 3D surround-sound, this time appearing (if that’s the word) in a re-telling of the Moses story. And it’s the turn of the mighty Ridley Scott (no stranger to the alien) to give us his interpretation in the new film Exodus: Gods and Kings. Like all those who came before him, Scott has had to deal with problem of God. Does he face him full on as Moses did on Mount Sinai? Or does he explain him away through knowable phenomena? In a less literal-averse age, Cecil B de Mille had God’s voice booming from behind a bush in his Ten Commandments; Scott has God appearing to Moses as a boy and speaking in a still small voice, and whilst viewers are free to attribute Moses’s visions to a head injury or give a scientific explanation to the intellectually embarrassing parting of the Red Sea, the film seems not to duck the source material. Thank God we live in a time and a culture where people are free to tell and interpret these stories for themselves. And it’s interesting that, thousands of years later, they’re still being told. Of course, for some the story of Moses is more than a ripping yarn. It’s a vital part of a greater whole, a sort of Part One in an epic that starts with a God who creates, continues with a God who reveals himself to a people; and reaches a fulfilment with this God stepping onto the stage himself. This part of the story - The Incarnation - will be told and re-told throughout this advent week, as the Bible supplies its own 3-dimensional version of the elusive and mysterious God that features in its earlier chapters. The part of the story where God becomes man is perhaps the most fantastic, intellectually challenging part of all. The writer Dorothy Sayers: once wrote ‘how strange, how interesting the narrative is. It really is a sensational story, more sensational than anything else. Imagine for a moment it being put in the papers!’ As Sayers recognised, the story is only sensational if it is historical, more than a myth or a general truth. An event involving a living person who some interpret as being the incarnation of God. A story still worthy of being re-told and re-imagined for people seeking the Great Protagonist in their own story.