The Weekend Australian  8th April 2017

The melodrama of the Cross and the Resurrection remains top of the pops

PETER CRAVEN

The incredible story of Easter runs through the greatest art and music in Western culture

It’s strange the premonition of Easter, the way the hot cross buns start coming into the supermarkets even as the last days of the heat beat down on us. And then we hear, generally from afar, from some churchy person that it’s Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent when Catholics and High Anglicans have ashes put on their forehead and are reminded they are dust and unto dust they shall return.

And the 40 days of Lent are supposed to be a time of austerity and sacrifice preparing for Easter, for Good Friday, the day that commemorates how Christ died for the wrongs that had been done in the world, and Easter Sunday when he rose from the dead.

Easter is the top of the pops in the Christian liturgical calendar, outstripping Christmas with the coming of the Christ child, at least officially. It is the essence of the Christian story. St Paul says in one of his endless glosses on what the mystery of the coming of Jesus, the Son of Man, the Son of God, may mean: “If Christ be not risen, our faith is vain.”

But what faith clings to us in this all but forgotten saga of what life may mean?

And why do we celebrate this post-Jewish myth of salvation, this revamp of the Passover that we somehow conflate with the coming of spring — particularly absurd in an upside-down southern hemisphere world of autumn and falling leaves — by juxtaposing Jesus, the man who was God, burst from the tomb like an apparition of the most WTF kind, with eggs that are the symbol of fertility, and in our modern world chocolate with its euphoric buzz?

So Judeo-Christian, so pagan, so confused. Someone I was close to said once that the good thing about Easter was that you didn’t have to see people. It was a stolen holiday where you did your own thing and went to the football or the pictures, or caught up with a book, without the endless lovehate rituals of family devotion: the gifts, the turkeys, the rows.

Still, the memory of Easter is buried deep in the world we inhabit. Has the world ever seemed more dead than it can on Good Friday?

Well, you could argue that where I live in Melbourne’s Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, one of the greatest strips of alternative bars and cafes south of Greenwich Village — everyone eating and drinking and listening to music and grabbing books and magazines — Good Friday is just another pagan fiesta for hipster kids and chardonnay-sipping, barramundi-munching elders.

Then again, a lot of fish and chips are eaten on Good Friday — just as no one would have eaten anything but fish in Shakespeare’s London on this day — and even in Fitzroy people make the trek to St Patrick’s or St Paul’s cathedral or some local church on this one day of the year when the mass, the Eucharist, the sacrament whereby Christ gave his body and his blood to the world, is not celebrated.

Not celebrated as a sacrament because it is actively remembered. The altars of churches are stripped, the statues are covered in penitential purple, the priest in the plainest garment, an anti-vestment, recites the psalm about being a worm and not a man.

And people listen to the Passion story. Is it the deepest dream our bit of civilisation has ever dreamed? After the Last Supper in the upper room, when Jesus broke bread and blessed it and said it would become his body and blood, they come for him and Judas betrays him with a kiss for 30 pieces of silver. He has been praying in the garden of Gethsemane. “If this cup cannot pass by without my drinking it, thy will be done,” he says to the Father on high.

He appears before the high priests and, when they ask him who he is, he offers (after apparently attempting to fend them off) a traditional Hebraic definition of godhead. He says he will stand among the clouds by the power of the Most High and they rend their garments. He is taken before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who wants nothing to do with him but falls under his spell. “Are you a king then?” “My kingdom is not of this world. I came into the world to bear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth hears my voice.” “What is truth?” Pilate asks.

Pilate is unnerved for all his initial disdain. “Am I a Jew?” he had asked, indicating that the charges brought against Jesus were beneath contempt, issuing as they did from his own despised people.

But then Pilate’s wife had come to him and said to him have nothing to do with this man, she had been so troubled by the image of him in her dreams.

So Pilate has Jesus scourged but tries to get the crowd to release him rather than Barabbas, the other prisoner. “Crucify him!” they cry. “Shall I crucify your king?” And the reply comes back like the dreadful conformism of the ages: “We have no king but Caesar.”

Everyone knows this story or should, how Pilate washes his hands and says, kidding himself, “I am innocent of the blood of this just man”, and later has written above the cross in Greek and in Hebrew and in Latin “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews”, and when the high priests tell him to say that this was just Jesus’ mad pretension, Pilate says, “Quod scripsi, scripsi” (“What I’ve written, I have written”) .

Jesus is crucified beside two thieves. One rails at him but the other says: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replies: “I tell you that this night you will be with me in paradise.” Then on the third day he comes out of the tomb. Mary Magdalene, the woman of the streets who had washed his feet with her hair, meets him and doesn’t at first recognise him, and he says to her, “Noli me tangere” (“Touch me not”). Then she does recognise him and cries, “Rabboni” (“Master”).

This is the blissful triumph, this resurrection, and it is the answer, the complement to the great cry on the cross, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” (“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), the only Semitic words in the New Testament, which recapitulate the agony of the psalmist (from Psalm 22). Somehow that’s the way of the spiritual search in our neck of the woods.

Here is the Messiah, the Son of God, dying on the cross and taking upon himself all the evil of the world and feeling the agony of a world bereft of God or any comfort of God, bereft of the essence that has brought the world into being of which he is the human embodiment. It is stark stuff, the Good Friday story. It figures that this should be the fundamental path of the seeker after truth in a civilisation that cracked its teeth, cracked everything in its soul, in all those dark and troubled and exalted psalms, all those songs of David in the Hebrew Bible.

Our Western tradition is grounded in the existential starkness of the Hebrew tradition, just as it takes its bearings from that aspect of Greek civilisation that issued into tragedy as the highest form of literary and dramatic art.

TS Eliot, the greatest modern poet who was a believer, wrote somewhere in his Four Quartets: “You must go by a way in which there is no ecstasy.” That is only pragmatically true of Christian spirituality but it certainly corresponds to the sweeping evocation of suffering — and, with it, the supreme value of the human personality that suffers, that sense of the supreme and sublime value of the suffering face of Christ — which is central to the Christian story, to our whole apprehension of why Easter is somehow a quiet time, even a profound one, when we ponder for a moment the thought that everything that is most precious and most sacred to us can die, that the very intimation of the reality of the good, the principle on which the world is grounded, what the greatest of Italian poets, Dante, called the love that moves the sun and other stars, could die.

Which makes it a thing of wonder and a thing of joy that the figure of Christ can then come back to life, as surely as spring follows winter, or in our own antipodean terms, the harshness of summer can be followed by the soft light and soothing cold nights of autumn. “Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?” that old propaganda monger St Paul sang.

Yes, but then there is the perplexing character of the risen Christ and the figure of doubting Thomas, who said he wouldn’t believe a word of all this resurrection drivel unless he could place his hands in the wounds.

Then he does, then he sees. And he comes out with that cry of hope, that expression of faith that encompasses its opposite: “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

The world has a great unbelief in this Easter story from which we take our bearings. It seems too old, too corny, too full of the melodrama of old-time religion, so why have a bar of it? Yes, well the spirit blows as it lists. The story of Easter

— the high point of the comedy and tragedy of Christianity — runs through the greatest art and music we know.

There are other immeasurably rich revelations: think of the face of the Buddha, the richness of Islam, especially in its mystical Sufi aspect, the infinite variety and metaphysical precision of the Hindu tradition, think of how Eastern meditation has transformed our world.

Yes, but Easter, the Cross and the Resurrection, Good Friday and Easter Day are us. They have formed us for more than 2000 years and there’s no getting away from them.

This should be the fundamental path of the seeker after truth in a civilisation