Easter 2025
By David Wilson
He was six years old, innocently walking down Newtown Avenue in Blackrock, County Dublin. Suddenly he had to ask for his mother’s help because he had seen a graphic horror image – right there in broad daylight.
‘What are they doing to him, Mummy?’
She parried his question with, ‘Well, it’s not a nice thing to talk about,’ while she fumbled for the right vocabulary in her long-buried memory of this kind of horror.
‘They’re actually trying to kill him’.
‘But why, Mummy?’ Now she was in at the deep end. She thought it was best to explain, ‘No, it’s not just a picture – it actually happened.’
The poor woman. She was brought up in one of those traditions where they don’t do crucifixes like that one in Blackrock. And now she had been pushed into accounting for the historicity of the crucifixion of Christ by her dear little boy. But he’s no dummy. He got the point – at least the main point:
‘Then he’s a superhero!’ he exclaimed, fitting Jesus into the top of his well-rehearsed list of title-holders.
The next thing you know it will be Easter again and hopefully you’ll be up for meaningful bank holiday conversations without having to go through the trauma that my health professional friend (the mother in Blackrock) just went through. Here are some pointers to getting your ducks in a row:
Duck One – Stick to the facts
We’re talking about Jesus, right? Neither a saint nor an Easter bunny. It’s a 100% case of homo sapiens. An installation artist acquaintance of mine decided one Easter to mark the occasion by recreating the circumstances of Jesus’ cross. She started with the nails but never got any further. She did the research on the kind of nails the Romans would have used and actually forged a set of nails. She found the whole thing too ugly and by the time I got to see her installation, it consisted of just a bucket of iron nails and a decorative mobile of wind chimes. She was right. It was that ugly. The Romans used crucifixion especially for insurrectionists.
Spare a thought for those guys and girls who stuck with Jesus to the end. That Friday ended up being called ‘Good’ (and we have a Good Friday Agreement to help us remember). But what did those guys and girls do on Saturday. Nothing. Not one single one of them had worked out that Jesus would come alive again. It was a hard Saturday.
The next day was odder still. It started with one of those women being bamboozled because she went to Jesus’ tomb and he wasn’t there. In Francis Spufford’s recounting of the event he describes he moment:1
‘The linens been thrown into the corner and the body is gone… she sits outside in the sun… she takes no notice of the feet that appear at the edge of her vision… she is weeping. The executee helps her to stand up’.
Duck Two – Position yourself to benefit
As to why he allowed himself to get killed there wasn’t the slightest doubt in the mind of the executee (by this time I should be calling him the ‘resurrectee’). Indeed, he had always told his mobile learning club, time and time again, that although he looked perfectly normal, he had come from somewhere else. And that he was going to be killed. And who was going to do it. And why. The ‘why’ bit was the hardest – and no, it wasn’t because he was the first communist. It was because the men who pulled the levers of power (and it was men in those days) were incensed by the way he talked about himself. In their words, ‘We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of God’2. They really didn’t like that and since they had the ear of the Roman colonial overlords, they worked out a way to do something desperate to him.
Little did they know that he had a plan too. His plan was not to do something to them so much as something for them. Because they were right. They had been listening. He was from somewhere else. He had come on a special assignment, not from outer space, but from far beyond all that. He had the authority in one fell swoop to forgive sins including their sins. That was the irony. Jesus took the next six weeks to fine-tune the job description of his team members. They were to concentrate on ‘explaining this forgiveness internationally’ (not just to local Jews). I guess they had a good opening line when they went public (just after he’d gone for good) –
‘Hey, if he can forgive me, he can forgive anybody’.
I feel the same. I point-blank refuse to join the namby-pamby narrative of the goody-two-shoes crowd who sound like they never sinned. The nearest they come to mentioning it is when they say, ‘Sorry if I offended anybody’. Come on, that’s not any kind of reasonable self reflection. If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to apply to Jesus for an amnesty. You’ll find it’s available, it’s guaranteed, and you can fly out the other side free as a bird.
If it weren’t for Easter, I’d be snookered.