In my leisure time over the past week I have pollarded a large willow tree and replaced a rotten shed roof. Both tasks involved a lot of sawing at unusual angles leaving my muscles in a state of aching revolt. Finally I burned the rotten wood of the shed and all the twigs and smaller branches of the willow in a fire so fierce it was too hot to get near and, although it may seem over religious of me, I thought of the martyrs at the stake and the horror of it.
And by extension I reflected that in the next 10 days we shall celebrate Palm Sunday and Easter, with the crucifixion sandwiched in between on a midweek day when many will be out trying to get a bargain at one of the bank holiday sales. Or buying Easter eggs for the kids. For some parts of the Church the cross is everything – ‘we preach Christ and him crucified’ – salvation lies precisely in the sacrificial event of Jesus’ execution at the hands of the Romans. For others the cross is passed by, because they like Christmas and Easter or a good wedding or beating the bounds, but the events in Jerusalem on Calvary are a reality too awful to face up to. So our post Christian society has looked the other way, ignoring human cruelty and state authorised violence and the need for moral redemption and reform, to turn a story that has shaped our history and self-identity, into a pathetically kitsch shopping spree.
Can you have Easter without the flogging and torturing of a man to death, a man who criticised smug, self-satisfied religion and preached a radical moral repentance in readiness for divine judgement? And can you turn you back on atrocities quite as bad as those committed by the Islamic State? Perhaps Good Friday is more important than Easter Day.