George Pitcher

An edited version of this review by George Pitcher appeared in the Financial Times on 15th March 2008

There is a convention that people like me - signed-up and pro-am disciples of Christ - are meant to be offended by screen representations of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. But I can't work up any offence from the latest dramatic contribution from the BBC. Quite the reverse - I'm very excited when a new version of the Passion appears and get in a six-pack with the DVD. And I like this one in all sorts of ways. I plan to show a chunk of it at my church on Good Friday.

I don't think my lack of outrage will disappoint the BBC. It has not set out to offend. Writer Frank Deasy and Producer Nigel Stafford-Clark insist that they wanted to make a drama in the realistic context of its time and to release characters such as Judas, Caiaphas and Pilate from their clichéd roles as "bad guys with big hats". So far, so secular.

But the problem that the BBC has is that it is impossible to put Jesus on screen without raising matters of theology - whether Jesus was the son of God (incarnation), why God allows evil and suffering (theodicy) and whether the Christ defeats death (resurrection), to name but a few.

As I say, I find the public and secular raising of these issues exciting and revealing. But there are those of my pro-am brothers and sisters whose self-appointed role it is to condemn, as if the story belongs to them. Throwing the first stone in a public place this week - predictably enough given his blasphemy action against Jerry Springer-The Opera - was Stephen Green, the national director of Christian Voice. He told the Daily Telegraph that Judas, Caiaphas and Pilate sent an innocent man to his death: "These are bad men," he intoned.

Leaving aside his judgment of a 2,000-year-old legislature under the Roman Empire by the standards of our own day and ignoring whether Mr Green is without sin as he throws his stone, it seems to me that this sort of Evangelical response spectacularly misses its own point.

Evangelicals have been fond of wearing bracelets with the letters WWJD inscribed on them: "What would Jesus do?" The BBC is respectful, even faithful, to the scriptural uiniversality of Jesus's mission when it has him engage with the whores outside a Jerusalem brothel, tend to the outcast sick at the Pool of Siloam and defend the temple guards from his disciples' violence when they come to take him in the Garden of Gethsemane.

So, what would Jesus do with Judas, Caiaphas and Pilate? Condemn them as "bad men" for all time? I think the BBC gets it rather more right than Christian Voice in its portrayal of Jesus's relationship with Judas - he holds him close, tells Judas he's sorry for the role he has to play and even instructs his betrayer in that role. Simply to condemn the baddies in this story is to miss the transformational nature of unconditional love. Without Judas, Caiaphas and Pilate, we'd have no Golgotha - and where would our Christian voice be then?

Which brings me to the crucifixion. Again, there is a breed of Christian who meets you at the church door, with arms open and a beaming smile, saying something like "Good news! Jesus died on the cross for your sins!" I can't buy that. For one thing, how can torturing anyone and then nailing them to a wooden beam and leaving them in the sun slowly to die be "Good News"?
I agree with Dr Jeffrey John, the Dean of St Albans who was barred from the bishopric of Reading in the early days of Dr Rowan Williams's archbishopric and who continues to be pursued by ghastly elements of the Christian right-wing as much, in my view, for his honest sexuality as for his theology, when he said on BBC radio last Easter that a god who demands the sacrifice of his son is an abusive, psychopathic god who makes no sense.

The BBC seems to agree. Unlike Mel Gibson's gothic battle between God and Satan, this Passion has Jesus's desperate prayers in Gethsemane met with the silence of the night (though Joseph Mawle brilliantly plays the strength and re-assurance that Jesus takes from this private communion), followed by the sheer banality of the cruelty meted out to him the following morning. This, I contend, is closer to most people's experience of God - one who transforms the worst that humanity can deal out through love, faith and hope.

These eternal qualities are, of course, best demonstrated by the women of the story, who are the only disciples to turn up at the cross (with the honourable exception of John, who may have gambled that the Romans wouldn't bother with a boy). I was initially disappointed by the low female headcount among the disciples, as if the BBC was following the patriarchal line, and with the two-dimensionality of their portrayal (hang in there - it improves). But not nearly as disappointed as The Madonna Fan Club, which turned up the BBC's premiere at a London cinema.

We had just been shown the first episode, in which Jesus's mother has travelled alone from Galilee to Jerusalem to tell her son, in an achingly touching scene...well, in short, that he's a very naughty boy. As her frustration builds, she complains: You were in my belly before I knew." The unofficial Madonna Lobby in the audience was having none of this. One woman said that Mary had "the right to choose", as though immaculate abortion was an option. (Really? Centuries of apostolic denial of women off the back of Mary's graceful obedience would seem to contradict that).

But there's a wider point here about faithfulness to scripture. Mel Gibson not only presented his Passion in Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin, but famously claimed that all the words his Jesus uttered were in the gospels. This is not true - witness "See, Mother, how I make all things new" from the Roman Catholic tradition. By contrast, the BBC doesn't attempt to be a verbatim transcript and is candid about its dramatic interpretation. I think it gets the balance between scripture and drama about right.

So we get just three of the scriptural "Last Words" from the cross, for instance, and two new ones. One of the replacements is a controversial one - the gospel of John's dying words from Jesus are "It is finished", which implies that Jesus's mission is complete and the Hebrew prophecies fulfilled. Deasy replaces it with Jesus declaring his love of God "with all my heart". I think that's a shame.

But I don't criticise the BBC for it. Partly because of the dramatic imperative that it must serve, which means that it is entitled to make such artistic judgments, but mainly because the story is no more mine than it is Deasy's and the BBC's. The story of the Christ is nothing if not universal and belongs not to me, nor to the Church, nor even to Christian Voice, but to everyone, including secularists, those of other faiths and none and the BBC.

This Passion shows Jesus repeatedly telling his disciples that they must let him go, just as he does in the gospels. And so must we, the household of faith, let him go, because he doesn't belong just to us. As the old movie cliché has it, if he loves us he'll come back.

The BBC's great triumph, whether it intended it or not, is to portray a Jesus for normal people, rather than one constrained by cultic Christians. And if anyone finds that heretical, then let me say that I believe in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. That's Christian jargon for saying that not only is there God, but that this story shows us entirely what God is like. In that, the BBC and I are making common cause. And, though the BBC isn't in the miracle business, its simple, human Passion paradoxically succeeds in showing the biggest miracle of all - how an artisan preacher from Nazareth came to Jerusalem with a rag-bag of simple followers, saw their mission collapse in abject and brutal failure, but whose witness changed the course of human history forever.

The Rev'd George Pitcher is curate at St Bride's, Fleet Street, London