Sara Cox sits in

From Leslie Griffiths, Methodist Minister:

Christians are in the middle of the most important week in their calendar. We’re following the sequence of events that marked the end of Jesus’s earthly life. No problems there. He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, he had a final meal with his friends, he then stood accused in two courts of law before being sentenced to death. And then came the grim end-game – they stripped him, laughed at him, spat at him, hung him up. And the life drained away from him until at last he gave up the ghost. “It’s finished,” he’s reported as saying, “into your hands I commend my spirit.” And, with that, he was gone.

The best minds and the finest artists have been trying to tease out the deep meaning of this sequence of events ever since. I’ve had a fair few goes at it too, one of the oddest being when I was asked, way back in the 70s, to speak about all this in, of all things, an Odeon cinema. The owner, J. Arthur Rank, was a devout Christian. He’d been roundly criticised for opening his cinemas on Good Friday. His response was to get Methodist ministers like me to take the stage between showings and explain the meaning of the death of Christ to all unsuspecting souls who’d come for a nice evening out at the flicks. I was as nervous as a kitten. The film being shown was a blood-curdling murder mystery with a grim ending. When it finished, the lights went up and I was thrust onto the stage by the manager. “OK,” he growled, “do your stuff.” I was blinded by the bright lights but still managed to note that the cinema was virtually empty – just a few canoodling couples on or near the back row.

So I spoke very simply but very directly to those startled young people. “Love always wins,” I announced; “nothing, neither the taunting nor the wickedness of those gawping at him, neither the pain nor the suffering they inflicted on him, diminished the pure and unconditional love that flowed from him.” I might have added, and I’m sure J. Arthur Rank would have nodded in agreement, that even death lost out in that battle.