“One Little Hour”

This weekend, Slate featured an excellent essay about the epic tone of easter passion plays.

For New Life Church’s The Thorn, the Passion is not only about the violence of crucifixion. It’s about spiritual violence: the larger story of the forces of good vs. the forces of evil. Like some early medieval Passion plays, according to Columbia University’s James Shapiro, The Thorn captures the whole sweep of the Bible, seasoned with Paradise Lost—we see the fall of Lucifer, the creation, the fall of man, even a bit of the plagues in Egypt and the exodus of the Hebrews. Then baby Jesus arrives and is presented like Simba into the Circle of Life. Satan and his demons hang around the edges of the production and fill the stage at key moments of the story, especially the betrayal of Jesus (when, according to the Gospel accounts of Luke and John, “Satan entered Judas”) and the anguished prayer of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. Muscular angels and demons clash on the margins of center stage, and the outcome of Jesus’ journey seems to hang in the balance.

At moments, the experience rivals Cirque du Soleil: Everywhere you look, there are flaming swords, pyrotechnics, and barrel-chested bodies dancing, leaping, flipping across the stage, and swirling down from the rafters. The scale is epic. And with its scenes of the creation of the universe and the fall of Lucifer, so is the story.

In the article Patton Dodd asked, “is the Gospel narrative truly an epic tale?”

If some church Passion plays suggest so, their creators might have mingled their beloved Scriptures with their beloved stories. Christians cherish a lot of contemporary epics because they are Christ-type stories. On some level(s), The Lord of the Rings, the Chronicles of Narnia, and even The Matrix and grand historical dramas like Braveheart say something about what the story of Jesus means. The epic and its basic components—good battling evil, foes of near-equal strength, the whole world at stake—resonate naturally with biblical themes. Many a Sunday sermon has been illustrated with an epic-movie clip.

New Life Church’s The Thorn

But it’s one thing for an epic to evoke the Jesus story. It’s another altogether to make the Jesus story an epic. Epics are audaciously bigger than life, but does any reader of the Gospels get that epic feeling? The Gospel of Mark is no Lawrence of Arabia, much less The Illiad. (Literary critic Erich Auerbach famously contrasted the “realistic” writing of the Bible with the highly stylized forms of the Greek epic poem.) The elliptical, talky New Testament doesn’t present itself in that way—if it did, there might be less discussion about whether its events actually occurred. If, as Christians believe, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were historians, then perhaps plays based on the Gospels should be realistic about more than just blood. Why aim for verisimilitude in violence but not in other historical points? The typical Passion-play Jesus, grinning warmly in his bright white robe, doesn’t tell us much about the first-century Jewish itinerant whose bold, sometimes bewildering stories and proclamations led him to the Passion path.

Churches should also consider other approaches to storytelling. Their ur-story should be not just epic but multiform. To quote writer and preacher Frederick Buechner, the Gospel is “tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale”—it happens on scales that are grand as well as domestic, historic, comic, mythic, realistic.

I think a hearty amen is appropriate! Christ’s resurrection is the epic fulfillment of the promise of the gospel, the climax of the crucifixion crisis. Yet Christ’s triumph over death is perhaps the dominant frame for the resurrection. We believers today look back with the benefit of hindsight and Scriptural revelation, but the resurrection was a part of other narrative threads: the story of how a woman saw her son come to life, the tale of a group of disheartened disciples confronted by a returned mentor, and the fulfillment of the promise of a heavenly Father to an incarnate Son. These stories may not be epic, but provide us with equally important glimpses at our beautiful Savior.

Admittedly I am hardly non-partisan, but I took great pleasure in calling J. over to read the article so that we could compare Dodd’s experience of passion plays with what I remember from attending the Living Gallery series at Bob Jones University. Living Gallery is the name for a series of Easter passion plays performed by the students and staff of Bob Jones. A full orchestra and choir performs sacred musical pieces while representations of Baroque paintings are portrayed on stage; these representations incorporate live actors into the paintings and sculptures, making the pieces come to life. There is typically a frame tale that ties the vocal, visual, and theatrical elements together. One year it was the story of a modern day father telling his son about his departed grandfather who was a carpenter. Several of the plays have told the story of the resurrection from the perspectives of various characters in the gospel account.

This use of multiple perspectives on the meaning of the resurrection encourages the members of the audience to reflect on what the resurrection means for them personally. Christ is not portrayed as “the Savior” so much as “my Savior.” But most significantly in light of Dodd’s article, the artwork chosen for reenactment is a mix of the domestic, public, grand, and intimate. Much of the chosen artwork comes from the Museum and Gallery, a collection of sacred art affiliated with Bob Jones University. Here are several of my favorite pieces of art from either the M&G or that have been used in Living Gallery.

Easter is over, but we can still rejoice that our Redeemer lives!