A very happy Easter to my fellow Unherd commentors 🙂

If the dead do not come back to life, why does Dr Alice Roberts need to remind everyone of it?
In her professional careers Dr Roberts has been down among the dead people for so long that she doesn’t expect to see one come to life. She hasn’t yet seen. In this she reminds me of a clergyman I was once told of.
In conducting a baptism, this man poured some water over the infant’s head. Then he did the same thing a second time. Then a third. Repeating this some more times, he finally looked up at the congregation, most of whom were not churchgoers and therefore didn’t know what to expect in a such a ceremony, with a mischievous smirk. You’ve all been had!
Having been an army chaplain and in order to get himself accepted by the unbelieving wags in the barracks he had had to put a jokey rendering on his ministry, as he did to this ceremony. One might have thought he had been too long down among the squaddies.
But his presentation of this ceremony had a serious point. If you don’t know what to expect, you will never see, nor understand, what is before your eyes. It will either, as Paul observed, be a folly or a mystery. Or lovely, like the blue sky, but which is something that conceals things far more beautiful.
It is a demonstrable fact that non-Christians and the non-religious can be good people. However, if we cannot see beyond goodness, we will never see the point of Christian belief; never understand the nature of what it was that was set before Jesus as the goal, the pursuit of which required a journey to the place of the skull.
Follow someone on their path, when they carry whatever is their cross, to the same place, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t witness what the disciples and the women witnessed. By God’s grace. Providing, as Paul cautioned, the believer discerns the Body.
It’s quite likely that Dr Alice Roberts has more than respect for the dead people she studies. We might be bold enough to say that, in a certain sense, she loves them. She loves someone she has never met. In many cases she loves someone she has never seen.
Can we love someone we have never met? Peter thought so. In his second epistle he observes that the converts have never seen Jesus. Nevertheless, they love Him. Nor is it surprising that this man, once so full of confident self-assertion, should think about love, given the question that was asked three times of him.
Not for nothing did C S Lewis put this in dramatic form in the hieroglyph of his Narnia stories for his child readers. At the end of the series, each Narnian who has ever lived has to meet Aslan face to face and decide whether they love him or hate him. Indifference or ignorance or procrastination are all impossible.
It is either one thing or the other. Love or hate. Against both things, goodness is, as Lewis put it, ‘mere machinery’, just the turning of the gear wheels of living. Neither self-control, however commendable, nor religious devotion, however lovely and however good, is holiness. It must be a journey to the place of the skull, and after which, something beyond goodness.

Beatiful and touching as always, thanks for sharing! You’ll continue to do a wonderful ministry at your new church, I’m sure. God bless you!

Wandering around Kew Gardens on ‘Good’ Friday, I was struck not just by the plant life coming back, but by the contrast between the scarcity of insects, which I was able to count on just two hands, and the crowds of humans stuffing rubbish into bins that were full by the afternoon. “Everything dies, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back”, but only if it has no name, no individual identity in our heavily filtered perception, its enduring presence real but too subtle for our understanding. Even then, sometimes it doesn’t come back. ‘Victory over death’ is an illusion unless we see something common or shared as surviving concretely, something as real as any other figment of imagination we carry around. However, it is a hollow victory if everything around us dies. The clanging of bells and chanting of spells will not save life or bring it back. ‘Victory over death’ needs to become like breath.

Such a great article, Giles. I have never read an essay which brings together the various threads of my faith in such a coherent and articulate manner.

Thank you Giles – Allelulia Christ is Risen, He is risen indeed

‘Murdered by the Romans..”

Thank you for a reflective piece.
Quite frankly, though it may be uncharitable of me to say so, I find it extremely odd that anyone with normal insight, empathy and humane sensitivities needs to state their atheist conviction in a general public forum at any time, but particularly at Eastertide, as though she intends to be especially offensive. It indicates someone with a missing cog, or a messed up head.
I’m not a regular church goer, though I was until my late teens sixty years ago. I’m contented not knowing what the grand plan is, and I’ll face whatever great adventure comes, or not, but I would stick pins in my eyes rather than make such a pointless and potentially offensive public statement. She’s most definitely ruled herself off my to-watch list.

I’m an atheist though many of my favourite writers are Christians. So I read those writers’ views on religion in the hope they might show me what I’m missing. But then I encounter sentences that are just plain odd, like ‘The God who is there in the person of Jesus is the same one in whom everything moves and has their being’. I just don’t know what to make of such claims.