This is because the resurrection can’t be represented. Not because it’s too sacred, but because although Christians believe it actually happened, it isn’t an event in the sense that the Budget or the war against Iran is an event. You wouldn’t have been able to take a photo of it had you been lurking around Jesus’s tomb with your phone. It’s not as though he yawned, scrambled to his feet, shucked off his shroud and walked out blinking into the sunlight. The resurrection throws into question the whole idea of what counts as something happening. Is waiting, for example, an event — or is it the absence of one? Falling in love is an event of a kind, but not in the way that burning a piece of toast is. The resurrection is beyond representation not because it isn’t real, but because it’s too real to make an image of. If there is something one might call ultimate reality, we wouldn’t be able to capture it in language. It would lie on the far side of our speech, like the unconscious.

But Jesus’s rising from the dead isn’t just a “spiritual” or symbolic affair, because it involves an actual human body. The risen Jesus eats with his friends to show that he’s not a ghost, he has real wounds in his hands and so on. Yet this body is of a different order from the body of, say, Pete Hegseth — not because it’s less flesh-and-blood than he is, but because it’s more intensely so.

Whether anything happened in the tomb or not also raises the question of who reported the body being missing. The first person to do so was Mary Magdalene, who was probably a sex worker and thus in the eyes of the establishment not the most dependable of witnesses. She was also of course a woman, and the testimony of women at the time was regarded as worthless. So the fact that it was Mary and some female companions who first reported that the tomb was empty would have been highly embarrassing for the Gospel writers, who might well have omitted this bit of the narrative had they felt able to do so. The fact that they didn’t suggests it was too widely believed to be left out.

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By Terry Eagleton

All of this is deeply inconvenient for the pious of this world, who demand a rather more positive icon of the Almighty than an empty space. Icons, however, are specifically forbidden by the Yahweh of the Hebrew scriptures. You can’t make graven images of God because the only authentic image of him is human flesh and blood. You can’t wield him as an idol or fetish in combat with your enemies, or try to scramble into paradise by wafting incense at a statue of him. In fact, you can’t even give him a name, because this, too, would be a way of trying to have him in your pocket, using him as a tool to promote your own interests.

Then again, it’s easier for some Israelites to project their Oedipal fantasies onto him and see him as Big Daddy, a vengeful deity who will punish them for their transgressions and so relieve them of their guilt. The Hebrew name for this false image of Yahweh as patriarch and superego is Satan, which means Accuser. When Christian nationalist Americans hail God as Commander-in-Chief of the Cosmos, they are committing what the Scriptures know as idolatry, for all their neatly creased trousers and shiny white teeth. The bad news is that God has no more peculiar concern for the United States than he has for East Grinstead. There are no favorite nations — not even Israel.

In fact, God gets quite testy with the ancient Israelites. Some of them keep wanting him to behave like a Super Being, whereas in fact he isn’t a being at all, in the sense that the Princess Royal or a set of bagpipes is a being. He isn’t any kind of object or entity or individual. Nor does he keep meddling in human history like an American neocon. God and the universe don’t make two. He isn’t in Heaven in the sense that he might be in Chicago. He certainly isn’t in the skies, despite the fact that people tend to gesture reverently upwards when they invoke his name. In the Book of Isaiah, when the Israelites think that he can be appeased by burnt offerings, he complains that their incense stinks in his nostrils — and asks them what they are doing about protecting the widows and the orphans and shielding the poor from the violence of the rich.

When the Virgin Mary bursts out into a triumphal chant when she’s pregnant with Jesus, she praises the God who has brought down the mighty from the thrones and raised up the lowly, filled the poor with good things and sent the rich away empty. These are typical themes of the Hebrew scriptures. As an obscure young woman from a notoriously backward part of the country, Mary is an image of the poor herself. The child in her womb will be murdered by the Roman state for fearlessly speaking the truth. He will fall victim to the kind of torture and death reserved by the Romans for runaway slaves and political insurrectionists. In fact, he was lucky to get away with only six hours on the cross. Some victims of crucifixion thrashed around for days.

It’s doubtful that he was a revolutionary himself, but a few of his closest followers almost certainly were. One of them, Simon, is specifically called a Zealot, a member of the anti-imperialist guerrilla movement of the era; two others (James and John) are given a nickname with Zealot connotations, while Judas Iscariot might have sold his master out because he had hoped he would lead an armed rebellion against the Romans and was disappointed that he didn’t. Jesus himself was a vagrant with no profession who railed against the ruling caste and seems to have had a particular distaste for the family, not least his own. A fidelity to his mission takes priority over attending your kids’ graduation.

A great many pre-Christian societies had rituals of death, burial and resurrection. Vegetation and fertility cults, myths of the slain or wounded god who will finally regenerate the sterile land: all this, ironically, lurks beneath the surface of the most boldly “modern” of all English poems, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The poem is archaic and avant-garde at the same time. It would seem, perhaps, that these patterns and rhythms are somehow built into the human psyche. In this respect, Christianity doesn’t introduce something entirely new to humanity but builds on a long tradition of sacrificial victims. The victim in question is the scapegoat, who takes on itself the burden of sin and guilt of a whole community, and by dying to this barren condition rises to new life.

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Christianity, however, transforms this pattern in the act of conforming to it. Fertility cults, sacrificed gods, the release of fresh water onto parched land and so on: all this is essentially about power. The tribe needs to exert power over Nature to grow its crops, and acts this out symbolically in the form of a god who is buried in the earth and then rises to new life. The seed must die in order for the plant to flower. What Christianity does is to raise all this from the level of Nature and biology to that of history and morality. Death is still essential for redemption — but now it’s death in the form of a loving self-giving to others, as exemplified in the life of Jesus. It’s this — not burnt offerings or slain idols — which constitutes the necessary condition of new life. You have to die to the system represented in Jesus’s day by the organized brutality and injustice of the Roman Empire, and be born again into a community of friendship. This is why baptism is about drowning, not washing.

It’s all a long way from bunny suits and painted eggs. Easter is about fun and joy, to be sure, but like any genuine happiness it comes at a steep price. Even if only in symbolic terms, you have to travel all the way through death and dispossession if you’re to emerge somewhere on the other side. Doing this without any guarantees up your sleeve is known as faith. This is why Jesus is said to descend into Hell when he dies — into that cacophony of mocking yelps, sniggers, hoots and cackles which is the domain of the demonic. The demonic is the sworn enemy of life and meaning, devoted to demolishing what it sees as the ludicrous fiction that anything human can be of the slightest value. You have to live all this in order to get beyond it, moving from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Or as W.B. Yeats puts the point: “Nothing can be whole or sole /That has not been rent”.

You don’t, however, simply leave death behind. The most unpleasant part of the Christian message is that if you love properly, you’re likely to be killed. It’s the least cozy kind of love imaginable, compared with the romantic, erotic and sentimental brands of the stuff that are peddled nowadays. Jesus dies as a martyr, which is to say one who freely gives up their life for others. It’s a little extremist for English taste. But it’s unlikely that any power short of this is going to bring down the death-dealing imperial machine now ruled not by Caesar but by Donald J. Trump.

Since the Roman state reserved this penalty almost entirely for political rebels and runaway slaves, the so-called thieves probably fell into the former category. In fact, it is quite likely that they were Zealots, members of an underground anti-imperialist movement which wanted to kick out the Romans and replace them with a purified Jewish state run by a priestly caste. The Zealots were to stage an insurrection some decades after Jesus’s death, with catastrophic results. They are memorably satirised as a kind of first-century Socialist Workers Party in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

The point of crucifixion wasn’t so much the pain, even though we derive the word “excruciating” from the practice. It was rather to proclaim the helplessness of those who struck against Roman sovereignty, hence discouraging others from doing the same. Their mutilated bodies were turned into advertisements for the power of Rome, pinned up in public humiliation on the edge of the city. Even so, Jesus himself got off fairly lightly.

I once made the mistake of pointing this out in a talk on BBC radio, and was the recipient of a shedload of outraged letters from Evangelical Christians who promised to pray for my soul while deeply doubting that I was in possession of one. But it’s true: Jesus seems to have been on the cross for only six hours, whereas there were other victims who thrashed around for days. It could be that the scourging they gave him helped to speed him on his way. If you are about to be crucified, lose as much blood as you can.

If the so-called thieves were revolutionaries, was Jesus one as well? It’s possible that the gospel-writers edited out some politically explosive stuff in order to cosy up to the authorities. Christians at the time were being savagely persecuted, and for them to portray their leader as a prototype for Lenin would scarcely have appealed to those in power. It’s true that a lot of what Jesus said might have sounded to a casual bystander like good Zealot stuff. He certainly would have had Zealots in his entourage. Judas Iscariot may have been one of them. Perhaps he sold his master out because he had expected him to lead the Jewish people against the occupying forces and was bitterly disenchanted when he didn’t. Jesus’s right-hand man Peter carried a sword, an odd thing for a Galilean fisherman to do.

On the other hand, Jesus supported paying taxes to Caesar, which the Zealots didn’t. He also called down some frightful curses on the heads of the Pharisees, who were more or less the Zealots’ theological wing, perhaps in order to put some daylight between the militants and himself.

The Pharisees, incidentally, have had a particularly bad press. They were admired by most Jews for their piety and good works, but are vilified in the New Testament as legalists and hypocrites. Some modern Christians think that Judaism is about the external and collective, while Christianity is about the inward and individual. Jews are devotees of Law, while Christians are disciples of Love. The gospel-writers, who were of course Jews themselves, wouldn’t have believed any such theological nonsense, and neither would Jesus himself. But the seeds of Christian anti-Semitism can already be detected in the smearing of the Pharisees.

Jesus tries to overturn what might be called the Satanic image of God. This is the idea of God as Patriarch, Big Daddy, Judge and Superego, with whom you have to bargain your way to heaven by being exceptionally righteous and respectable. On this theory, if you’re going to have a God at all, you might as well have a big nasty bastard of one who will relieve you of your guilt by clobbering you at regular intervals — not some gentle, Guardian-reading deity who lets us murder his own child without even a struggle. Jesus’s God, by contrast, is not a judge but a counsel for the defence. You can’t make graven images of this God because the only image of him is flesh and blood.

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The real Big Daddy was not the Jewish Yahweh but the imperial state, of which the local representative at the time was Pontius Pilate. The Roman governor is presented in the gospels as a vacillating, well-meaning, rather spineless liberal with a metaphysical turn of mind (“What is truth?” he inquires of Jesus), the kind of man you could imagine doing moderately well in the BBC. Being a decent sort of chap, he doesn’t want to come down too hard on this enigmatic young holy man, one of a whole pack of hairy prophets, freaks, hippies and charlatans thronging the streets of Jerusalem for the feast of Passover. The place must have looked a bit like Woodstock. In the end, however, Pilate can’t resist the pleas of the Jewish rabble and reluctantly packs Jesus off to his death.

None of this is likely to be true. For one thing, Jesus was wildly popular with the common people, who would never have called for his crucifixion. Like a modern rock star, he actually has to hide from his adoring fans. For another thing, Pilate was by no means the decent chap the gospels make him out to be. We happen to know from other sources that he was a ruthless despot who murdered prisoners, executed at the drop of a hat, and already stood accused of bribery, cruelty and illegal execution when Jesus appeared before him. He would never have got past his first interview at the BBC. In fact, he was finally dismissed from the imperial service for dishonourable conduct, and you had to be spectacularly dishonourable to be kicked out by the Romans. He would certainly have condemned Jesus, not to speak of his own grandmother, without a qualm, and without needing to believe that he was guilty.

Seeking once more to keep the ruling powers sweet, the gospel-writers tried to shift the blame for Jesus’s death from Pilate himself to the Jewish people. But why was he killed in the first place? It’s true that his life-style might have been offensive to the Jewish Establishment. He was homeless, vagrant, without property, celibate, a scourge of the rich and powerful, a champion of the dispossessed, remarkably laid-back about sex, averse to material goods and hostile to the family (almost every reference to the family in the New Testament is resoundingly negative). He also laid claim to an extraordinary authority, surprisingly for someone from a rural backwater like Galilee.

None of this would have got him into rabbinical school, but none of it would have got him topped either. He doesn’t directly claim to be Son of God, and even if he had it wouldn’t necessarily have landed him in trouble. All Jews were sons and daughters of God. He doesn’t claim to be the Messiah either. Instead, in carnivalesque spirit, he sends up the whole notion of kingship by riding into the capital on the back of a donkey. Besides, Messiahs don’t get themselves crucified. The very idea of a crucified Messiah would have struck the Jews of the time as a moral obscenity. In any case, the Romans wouldn’t have given a toss about the theological squabbles of their colonial underlings. They didn’t get out the hammer and nails for that.

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They might well have done so, however, had they thought that the Jesus movement was seditious. And the people most likely to have sown that suspicion in their minds were the Jewish priestly caste or Sanhedrin. Maybe the priests didn’t believe that Jesus was a would-be insurrectionist, but it might have been convenient for them to pretend that they did. The political atmosphere in the capital at Passover would have been extremely tense, and Jesus could have provided the spark that sent the place up in flames. The Sanhedrin knew that any such uprising would bring the full force of Roman power down on the backs of their hapless people, and would have been properly fearful on their behalf. They were out to prevent a disaster, and Jesus was to be the scapegoat. So it may be that Jesus was sent to his death as a political agitator without either the Jewish or Roman leaders believing that he was — or in the case of the Romans, really caring.

The first person to discover that Jesus’s tomb is empty was Mary Magdalen, which means that the news of his resurrection was broken to the world by what used to be known as a fallen woman. She was in the company of other women, all of whom testified that Jesus had risen from the dead. This must have proved an embarrassment for the early Christians — not because Mary was of dubious moral character, but because the testimony of a woman was regarded as worthless. What the Christian community viewed as the most momentous event in human history rested on notoriously unreliable witnesses. Just for this reason, however, the women would seem to be vindicated. If the gospel-writers could have passed over this awkward episode, they might well have done so; but the fact that they don’t suggests that it was so widely believed that it would have been odd to leave it out.

Jesus warns his followers that if they speak out for justice and friendship as he did, then they, too, will be done away with by the state. There are plenty of latter-day Zealots who have learnt this lesson the hard way. The message of the gospels is that if you love in a certain way, you are likely to be killed. There’s your pie in the sky for you. But as long as we see love mostly as an erotic and Romantic affair, rather than a matter of, say, toppling dictators, this needn’t disturb us unduly. One of the biggest mistakes of the modern era is to see love only as interpersonal. The authors of the New Testament can’t be accused of that, whatever their other shortcomings.

Some thought it was a bit of a laugh, that all-purpose justification for brutality the world over. And with just enough boys involved to make it a collective effort, individual responsibility was dissolved away in the frenzy of a Dionysian joint enterprise.

Others didn’t know what to do. They watched or slunk away, not wanting to be next. But there would be no escape. Bullying was cyclical. One day you were the bully, the next, you were the bullied. The roles were very swiftly transferable: victim one day, victimiser the next. Pretty much everyone was involved. A kind of omertà pertained, generated by a mixture of fear and shame. The Lord of the Flies wasn’t fiction at my school.

Few people who were at boarding school back in the Seventies can have escaped the effects of this brutal and brutalising culture. Free a group of young boys from parental control and leave them largely unsupervised for hours on end… Only those with the most blindly naïve view of human nature could be surprised at what happens next. And when the school is itself run on the basis of gratuitous violence — beatings being the only language of moral instruction I can recall — one has all the elements of a little lesson in the social dynamics of the crucifixion.

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Perhaps the most challenging thing for a congregation to accept during Holy Week is that the people who welcome Jesus into Jerusalem at the beginning of the week are those same people who jeer for him to be crucified a few days later. All the signs were that this man was the Messiah — half religious leader, half king — who would return the Jewish people to the glory days of Kings David and Solomon. The Messiah was the charismatic frontman for the Make Israel Great Again movement. The sort of person who could draw a crowd, get them all excited, hold them in his hand.

Palm Sunday has all the energy of a Trump rally in a football stadium, with crowds pouring down the Mount of Olives to hail their hero’s triumphant entry into the city. I have joined those crowds myself on Palm Sunday and, even though we know what follows, it still feels like religious enthusiasm at its least self-critical. Punch the air. We are on the winning side.

But when squeezed inside the political cauldron of Jerusalem, something changes. Within days, maybe even within hours, the perspective flips. The all-conquering hero suddenly looks like a funny little man from provincial Galilee, someone who won’t stand up for himself, someone who allows himself to be bossed about by the authorities. And all that nonsense about turning the other cheek. What a loser. And messiahs can’t be losers. The cries of “Hosanna!” fade away to be swiftly replaced by “Crucify!”.

The crowd is the great villain of Holy Week. More so than Judas, the betrayer. More so than Pilate, the pragmatic amoral politician, straight out of central casting. More so than Peter, the denier. The crowd has a kind of demonic corporate personality: fickle, gratuitous, devoid of conscience, at turns both sentimental and brutal. In the crowd, you can no more be blamed for your actions than a starling can be held responsible for the direction of a murmuration. Everyone has deniability, no one has blood on their hands because everyone has blood on their hands.

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In the Gospels, the crowd functions much like the Ring of Gyges, a mythical band that grants invisibility to those who wear it. Plato talks about it in Book 2 of The Republic, where he asks if any of us, when freed from the possibility of detection, would be so virtuous as to resist the temptation to do whatever our passions might compel. The Gospels suggest not.

The liturgy of Holy Week is designed to call us out, to expose the way we flit from friend to betrayer the moment our own security is threatened. If the liturgy is doing its job properly, Christians should recognise themselves as the very people who are screaming to string him up. And piety does not save us from being among their number. There is something more than a little ironic about that. Holy Week is packed full of religious services. Yet Holy Week is also a thoroughgoing attack on religious piety, whereby the more religious you are, the greater your failure.

So, for example, Peter’s denial of Christ — “Nope, I don’t know him” — wasn’t just a one-off. Three times he pretended he wasn’t one of them. And yet, it is from this unpromising material that the church itself is created. Peter was the first Pope.

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This Christian attitude is the absolute polar opposite of that debased and moralistic approach to human values that is known as cancel culture. In cancel culture there is no way of coming back from the taint of guilt. In cancel culture everyone is encouraged to see themselves as a victim but no one has the courage to admit they have been the victimiser — except, of course, in the most general of terms. And the two are connected. Cancel culture offers no redemption, so encourages only the denial of one’s complicity. By contrast, Holy Week offers nowhere to hide from our own cowardice and failure. In this story, we are the betrayers. And yet this is also the one where we emerge transformed.

And that, in the end is the weakness of cancel culture moralism: it leaves everything where it is. People are not changed. In the quiet of Holy Week, I can admit the painful truth that I was a bully too. Both a victim and a victimiser. I looked away when I should have stepped in. I too pretended it wasn’t going on. Because if you can’t admit it, you can’t heal it.