Playing Jesus

Each day, we will post a short article by one of Darton, Longman and Todd’s amazing authors, offering a personal reflection on our current situation in life. Sometimes this will be written with reference to one of their books, and sometimes about how they are living in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus and our current world situation. We hope it will give you a taste of the depth and diversity of DLT’s list – books for heart, mind and soul that aim to meet the needs and interests of all.

Today’s post is by David Wilbourne author of The Helmsley Chronicles. You can buy an eBook copy of the book here, or a physical copy here.

Playing Jesus

During my twelve years in Helmsley I encouraged many people to play the part of Jesus in the Gospel of the Passion, to put on Christ.

Unconventionally, I often sought my Jesuses from outside the church family, and have been surprised and heartened. I recall a consultant neurologist, whose toddler grandson had banged his head. ‘He’ll be fine,’ the GP had said. But his grandfather had sat up beside his cot through the night, watching for signs of life or death. Like God the Father watching us through our dark nights, desiring life in all its fullness; also watching his Son through his dark night, watching him die. He played Jesus very straight, a very humble, quiet voice: ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’

I once asked our GP, an unusual doctor who sought healing for his patients by encouraging them to join his poetry group, to be Jesus. This poetic doctor, who had seen many births and many deaths, was strangely moved and moving when he acted the part of this ultimate death.  As soon as Jesus died his bleeper went off and he rushed out to attend an urgent case.

Another time, shockingly, I asked the local butcher to be Jesus. Butchers and I have a lot in common: they feed the world with meat whilst I feed the world with Christ. John’s Gospel has Christ dying at the very moment that the Passover lambs are being sacrificed in the temple. My butcher, with his own flock, would have seen a lot of lambs die, so I felt he was well qualified to play the Lamb of God in his final fatal hours. He played him beautifully, with his natural soft Yorkshire inflections, ‘My God, my God, why hast forsaken me?’ Not long after playing Jesus, to everyone’s surprise, he left his butchering and trained for ordination. Playing Jesus can do some funny things to you.

I have asked two women to play Jesus. When a cathedral in New York featured a woman, Christa, on the cross, people were outraged, as if crucifixion only happened to men. One woman was a lawyer. In the Gospels lawyers attack Jesus at every turn; this Palm Sunday we bucked the trend because a lawyer was Him - a young mother, blond, Aryan, a joyful Jesus even unto death.

The other woman had a bronzed Indian skin; she was a German teacher at our local school. She was a brilliant Jesus and a brilliant teacher, always reconciling, soothing, healing. A group from Germany on exchange at her school played the other parts. The Physics teacher carried off Judas rather well, with his ‘Ze one I shall kiss iz der man! Seize him and lead him away safely!’ A little Russo-German girl read the part of the crowd on Palm Sunday with her plaintiff cry, ‘Hosianna, Hosianna, blessings on him who comes in the name of the Lord.’ There was a pathos there of Mother Russia intensity which brought a Good Friday chill to our Palm Sunday.

Two Jesuses really stay in my memory. One was an atheist, the deputy head at our local comprehensive school when I was Chair of Governors. He was a fixer, whatever I asked him to do, he would sort and sort well; so I asked him to be Christ. The Chair of Governors has powers of which bishops only dream, and you don’t turn him down. But he was a simply wonderful Christ, softly-spoken, every word heartfelt. ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Maybe God’s closer to atheists than we believers realise, we who keep God at a safe impassionate distance. Certainly he delivered Jesus straight, freed up from all the trappings and clutter which can make us religious folk so easily miss Him.

The other Jesus is my first one. ‘Let’s act out the Gospel,’ I said to my wife, Rachel, at 8.30 a.m. on Palm Sunday 1984. ‘You can be the narrator, I’ll be the other voices and we’ll get David to be Jesus.’ I hurriedly drove over to David’s house, only a mile or so away, the curtains still drawn as I rapped on the door. Eventually David opened his bedroom window and stuck his bedraggled head out. ‘What do you want?’ he sleepily said.

‘David, I want you to be Jesus at the 9 o’clock communion,’ I shouted. Goodness knows what his neighbours thought.

‘Okay,’ he replied. ‘I’ll get dressed and try to join you in time.’

I drove off, robed and started the service. We began the Gospel and on cue David walked in. We hadn’t rehearsed, just the small print of the Missal in front of us, our parts unmarked. It would have been so easy to make a slip, make the Passion into a farce. Yet we didn’t. It all went just fine, beautifully. Maybe Jesus doesn’t brook too much rehearsal, better when he comes upon us all of a sudden, with his ‘Leave all that and follow me!’

Holy Week invites us to time-travel 2000 years and re-enact the Passion now in our own so-anxious world, our own context. Even to dare to be Jesus ourselves, to bring all that we are to the part of Jesus and to bring all that Jesus is to colour our part in life, and let it be none other than life and death changing.

Back to Middlesbrough, David’s voice was just right, not churchy, rather real, tender, embracing you with the Love that went unto death. I soon left Middlesbrough, David stayed. growing into a huge man, as massive as Henry VIII at his end, his body ballooned so he could hardly stand, Sadly in 2016 he died. I like to imagine another surprise knock on his door early one spring morning. Not me this time, but the Christ he played so beautifully three decades before, come to call him home. My first Jesus and the very best.