Growing up in a small Christian community in rural Victoria, Easter was always the highlight of our year. The air would change as spring approached—flowers blooming, birds singing, and our church bustling with preparations for the most important celebration on the Christian calendar. Yet, as I've grown older, I've come to realise that Easter is not just a story we remember once a year. It is, in truth, the greatest story ever told—a story that changed history, and a story that continues to change lives, including my own.
The Easter story begins in the shadows. Jesus, the Son of God, entered Jerusalem to shouts of "Hosanna," but within days, He was betrayed, arrested, and condemned. On Good Friday, He was crucified—a brutal, public execution reserved for the worst criminals. For His followers, hope seemed lost. The Messiah they had trusted was dead, His body sealed in a borrowed tomb.
I remember as a child sitting in the pews on Good Friday, feeling the weight of that darkness. It was a sombre day, a day of mourning. But even then, our pastor would remind us: "Sunday is coming." The story was not over.
Early on Easter morning, women went to the tomb and found it empty. Angels proclaimed, "He is not here; He has risen!" The impossible had happened—Jesus had conquered death. The disciples, who had been hiding in fear, encountered the risen Lord. Their sorrow turned to joy, their doubt to faith. The resurrection was not just a miracle; it was the validation of everything Jesus had taught and claimed.
For Christians, Easter is more than a historical event. It is the foundation of our faith. As the Apostle Paul wrote, "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins." But because He lives, we have hope—not just for this life, but for eternity.
Easter is the story of victory—victory over sin, over death, and over despair. It is the story of God's love poured out for a broken world. Jesus became the ultimate sacrifice, the Passover Lamb, so that all who believe in Him might have new life.
This truth is not just theological; it is deeply personal. I have seen lives transformed by the power of the resurrection—addictions broken, relationships restored, hope rekindled in the darkest of circumstances. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in the world today, offering forgiveness, healing, and purpose to all who call on His name.
Easter is not a story to be shelved until next year. It is an invitation to live differently every day. Jesus calls us to follow Him—not just to admire His sacrifice, but to walk in His footsteps. That means embracing the way of the cross: loving our enemies, serving others, seeking justice, and proclaiming the good news of resurrection hope.
As I reflect on Easter, I am reminded that the story is not finished. Each of us is invited to be part of it. In a world still marked by suffering and division, the message of Easter rings out: death is not the end, evil does not have the last word, and love has triumphed.
Easter is the greatest story ever told because it is the story of God's relentless love for humanity. It is a story of sacrifice and redemption, of darkness overcome by light. And it is a story that continues—every time we choose faith over fear, hope over despair, and love over hate.
This Easter, may we remember not just what happened two thousand years ago, but what is happening now. Christ is risen. Hope is alive. The story goes on—and we are called to live it, every day.
"Easter is a strange time, almost an uncanny time. You can see your family if you want to but the chocolate egg giving and perilous camaraderie are not obligatory.
But we believe in Easter deep in our bones, whatever religious or agnostic or atheistic label we put on ourselves; we are intimate with Easter because it contains the two greatest stories we know, the contrasting stories of the death of Christ, the effective death of God, so grave and stark and tragic, and then the complementary story of him walking from the tomb, so exultant and glorious. As a civilisation, we are handed these stories on a platter like the fish and chips many of us would have eaten on Friday out of a habit older than the Reformation when the dream of a unified Christendom ruled the world as a just possible thing.
It structures the dream of a civilisation we inherit and which God knows is compatible with the wisdom of the world's other great religions.
Good Friday is the day when the mass is not celebrated because the mass is the remembrance of the death of Christ that we had been told saved the world: whereas on Good Friday the killing of the God-Man was overtly, God help us, taking place. Remember the terrible cry of Jesus on the Cross:
"Eloi eloi lama sabbachtani. My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"
When I was a boy, there was a popular novelisation of the life of Christ The Greatest Story Ever Told which gave its name to the George Stevens movie which has in the role of Jesus the greatest actor ever to impersonate the figure who governs our very notion of time: the great Swedish actor, star of a score of Ingmar Bergman masterpieces, Max von Sydow. At the end of the book, one of the high priests – Annas, I think – is delighted at Jesus' expression of despair but the other one, Caiaphas, the one who said it was necessary that one man die for the sake of the nation, says, "You absolute ninny and fool!" Why? Because he realises that it is prophesised that the Messiah, at his last breath, will come out with the mighty words of Psalm 22.
I remember a lifetime ago the stark spectacle of one of my teachers dressed only in a white shift reciting the terrible words of attrition, the supreme Hebrew lament of desolation: "But I am a worm and no man; a reproach of men and despised of the people."
Penitent Wilfredo Salvador kneels in prayer before he is nailed to a cross during Good Friday crucifixions on April 7, 2023 in San Fernando, Pampanga, Philippines.
We retell this story, the tragedy of the passion, the glory of the resurrection in a thousand versions. Think of Aslan in CS Lewis's Narnia tales. There is the death of the mighty God-like beast and there is a rising from the dead. I once asked my friend, the novelist Kamila Shamsie, who grew up in Karachi, if as a girl she had had trouble, given the Anglophile side of her, with the Christian mythology of the Narnia books (bear in mind that a myth can also be something that happened and continues to happen). "No, Peter," she said. "Sometimes a lion is just a lion." Well, yes and no. No matter how agnostic we think ourselves it's difficult not to be hurled into a sense of a tragic story of overpowering gravity and truth. People who commemorated Good Friday according to the packdrill of the Catholic Church would have heard recited or sung the Passion of St John. Remember Pontius Pilate asking Jesus, "Art thou a king then?" and Jesus replying, "My Kingdom is not of this world." Jesus says, "Thou sayest I am a king. To this end I was born and for this have I come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice." And then Pilate says, "What is truth?"
He's a great master of questions and terse statements, Pontius Pilate. Think of the disdain with which he says, "Am I a Jew?" Or the rattled sense of wonder with which he says, "I am innocent of the blood of this just man" knowing he is not as he allows the crowd to consent to Jesus's execution because they accuse him, Pilate, of disloyalty to Caesar. And there's the moment of some grandeur when he refuses to compromise on the title put above the cross of the man he has allowed to be murdered in Hebrew and Greek and Latin. The chief priests say to make it clear the title is just the delusive claim of a false prophet. And Pilate says – in the Latin of St Jerome's great translation, the Vulgate, "Quod scripsi scripsi". "What I have written I have written."
Michael Heyward and I once called a literary magazine Scripsi, and when the poet Evan Jones launched some issue of it he remarked that whatever else he was guilty of, Pilate was a good literary model. Literary scholar Erich Auerbach argued in his work Mimesis that the gospels use a style of graphic realism which we hear as the idiom of truth.
It's not hard to see how this might have led Mel Gibson in his extraordinary way to reconstruct for his film The Passion of the Christ a hypothetical version of the Aramaic language Jesus would have spoken, even though none of the gospels are in this semitic language which is a demotic ersatz version of Hebrew (the Gospels are in fact in koine Greek which paradoxically was the language of the Roman Empire). And this is not unrelated to the way Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a far greater version of the story – outshining von Sydow's knightly power of introspection or Gibson's lust for an ancient language – produced The Gospel According to St Matthew in a neo-realist style that is genuinely uncanny because it is a bit like watching a documentary of these fabled events. Pasolini, a poet as well as a film director, was leftwing, gay, a cavalcade of contraindicated complexities but he dedicated his Jesus film to Pope John XXIII.
He also includes a snippet of Bach's St Matthew Passion. In her recent memoir, actor Sheila Hancock, a fan of classical music, says Bach's St Matthew Passion is the greatest expression of human feeling she knows. Perhaps that's why that liberal and secular Jewish silk Robert Richter played the St Matthew Passion when the man whose innocence he was certain of, George Pell, was exonerated by the full bench of the High Court. It is full of a sense of the infinite sorrow of the world, the pang of the complexity of humankind implicated in the death of the Good, but it also through the paradox of Bach's genius manages to convey like a presentiment the solemn glory of the resurrection to come.
My generation tends to put its money on the 1960s Otto Klemperer version, but a lot of people think John Eliot Gardiner's is closer to how we imagine Bach's tempi and he has also recently released a new version of the St John Passion. And this alternate Passion, which some people prefer for the brightness of its colouration, was performed on Good Friday at Scot's Church by Douglas Lawrence and his choir with the Melbourne Baroque Orchestra.
Bach is one of a world of points in which art and an implicit belief in the Easter story meet. If this is arguably the summit of what shaped sound can mean, how comfortably can we dismiss its origins in faith? Of course a story is not literally true because it is beautifully told or morally luminous. When Priam in Homer's Iliad comes to beg the dead body of his son Hector and declares, "I have done what no man ever did. I have held out my hand in friendship to the killer of my son," the great warrior replies, "It is said old man that you too were happy once." Yes, this has a staggering symbolic truth – but it is different from the world of tradition that shapes our sense of Easter.
Think of how in Peter Paul Rubens' Descent from the Cross everything is full of turbulent operatic energy quivering with gesticulation and expectation except for the still-bloodied corpse of the Lord whose spirit has departed. The brilliance and grandeur of the whole picture is overwhelmed by the sense of the mortality of the most high, and this is presented as an ungainsayable truth which can be imagined in a thousand ways.
It's a world away from the quiet but absolutely intense sense of deepest bereavement in Diego Velasquez's Christ on the Cross which could be an almost conventional image of the tragic figure if it were not for the absolute stillness and overwhelming sadness of the presentation. And this is true too of the sheer lyricism of the sense of motherhood in Michelangelo's supreme elegiac work, Pieta, with Christ dead in his mother's nursing arms. How far is this concertedly beautiful sculpture – the intensity of the feeling is in the delicacy with which stone is made sentient – from the scarifying figure in the Crucifixion of Matthias Grunewald in the Isenheim altarpiece which shocked a world of 19th century believers and continues to shock committed Christians now as well as anyone with a feeling for art because it shows the body of the son of man, the body of the son of God, as a tortured ravaged corpse.
The resurrection story is one of intimate shining glory. Remember Mary Magdalene, the woman whom much is forgiven because she has loved much, coming to the tomb from which Jesus has broken out like the principle of love that rules the world and confounds the laws of physics. She sees two angels who say to her, "Woman why weepest thou?" And then, not knowing who he is, she sees Jesus all in white. He repeats the words and expands them, "Woman why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?" And then he says to her, "Mary." And she knows who he is now and replies, " 'Rabboni' which is to say Master." And he says to her, "Touch me not," in St Jerome's Latin: "Noli me tangere."
There are limits to what more can be said about Piero della Francesca's Resurrection of Christ, which is thought of with its incarnation of the glory of God as the sublimity painting that has driven people into monasteries or turned them into art critics. It was from a long sequence of paintings about the cross but it is an utterly uncanny work because – if ever painting did – it seems to give figurative expression to Shakespeare's words from The Winter's Tale: "It is required you do awake your faith."
Most people would run a mile from reading the Bible with any regularity but a fair fraction think they should have. In our age of Audible and podcasts it's worth pointing out that there are versions of the New Testament done by Gregory Peck and James Earl Jones. And there is an extraordinarily vivid version of the English actor Alec McCowen doing his one man show of the Gospel According to St Mark. This is the gospel that first fired Nick Cave.
The weird thing about Easter – when we celebrate (or whatever we do) Easter Sunday – is that our faith in this story tends to be dormant but is not non-existent whatever we imagine we believe or don't believe.
The strange, sometimes reluctant faith we have in the Easter story is part of the way our minds move in tune with the civilisation that has chosen us. Does that mean that we're condemned to magical thinking?
Well, as one of my friends who is also a great artist said, "Isn't that the only kind of thinking worth having."
"It's from one of the great Bob Dylan songs: "When you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Eastertime too. And your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through." Easter naturally associates with the loss of gravity and the invocation of negativity. It is the most solemn time in our Christian culture's calendar, encompassing the stark tragedy of Good Friday, the day God died, then after two days of darkness the blinding light of the resurrection. Christ is risen, one voice says, and the reply comes like clockwork: he is risen indeed.
Easter is a time for sorrow and new life, so we make it coincide with ancient festivals – pagan ones, but so what? We associate it with the son of man who walks from the tomb: the eggs, the chocolate, the love fix it gives.
But this is the great story of our culture and its power is still part of us however far we have drifted or must drift. You can gorge yourself on fish and chips and hot cross buns or eat barramundi with Beerenauslese white and still know Good Friday is a day of blood, the day when we took Christ's life.
But Easter as we have kept it up is a complex exercise in counterpoint and tonal shifts.
We can follow the different accounts of the Passion. Luke has a special human quality. It is in his account that we get the good thief who is crucified alongside Jesus and says to him, "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Truly I say to thee. This day shalt thou be with me in paradise."
Mark, according to tradition, was a very young man when he was Jesus's apostle and he gives us the two great commandants: "And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. / And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these."
An easy way into Mark's gospel is that fine actor Alec McCowen who reads it with an intense feeling for its drama and power, whereas the versions of the whole of the New Testament by James Earl Jones and Gregory Peck use their respectively beautiful voices as if they were reading in church. The Lion King doesn't have the vibrancy of McCowen.
But the different interpretations of the Easter story – in art, music and drama – are endless.
The great Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) has the uncanny look of a neorealist documentary. It doesn't have an ordinary script, it has the words Matthew reports to us, and the wobbling cameras and the black-and-white cinematography add to the weird sense that we're looking at something that happened.
This is not to deny the power of Swedish actor Max von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) or Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which dramatises Nikos Kazantzakis's 1948 novel Christ Recrucified. Then there's the bizarre reconstruction of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004) in which Gibson had the scriptural dialogue translated back into Aramaic – the language Jesus would primarily have spoken – even though the gospels are in the Koine Greek that was the language of the Roman Empire.
If you want a challenging literary dramatisation of Christ's Passion listen to the BBC's 1941 radio version of The Man Born to Be King in which Dorothy Sayers, the creator of aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey and translator of Dante, tries her hand at dramatising the gospel story with Robert Speaight (who recorded TS Eliot's poetry with considerable suavity and some beauty) as the Messiah.
Sayers – who certainly had the gift of tongues – is not interested in a grandiloquent version of Jesus' life. The dialogue she gives him is much closer to the language of recent translations of the Bible. It's plain, sometimes clumsily demotic: it all brings to mind the great authority on the Dead Sea scrolls, Steven McKenzie, who used to say to his students translating scripture, "None of your Shakespeare here."
On the other hand, Sayers's introductions to each of her radio plays are dazzlingly bright. She paints a convincing portrait of a Roman Empire – none too wonderful but parallel to the British Empire, which was far from secure in its dominions. It is one of the most brilliant discussions about it.
The St Matthew Passion of Bach is the work of one of the greatest artists who ever lived and so is his St John Passion. The standard contemporary accounts of the Bach passions are by John Eliot Gardiner and he is rightly applauded for the way he has reconfigured the baroque Bach without the romantic accretions.
Then there is the Otto Klemperer version of the St Matthew, which is incomparable and confounds all doctrine and dogma: yes, Klemperer is the conductor who makes The Magic Flute sound like Beethoven but that kind of breath and grandeur is there with an absolute magnificence in his St Matthew. Peter Pears as the Evangelist, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Jesus, Christa Ludwig in the contralto role and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf doing the soprano, with Walter Berry doing the bass and Nicolai Gedda the tenor. It is an extraordinary cast and Klemperer makes anyone else sound a bit swift and light.
The Passion story is powerful in the widest variety of retellings. Jesus Christ Superstar (which was first a 1971 musical, then a 1973 film) includes one of the great Andrew Lloyd Webber songs, Mary Magdalene's I Don't Know How to Love Him. There is the beauty of the melody and the wistful wonderment of Tim Rice's lyrics: "And I've had so many men before / In very many ways he's just one more." Knowing how it can be possible to love him is the enigma for every believer and seeker.
We identify Mary Magdalene with the woman of whom much is forgiven because she has loved much. When Jesus comes out of the tomb he meets her and she doesn't recognise him. He says to her: Noli me tangere – touch me not. Titian did the painting of Noli Me Tangere (Christ Appearing to the Magdalene) at the height of his astounding powers.
Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece terrified in the 19th century – including as seasoned a beholder of suffering as Dostoyevsky – because it presented an image of the Lord as palpably dead, dead as a consequence of torture and agony, a terrible thing to contemplate.
That was also true of Grunewald's Small Crucifixion, which emphasises the death,
overpoweringly but with a bit less of the detail of slaughter. Then there is his complementary image of the resurrection. Among abundant images of Christ crucified and resurrected are frescoes such as Masaccio's image of Christ on the cross with God the Father behind him. Sublimity is the word people reach for with Piero della Francesca's The Resurrection.
When it comes to the culture, Christians have the immense benefit of so much art, music and literature created in the shadow of the world of this iconography, this belief system. That in no way lessens the faces of the great Buddha, let alone all that glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome (that is a different part of any Western heritage).
While Easter in its Good Friday aspect is the most sombre thing around, we should not be too solemn. That one-time Jesuit, Peter Levi, a man of great wit and style as well as being professor of poetry at Oxford, at one stage wrote a bit of doggerel that perhaps only someone who had been a person of the cloth could get away with. "The lads of course arrived too late / Still for a little fee / Christ being crucified / They chopped down the tree."
In his great panegyric for that adoptively Welsh poet David Jones, Levi noted Jones thought there were a lot of people in the church who didn't realise they were in it. Our civilisation is up to its neck in it.
This doesn't betoken a superiority to the Tang poetry or painting of China; rather, it should heighten our sense of the value of the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads and the Rubaiyat.
But let's not minimise the power and the glory; it is, after all, one of the greatest stories ever told. There is a novel by John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) where the main character is haunted by the crucifixion; that old polymath (American literary critic and essayist) George Steiner used to say if he could have anyone in history to dinner he would invite Homer, Shakespeare and Jesus Christ because he wanted to know if they had existed.
Think of John Donne writing A Hymn to God the Father:
"I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
"My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
"But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
"Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
"And, having done that, thou hast done;
" I fear no more."
When Donne wrote "For whom the bells tolls, It tolls for thee", he wrote from the heart of a world full of glamour and terror. He was a man of the Renaissance, "a great visitor of ladies, a great frequenter of plays". But he was also a priest and a man with a bravura sense of drama who understood the terrible times in which he lived and the democracy of spiritual difficulty.
Someone I was close to said once that he loved Easter because you didn't have to see anyone.
That's true but still they come to the Lutheran churches that nourished Bach, to the Roman churches that licensed the art of the Renaissance and to Hillsong where they clap and wonder and know they are one with folk who know how to believe."