Housesitter

Here is the latest article by my friend Dr John Dempster published this week in Highland News Group of newspapers under the heading Christian Viewpoint. As always reproduced with the permission of the author.


David Oyelowo who plays Joseph of Arimathea in the BBC’s new mini-series The Passion is himself a Christian. He describes how his character has to go to the place where three people, two of them criminals, have been crucified, and seek permission to take Jesus’ body away for burial.

‘I arrived on set,’ says Oyelowo, ‘and there they were hanging on the cross. I couldn’t hold it together. It was like being transported to see the image on which you have based your whole life.’

The Passion (the word means suffering) which dramatises the Bible’s account of last week of Jesus’ life is being shown throughout Easter week beginning on Palm Sunday, 16th March. Christians have welcomed the opportunity this series gives people to learn and think about Jesus.

The other day I heard that my friend David Parry had died. Dave, born in 1934, was a fellow-librarian, a former Labour councillor, and a translator of Russian scientific papers. He was also a Roman Catholic Christian with a ‘writing vocation.’ His letters upholding Christian values frequently appeared in the press, and he engaged in much email correspondence. Dave was a mild eccentric, who loved God deeply, and radiated a quiet joy. Each week I’d email Dave these Christian Viewpoint pieces, and though we didn’t always agree, I’d often receive a warm, encouraging response.

Actor Joseph Mawle, who plays Jesus in The Passion is according to David Oyelowo ‘a wonderfully sensitive actor’, fully aware of the responsibility of portraying Jesus. Though not a Christian he was genuinely interested in preparing for the rôle in what Jesus means today to believers like Oyelowo.

Interviewed for the BBC web-site Joseph Mawle makes three striking comments. He describes Jesus’ words at the Last Supper making clear to his friends that he’s going to die. ‘That to me is beyond my understanding,’ says the actor. He feels that, especially since Jesus death by crucifixion would be so painful, for him to say ‘“I am actually going to let this happen” is quite a weird thing to get your head round.’

Why did Jesus allow his enemies to capture him? Why did he not simply walk away from Jerusalem, or go into hiding? Mawle says he found ‘a way of understanding’ but he doesn’t elaborate. But the ‘way of understanding’ this mystery which has been given to Christians is that motivated by incredible love Jesus was embracing the destiny which he had chosen for himself, a destiny which involved him in giving up his life for the whole of humanity.

Joseph Mawle refers to one quotation which resonated deeply with him when he was researching the rôle - ‘God didn’t cheat’. ‘What this means to me is that Jesus was a man,’ he says. Christians agree that God does not cheat. Jesus was a real man, not God pretending to be a human being. While at the same time, Jesus was God in some inexplicable way.

But another consequence of the fact that God does not cheat is relevant at Easter. We believe he created a moral universe in which those who are guilty of sin and evil must face the consequences of their action – ‘the wages of sin is death.’ For God to forgive people, wiping the slate clean, pretending they had done no wrong would be cheating, and God does not cheat. At Easter Jesus died to absorb the consequences of our sins, so that God can forgive us without cheating and we can know the joy of finding him as father.

Playing Jesus was ‘gruelling’, Joseph Mawle confesses. It was ‘fearful and wonderful in equal measure. The amount of pleasure and the amount of pain was the same.’ The Christian faith is for different reasons both fearful and wonderful. Fearful, in the sense of ‘awesome’ as we reflect on the greatness and purity of God in contrast to our weakness and moral failure, and wonderful as we realise that we are forgiven. For us, as for Mawle, there is a direct relationship between fear and wonder, as we seek to match Jesus’ commitment by embracing our destiny.

For David Oyelowo, walking into the middle of the scene he’d based his life on was powerful. Two weeks ago, days after his final email to me pinged into my inbox, another David, my friend Dave Parry walked off the set which is the universe we inhabit, transported to the greater reality we know as heaven.

And what he found there had an infinitely more powerful effect on him than the film set in the Moroccan desert had on Oyelowo, as he looked for the first time at things on which in faith he had centred his life and gazed, in some utterly satisfying way on the living Jesus.

John A. H. Dempster

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Ray
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Christian House Sitters
www.christian-housesitters.com

Boanerges

Very nice, thanks for sharing Ray!

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“Neither skill nor knowledge is needed to go to God, all that is necessary is a heart dedicated entirely and solely to Him out of love for Him above all others.”
Brother Lawrence