Given the decline of Christian belief in the UK, it’s surprising to discover there’s quite so much about the Easter story on the airwaves this week. You might have assumed that no space would have been found in the schedules for a retelling of the central but yet most difficult Christian narrative. Christmas is easy to sell and to dwell on, with its baby, its joyous arrival, its exotic gifts, but Easter? Who hasn’t as a child in a Christian household bewailed the gloom and doom of Good Friday? Who hasn’t at some point given up on attempting to understand the great paradox of the Passion as it takes us from the triumphant glory of Palm Sunday when Jesus entered Jerusalem to the horrific events of Good Friday fewer than seven days later?
Yet on the evening of Good Friday, Radio 2 gave us an hour-long meditation uncompromisingly entitled At the Foot of the Cross. No avoiding, then, the implications of that story — the bloodied hands and feet, the rejection, the pain, the utter despair, and the apocalyptic rupture of the Temple curtain at the hour of three, when the skies darkened and the last words of Christ echoed through Calvary. On 4, there was not only a Good Friday meditation by the Archbishop of York but also The Archers put Chris on the Cross, quite literally, as the Ambridge villagers acted out the Passion with Neil Carter’s blacksmith son taking on the central, sacrificial role. (‘The hunky young farrier with his chest out,’ as Kirsty so memorably foretold a week earlier.)
Radio 3, meanwhile, devoted The Essay all week to five meditations on Christian themes by the journalist Madeleine Bunting. She took as her inspiration the ‘Retreating Roar’ of Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’, comparing society’s gradual loss of faith to the ebbing of the tide across a pebbled beach.
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