Good Friday

Today Christians remember something unusual, though not otherwise entirely unknown for religious believers, in that they commemorate the execution of their God.

Regardless of whether you believe Jesus was the incarnate son of God or just a human being, the story of his trial and execution is an incredibly dramatic one which seems in some ways remarkably relevant to our own age.

It is a story of courage and cowardice, of constancy and betrayal, of political and religious rivalry (the by-play between Pilate and Herod is particularly fascinating) of a tolerant faith against a fanatical one, of national unrest against an established regime, and a story in which people's principles are put to the test and all but one of them comes up short.

The Good Friday story does not make for comfortable reading for Christians or anyone else. Partly because most of us on hearing the story instinctively put themselves in the place of one of the protagonists and ask "What would I have done?" And the greater the self-knowledge that we have, the less likely it is that we will like the answer.

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