The Lewes Passion Play 2010

In Holy Week 2010, Lewes Passion Play presented the greatest dramatic events the world has ever seen – in the streets and gardens of the historic Sussex town of Lewes.

Lewes High Street became the centre of Jerusalem and we saw Jesus, the son of a carpenter from a provincial town in occupied Galilee, take the Judaean capital by storm. The crowd – actors and watchers – acclaimed his entry into the city and followed as he reclaimed the Temple from the commercial interests which had taken it over.

The way Jesus taught, and lived, challenged people's ways of thinking about God, about authority, and about each other. He threatened the relationship between the local authorities and the Roman empire.

Those who come up against the might of a brutal political power end up under arrest, tortured and worse: then as now. Those powers conspired to get rid of him. They exploited the frustration and misunderstanding of one of his closest friends: a story mirrored by many more recent regimes, to the present day.

Were you there, in the pouring Good Friday rain, when the Governor offered the people a choice? Did you shout for him – or against him? Did you follow to the Mount to see the day's dreadful end? We shared the despair of his mother, and his friends. But Jesus was not broken. Love, not hatred, was the victor here.

In the final Act, and against all that human minds could expect, God's Friday was not the end of the story. On Easter Day, as sunshine broke over Grange Gardens, we shared this too. He died. But he is risen indeed.

In the famous phrase, this was not the end. But it was the end of the beginning. The rest of the story has been told down the ages in the lives of those who refused to give in to hatred, who loved and forgave as Jesus loved and forgave. He knew the secret of real life.