More Tea, Jesus?

by James Lark

  ‘On the Second Coming?’

  ‘Yes. Something our readers might be able to relate to a bit more.’

  ‘This Bishop says he’s been staying with an Anglican priest in some village.’

  The editor sat up, interested. ‘That’s more like it. Can’t we get in there, maybe speak to some people in the village? We could have a big colour spread, photographs of the locals and little box-outs saying what Jesus did for them.’

  ‘That sounds like a good idea.’

  ‘And then it’s not too specific to this week, you see, we’re under no pressure to get it into this issue.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll just …’ said the sub-editor, retrieving the phone from the folds of her cardigan and speaking into it. ‘We’re wondering if we might do an article on the village that Jesus visited?’ she said. She listened, then looked up at the editor. ‘He’s asking if we want to talk to Jesus himself,’ she told him. The editor waved his hand dismissively.

  ‘Yeah, whatever.’

  The Bishop of London drummed his fingers irritably on his desk. ‘Alright, Slocombe, I’m doing my best, but you haven’t given me much notice. It can’t wait until next year, can it?’

  Slocombe’s response squeaked indignantly from the phone.

  ‘Mmm,’ grumbled the Bishop of London, ‘the Messiah’s timing leaves a lot to be desired, if you ask me. The number of General Synod meetings I’ve desperately waited for him to come and cut short … I think we’ll be able to fit him into one of the services at St Paul’s, alright? Let me think for a moment.’

  He thought for a moment.

  ‘It’s just a question of which service,’ he mused. ‘Easter day’s already completely packed – totally out of the question. As for Saturday’s vigil …’ He paused, frowning. ‘I wonder if there will really be much for him to do. I mean, apart from all the homoerotic stuff with the candle, people usually like to spend their time looking at statues and lying on the floor meditating. Does Jesus really need to be there?’

  The Bishop of London puffed out his cheeks and exhaled, but quickly resumed thinking aloud before Slocombe could interrupt. ‘Now, wait a minute, how about Good Friday?’ he suggested. ‘We’ll be doing a dramatised reading of the Passion … yes, yes!’ he continued, suddenly feeling excited about his brilliant diplomacy combined with expediency and, fingers crossed, reverence. ‘Why don’t we ask him if he’d like to play the part of Jesus in the drama?’

  There was a long silence, after which Bishop Slocombe started to make some protestations about how, having experience the traumatic process of crucifixion once, Jesus might feel somewhat aggrieved to be asked to go through the whole thing again.

  ‘Nonsense!’ roared the Bishop of London – why were these younger Bishops always so worried about hurting people’s feelings? ‘Everyone knows that it has a happy ending! That’s how C. S. Lewis sold so many books! Come on, it’ll be a great honour for everyone involved, it’ll make the whole thing come to life so much more, and …’ He lowered his voice slightly, ‘if I do say so myself, it’ll be a pretty brilliant dramatic coup, even by London standards.’

  The Bishop of London listened to Slocombe’s protestations for a while before stopping him, this time with a note of anger in his voice. ‘I’m sorry, the Titanic is hardly a valid comparison. The people who died on it are hardly around to re-enact the tragedy, are they? It’s clear to me that the best way we can possibly incorporate Jesus into this week’s activities at such short notice is to slot him into Good Friday. He gets to make a nice cameo appearance – I mean, it’s hardly a cameo, it’s the star part! He’ll be the centre of attention and all that, and we won’t have to make any massive last-minute changes.’ The Bishop of London drummed his fingers on the desk again, calming himself down. ‘As long as he’s not expecting any special music or that kind of thing.’

  Holy Wednesday

  Special music was very much on the cards for the choir of St Barnabas, Little Collyweston. Ted Sloper felt that one of the privileges of directing the choir was the ability to occasionally try out his own music with them, for he had a compositional streak which was sadly underused but nevertheless demanded satisfaction. If this satisfaction had to take the deeply unsatisfying form of a group of musical incompetents doing their best to strangle any element of musicality out of his work, so be it. And so he continued to submit his musical workings to the choir, like a shepherd regularly marching his favourite lambs to the sacrificial altar.

  ‘This is a short Easter vivat fanfare I’ve written for Saturday,’ Ted explained as the choir passed his music around with strained smiles, attempting to show encouragement and gratitude towards their generous benefactor. The choir of St Barnabas had grown wary of photocopied sheets in Ted Sloper’s handwriting. Most of them imagined that they were simply not educated enough to see the musical sense in Ted’s modern style – it looked and sounded like random notes, so it was evidently ‘proper’ music and terribly clever.

  Not having experienced Ted’s compositions before, and already glowing with enthusiasm for his newfound vocation as a singer, Bernard Lomas enthusiastically seized the music and began to study it. This, he mused, was what art was all about, performing brand new works, being a part of something fresh. Probably he ought to be starting to compose music himself – how hard could it be, after all?

  ‘It’s a slight pastiche,’ Sloper explained, ‘it’s how I think Haydn would have written it if he was still alive today.’

  A little shiver passed through Bernard Lomas as he realised that they were going to be the first people ever to sing something that Haydn might have written himself. This was fantastic, why had he never thought of singing in a choir before? He grinned enthusiastically at Ted, who tried to ignore it. ‘We’ll, er … sing through it, I suppose, and deal with any problems as they crop up.’

  Ted lifted his hands and started conducting. After a few bars of silence he fiercely called ‘Anne?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m ready,’ Anne Hudson called from her organ, hurriedly finishing the page she was reading of Seduction on the Riviera, a hugely erotic tale about an English tourist meeting a French tour guide and having a whirlwind romance in the most romantic country of all. Anne was already thinking of booking her holiday to France. But she put aside thoughts of the places she might visit and the French tour guides she might meet, quickly searching for the music she was meant to be playing.

  The organ finally burst into life; the choir had expected to hear something unbearably dissonant, but although there were definite modern streaks and clashes in the organ introduction, they were pleasantly surprised by how relatively tuneful it was. It even sounded a little bit like Haydn, as Ted had said.

  ‘Anne, that’s Haydn,’ Ted barked angrily.

  ‘You said we’re doing the Haydn!’ Anne retorted.

  ‘We’re doing my piece, it’s what Haydn would have …’ Ted gave up. ‘We’re doing my piece. The vivat fanfare.’ He added under his breath, ‘stupid cow’.

  After more rustling of music, the organ started again. This time, it was much more along the lines that the choir had expected. Many people winced involuntarily at the cacophony that erupted, whilst the more well-meaning members of the choir desperately tried to follow it on the sheet music so they would know when to come in. Bernard Lomas put his head on one side in puzzlement, until it struck him that this was a totally new and different sound, unlike anything he’d ever heard before – this was it, this was modern music, the way forward! It was exciting, it was vibrant, it was somehow so … right!

  ‘Anne,’ yelled Sloper, ‘it’s all wrong!’

  The organ stopped. A moment later, Anne’s response floated back. ‘I can’t really read your writing. The notes are very small.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with the size of my notes,’ Sloper furiously argued. ‘My notes are plenty big enough, the problem is with you, you can’t fucking play them. It’s bad enough when you’re disrespectful to other composers, but when you demolish
my own work …’

  ‘I’ll play it again, shall I?’ Anne called, having missed most of the preceding diatribe.

  ‘Might as well,’ muttered Ted. The organ introduction started again and this time Ted let it continue, though the choir were none the wiser about how much of it was what he’d actually written. Finally, he lifted his hands to bring them in, and twenty-three panicked choir members desperately guessed at what notes they were meant to be singing. Two minutes later, twenty-three people having sung entirely independent and original choral lines, Ted finished conducting and slowly dropped his arms, weary and drained of the will to live. He couldn’t even look at the choir.

  The first person who dared to speak was Noreen Ponty. ‘Ted,’ she enquired, ‘I wonder if we could have another alto on our side. I can’t help feeling we sound a little bit weak without Harriet here.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ted looked at Noreen with a manic glint in his eye. ‘That’s just what I was thinking, all the way through that rendition of the vivat I’ve spent precious weeks of my life slaving over. What I was thinking was “It’s exactly how I wanted it to sound, except – oh dear! – the altos on one side sound a little bit weak.” Thank you, Noreen, for pointing out the only thing wrong with that – fucking – travesty!’

  The choir shuffled about, nervously. Some had hoped, for a moment, that Ted wasn’t being sarcastic and they had, by some fluke, managed to sing the right notes.

  ‘I don’t know why I bothered writing out music at all!’ Sloper ranted. ‘Why don’t I just wave my hands about and let you sing whatever the hell you want to?’ (This was a question which many people in the choir had already been asking themselves, and since that had pretty much been what had happened, they wondered if this wasn’t such a bad suggestion. It would save learning the music.) ‘I mean, it’s only the most fucking important bit of the whole fucking Christian year, we’re only celebrating fucking Jesus being fucking raised from the dead! If he’d heard anything like that when it happened, he’d have gone heading straight back into the tomb …’

  Ted felt alarm bells ringing in his head and hurriedly glanced back over his shoulder to check that Jesus wasn’t there to have heard his potentially heretical comment. Then he looked back at the choir and decided on one last-ditch attempt to get them to grasp the importance of his music. ‘He’s going to be there, for Christ’s sa— … for crying out loud! What’s he going to think if he hears that? That, as our commemoration of his being raised from the dead. I mean you might as well all go and spit in his face if you’re going to sing that at him.’

  ‘Uh … Ted …’ Harley Farmer was waving his hand in the air. ‘Is he going to be there on Saturday?’

  ‘It’s probably best to assume so,’ said Ted with a shrug.

  ‘I only ask because he said something to me about going away soon.’

  ‘Yes, he said that to me,’ agreed Noreen Ponty excitedly, and others in the choir affirmed that Jesus had been saying similar things to them as well.

  ‘Well, yes, he did mention that he might be going quite soon,’ Ted mumbled, ‘but it wasn’t like he said when, exactly.’

  ‘He asked me if I was coming with him,’ Gordon Spare announced proudly.

  ‘He asked me that as well!’ squeaked Noreen Ponty. ‘But I did tell him it was difficult to commit to anything until I know exactly when it’s going to happen. I can’t do anything if it clashes with bridge club.’ There were murmurs of agreement amongst the rest of the choir.

  ‘Naturally I told him I was willing to go,’ Gordon Spare explained, ‘as long as I have plenty of notice. It’s not as if I can simply drop everything and leave!’ The rest of the choir nodded and agreed that it was very difficult to plan ahead for this kind of thing without any details.

  ‘What about you, Bernard?’ Noreen asked curiously, still slightly worried about the occasionally manic-looking newcomer to the choir.

  ‘Oh, he asked me to come with him, too!’ Bernard grinned. ‘Of course he did.’

  ‘Are you going with him?’

  ‘No, no.’ Bernard tapped the side of his nose. ‘I’ve got other plans.’ Bernard was thinking of his career as a singer, though since a few minutes earlier he had started to revise this plan to include composition. Maybe he could become a singer-songwriter – with a modern, original twist. ‘Besides,’ he added, trying to make his motives seem less selfish, ‘Harriet’s still ill.’

  ‘I thought she might have gone with Jesus already,’ Harley Farmer commented.

  ‘No, no. She’s ill.’

  ‘Fat chance of me getting a chance to go away ever,’ snorted Ted. ‘Jesus doesn’t seem to realise how much people have got on.’

  Maundy Thursday

  The day was near and people were getting ready to go. How far, nobody was sure. But it didn’t matter – all that mattered was that they were prepared. They didn’t pack bags, they just watched and waited. People who had lost family members left them unburied. People turned off their mobile phones and unplugged their computers without stopping to say goodbye to their friends. There was no time and they didn’t want to miss what was coming.

  ‘I really am going soon,’ Jesus told Biddle for the last time.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll have an early supper,’ Biddle responded happily. ‘I’ve got to be out of the house in plenty of time for the service.’

  He went through to the kitchen and took some chicken pies out of the freezer. He could hardly believe that he’d been doubting his vocation only a week ago. This busy, liturgically rich and theologically meaningful time had absolutely erased any doubts he’d been having about whether this was the right life for him. Honestly, it was a genuine paradox that so much organised misery could be such reliably good fun. And obviously, having Jesus around was an added bonus.

  ‘Are you … er … will you be joining us for tonight’s service?’ Biddle asked Jesus, who was watching from the doorway as Biddle took some carrots from the fridge and looked around for the vegetable knife.

  ‘Not tonight,’ Jesus said. ‘I have other places to be.’

  ‘Of course.’ Biddle nodded, understandingly. ‘Well, I’ll say this now, since we might not see each other later. Tomorrow is going to be pretty chaotic for both of us – er, the Bishop of London tells me you’re involved in the service at St Paul’s, which – well, that ought to be jolly good!’

  Where was the vegetable knife? It wasn’t on the draining board and Biddle was sure he could remember washing it up the other day.

  ‘Have you decided whether you’re coming with me?’ Jesus asked quietly.

  ‘No, I wish I could, but London’s too far for me to go with everything else I’m going to have on,’ Biddle said. ‘We’re having a day of workshops at St Barnabas – hammering nails into wood, that sort of thing, to … er … hammer home the reality of what we’re talking about.’ Biddle chuckled at his own joke. ‘It’s for the children mostly, but you know, I often find that adults get even more out of it than the people we’re aiming it at …’

  As he talked, Biddle checked through the drawers one more time. He could use the bigger, sharp knife, he supposed, but it frustrated him that he couldn’t find the vegetable knife, when let’s face it, that’s what it was there for. Was there any chance that Jesus might have …

  Biddle looked over at the Messiah, who had been quiet all day. He was met by the same sad, yearning eyes as usual. Biddle sighed. He knew that he was neglecting the Lord and that was bound to make things a bit tense, but they both understood each other’s difficult timetables. So Jesus was disappointed that Biddle couldn’t make it to St Paul’s – that was understandable, but what about all the services at St Barnabas that Jesus had been missing?

  ‘Look,’ Biddle said, trying to clear the air, ‘I know it’s all been quite busy, these last few days, but … come Sunday it’ll all have finished, and we can sit down and have a big dinner and catch up, okay?’ Jesus was silent. ‘Obviously, I’d love to eat with you tomorrow, but I think I’ll be
mostly having hot cross buns with the children, so unless you’re planning on popping in …?’ Jesus shook his head, then opened the drawer next to him and took out the vegetable knife.

  ‘Is this what you need?’ he asked.

  The knife drawer. What on earth was it doing there? ‘Er … yes. Thanks. So …’ Biddle began to chop the carrots that he’d brought out for their supper, ‘do you need me to leave any food out for you tomorrow, or will you make your own arrangements?’

  ‘This will be the last meal I need,’ Jesus reassured him.

  ‘Super!’ Biddle beamed. ‘We’ll catch up when it’s all over then!’

  Later that evening, Reverend Alex Milne finished a sermon about the true meaning and beauty of the Mass, then all but collapsed out of the pulpit. The combined stress of so much organised misery with genuinely being quite miserable was always a little bit too much misery to cope with, which was not to say that he didn’t welcome the fact that Maundy Thursday commemorated the first ever Mass, and thus gave him the perfect excuse to preach on what was effectively his favourite theological subject. But he was exhausted, and still had half of Holy Week left to deal with. God alone knew how he would manage to stay awake for the vigil that evening.

  It wasn’t only that it was the busiest week of the church calendar. While there was indeed an unusual amount for him to organise, the other work didn’t stop for Easter. There was nothing to halt the build-up of other burdens, the social problems, the emotional difficulties, the lost people looking for some grain of hope that he might be able to offer. Milne loved helping people in this way. But he badly needed a holiday.

  However, looking out at the sea of faces in his congregation, gathered together to take their minds away from their own problems for a few hours and focus on the solution, he discovered a renewed sense of purpose. Praying that he might be able to offer these people the genuine hope in which he was sure he believed, he addressed the congregation.