Easter is yet to be, Good Friday always is

[Jesus Christ Superstar, 'Overture']

I first watched the film, Jesus Christ Superstar, in the cinema when I was 4 or 5 back in the early 70s. Thereafter, my brother bought the soundtrack, on cassette tape, and I recall stumbling out of bed at 5 or 6 in the morning to listen to it whilst everyone, except my father, who was preparing to go off to work, were still asleep. I was thrilled by the whole story, hoping each time that I listened to it, that the ending would somehow be different and not end up with Him on the Cross. One morning, when I awoke at about 5am, I attempted to fit the plug into the wall socket so that I could listen to the tape, yet again. In doing so, i was electrocuted and cried out. My father rushed out, but I had already managed to disengage myself. I remember him starting to cry before getting a hold of himself and telling me not to do that again. It didn’t seem to matter to me, as I stared at my hands which were blue.

After waving goodbye to my father, as he went off to work, I put on the tape and listened to the story, yet again, hoping that the end would be different....

4 scores down the road, I realise that Easter is yet to be, and Good Friday always is. The Cross is being prepared and bloodied daily. Xenophobia, racism, exploitation, the class system, nationalism, ethnocentrism, capitalism, war, the profit motive, nationalised religion.......and the belief that we have arrived at the shores of modernity, which is nothing more than a period in history where an enforced and iniquitous system has gained wide acceptance for nothing other than the masses, with the passage of generations, having built up systems of coping that enables them to make sense and dollars within a paradigm that belittles them enough for them to make much of little.

Hence, I’ve been inclined to state, ‘if the Christ was a blogger, He would receive far less hits than he did upon Pilates instructions (39 strokes of the whip) in a lifetime.

So, I put on the tape yet again, hoping that the end would be different, and find myself, in this effort, unwittingly taking on the persona of both Jesus and Judas, the Angels and Demons, Heaven and Hell, in the hope to reconcile both so that I might find the stairway to heaven through the abysmal mires of modernity.

“Play”

[Jesus Christ Superstar, 'Superstar']



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