The Passion

The BBC's retelling of the last week of the life of Jesus begins on Palm Sunday at 8:00pm. It looks fascinating and runs through the week. There's an outline of the running order on both the BBC website and Premier.

Unlike Mel Gibson's film and unlike the release of The Da Vinci Code, this series doesn't seem to be getting hyped up in the Christian media as the greatest opportunity the 21st century church will have for evangelism. That, for me, is a very positive thing. I found all the emails and publicity that came my way about the other greatest opportunities just too much. Every Sunday is a great opportunity, every day is a great opportunity to share the life and death and resurrection of Jesus with those around us.

I remember going to see the Gibson film and wondering if any of my unchurched friends would actually comprehend it; whether they would simply come out of the cinema shocked and bewildered by the whole thing. Good as it was, it didn't produce a rush of interesting conversations. And, if the truth be told, I'd rather have sat down with a group of friends and watched Bruce Almighty and talked about our images and understanding of the nature of God than try to use Mel Gibson's Passion.

I hope there will be many opportunities for conversations, many opportunities for pointing people toward Jesus. I'm certainly going to watch it carefully so that I can use what I can on Easter Sunday. But I also hope that we will learn how to be Christians in plain view, how to share our faith in positive ways and how to engage our friends in conversations that might nudge them towards Jesus.

And my prayer? It's very simple: "Lord use this drama in ways we cannot imagine to make yourself known in our nation."