The election Jesus lost

7th May 2015

This was my final post during the Parliamentary election campaign period, before the polling stations opened on Thursday.

#GoodFridayAgreement

The biblical Jewish “day” – a 24 hour or so period of a night and a daylight day (in that order) – traditionally begins at sundown, not at midnight as the software of our Common Era culture automatically datestamps our blog posts, tweets and emails.

There was a “day” (thus defined) during the bloody history of our human species, a history of man’s inhumanity to man, during which The Lord Jesus Christ was arrested, and put on trial, no fewer than four times – before the Sanhedrin, before Pontius Pilate, before King Herod, and finally (for the second time that day) before Pontius Pilate, who put Jesus’ fate to the vote.

Pilate himself nominated this Jesus (a notoriously gifted spiritual healer of the time, who asserted his own deity), as a candidate, in an election in which nobody at all voted for Jesus, and in which a criminal called Barabbas was the successful candidate, elected unanimously, to receive the annual Roman imperialist pardon.

The defendant Jesus was tortured, mocked, crucified, and buried, that day, having lost the election to Barabbas.

In the UK’s history, there has been a Good Friday Agreement, in which former enemies made friends.  David Trimble was in the limelight.  Ian Paisley didn’t find this flattering, so he “renegotiated” our own Good Friday Agreement, much like Harold Wilson renegotiated our nation’s membership of the then European Economic Community that Ted Heath had led us into.

The nomenclature of the Northern Ireland “Good Friday Agreement”, is an apt reference back to the original “Good Friday Agreement”, that is mentioned in the bible at Luke 23:12:

“That very day Pilate and Herod became friends with each other, for previously they had been at enmity with each other.” [NKJV]

May the dispute on how best to worship the false god called The Economy at last be settled by this election!  Let there be a coalition of all the idolatrous parties!  May that coalition include even the Greens, to avert (if necessary) the next Ice Age, paradoxically said to be threatened by the anthropogenic resumption, after a 12 years or so of spontaneous global cooling, of the century-and-a-half or so of harmless global warming that had preceded the present-day cooling.  When meterologists  have managed to predict the weather tomorrow better, I might take more seriously those, like Amanda Pennington (the Green candidate), who claim that what certain climatologists predict might become the simply horrid climate within only a few generations, is the most important political issue of today’s election.

The differences of party policy amongst the candidates whom the BBC didn’t deliberately starve of publicity, have become less and less discernible by the day.  What unites the parties whom the BBC promoted, by not editing out almost everything they had to say between  recording and broadcast of the Bodmin hustings, is akin to that which brought accord between Pilate and Herod.  Disagreeing about what they like, the main parties at least agree about Whom they wouldn’t mind seeing crucified.

I was harassed the day before polling day, when handing out my election leaflets in the town where I live, by a cop who told me he’d spent four hours the previous day (God knows why), reading as much as he could of my writings on the internet, searching for anything I could be prosecuted for under the Malicious Communications Act, but (he admitted) finding no fault in me.  That didn’t discourage him from making a meal of “responding” to the 999 call of a public servant who hardly knows me, but who was offended by a candidate’s handing out of his election leaflets near her workplace.

If that is the sort of country you want to live in, then please feel free to vote for one of the main party candidates today.  That is what most of you have been doing for decades anyway.  That is the sort of country many of the other parties want you to live in.  I realise that this is also something that many of you want yourselves.

My only poem published on this blog (if you don’t count the lyrics of my song Lost Brother), may give you something to think about.  It’s called Burning the poppy.