James Lark - More Tea, Jesus?

Dedicated to the memory of Bill Bates, Ian Thompson and Rex Walford. They all would have found weaknesses in my theology and storytelling, but I think they would have laughed.

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part Two

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Part Three

Palm Sunday

Holy Monday

Holy Tuesday

Holy Wednesday

Maundy Thursday

Good Friday

Holy Saturday

Easter Sunday

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About Authonomy

Copyright

About the Publisher

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and in the firmament of the sky He made two great lights; the greater light was to govern the day and to give light on the earth, and He called it the sun.

Towards the end (which was really just another beginning), the sun was still successfully governing the day (unless you happened to live in Norway, where you might justifiably feel that you had been overlooked) and one day in early spring its golden rays streamed across an unremarkable part of England, winding their way with a vigorous, end-of-winter energy into the unremarkable village of Little Collyweston.

The village was, as its name hinted, little. The one landmark was the parish church of St Barnabas, its plain exterior, wooden door and stained-glass windows lit by the bright, early morning rays. In front of the church a wooden noticeboard stood at a slight angle, dappled sunlight playing over the week’s service times, an advert for the Tuesday Mothers and Children Group and a red piece of cardboard displaying the poorly printed motto:

ASPIRE TO INSPIRE BEFORE YOU EXPIRE!

Somebody in the church had been pinning poorly printed mottoes on the board for as long as anyone in Little Collyweston could remember – so long, in fact, that nobody could remember who was responsible. The incumbent vicar was not greatly keen on the mottoes, but because nobody knew who put them there he wasn’t able to ask them to stop doing it and he didn’t like to remove the mottoes in case he offended somebody, so there they remained, in garish contrast to the plainness of the church.

Even on this bright morning the sun seemed unwilling to penetrate the walls of the building itself. In this respect it had a great deal in common with the inhabitants of Little Collyweston, almost all of whom had more enjoyable ways of spending a Sunday morning than thinking about their creator, so apart from the distant echoes of a sermon floating from the church, the village was still and quiet. The scene might have been the opening to the kind of Saturday-evening post-apocalyptic drama familiar to television audiences in the 1970s. In that instance, the sweetly sinister deserted scenario would have yielded a desperate and low-budget gang of survivors, possibly along with zombies or flesh-eating plants, but when the people living in Little Collyweston finally drew their curtains they would find nothing so dramatic. The most apocalyptic thing to have happened in Little Collyweston was the installation of a new bus stop in 1987.

If the sleeping inhabitants had realised that this was all about to change, they might have been more inclined to venture into the church to get information about the impending day of reckoning. But in the stillness of that clear, bright morning, they would have taken quite some persuading that God had chosen to make any kind of apocalyptic return in Little Collyweston.

Nevertheless, He had, and it had already started.

But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.

1 Thessalonians: 5, 1–2

Reverend Andy Biddle was in the middle of the best family service he had ever devised – and that was quite an achievement by his standards.

If anybody ever understood the peculiarly Anglican tradition of family services, the wisdom was never passed on. These are services which, as their name suggests, are aimed at the whole family, so parents have to put up with having their children with them and everybody else has to put up with having other people’s children with them; nobody, including the people running the services, knows what to do with the children, and the children don’t know what to do with the services, except perhaps ignore them, which results in frequent tellings-off by parents who are invariably guilty of ignoring the services too because everybody, including the people running them, finds them a tedious waste of time. Anglican clergy, not knowing what to do with either the services or the children, often like to ignore them as well, passing all responsibility over to unwary lay readers, trainee priests, or – if they have such a resource to draw on – wives.

Reverend Andy Biddle was an exception. He believed he had a special gift in knowing the level at which to pitch a service for a congregation ranging from the youngest to the oldest people in the church. On this particular day they seemed to be responding even more positively than usual.

He playfully tapped the third egg against the side of the lectern before pulling the shell apart and emptying its contents into a plastic jug. ‘It depends on the size of your frying pan, of course,’ he said, ‘but I find three eggs is usually the right number for a decent omelette.’ He grinned at the rows of faces observing him. ‘Unless you’re very hungry indeed,’ he added, ‘but then, you could always make yourself a second omelette, couldn’t you, now that I’ve shown you how easy it is?’

Andy Biddle’s cookery sermons were a running theme in his ministry. He had first incorporated his love of preparing food into a sermon as a trainee priest, when the vicar at his placement church, not having a wife, had asked him to take responsibility for the family service. Struggling for suitable ways of engaging with disinterested children and distracted adults, he had hit upon the idea of comparing the oats in a flapjack to the church, with God as the sugary content binding the different parts together. It had been a qualified success; enjoyable as making flapjacks in a church service had been, cooking them required an oven (which he realised at the last minute he could not realistically bring into the church itself), and twenty minutes’ cooking time. He had been forced to ask a Mrs Wells, who lived next to the church, to nip home and put his flapjacks in the oven, whilst he preached a somewhat longer sermon than his chosen topic could really sustain.

However, the theory behind the sermon had been a good one, and the flapjacks had been very much appreciated by the younger members of the church. Over the years, Biddle had refined and perfected the technique of preaching with food, specialising in simple dishes he could prepare over a Primus stove (so as to allow the congregation to watch the cooking in process), and simple but memorable messages about the nature of God and the church. There had been some failures; a foolish attempt to make floating islands – a complicated dessert involving meringue which was hard enough to pull off at home – had gone badly awry and the point of his sermon had been lost as a result. Once, whilst preparing beans on toast, his surplice had caught fire, and though it was quickly extinguished and no injuries occurred, his dignity (and with it the strength of what he was trying to say) had suffered badly.