From the Time Tribune: Dramas bring Easter to life

The apostle Peter sang his welcome to the audience in the darkened hall at the Rock Church Worship Center during dress rehearsals last week for the congregation’s annual Easter drama.

He was on a stage set with vine-covered walls, an open tomb and a wheel-shaped stone that foretold his story’s ending.

“The son of God has come and I’m a witness,” he sang.

In churches throughout the region, accounts of Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection have stepped out of Scripture onto stages in recent weeks as parishes dramatize the defining event of Christian history, turning audiences and actors into witnesses. The displays range from modest wooden tombs set up on church lawns to elaborate stage dramas with dozens of cast and crew members.

“We all need to be reminded that Jesus came and gave his life for us,” Rock Church pastor Bill Smalt said before calling his performers to their places. “We can read it in the Bible. But there’s something when you see it acted out that’s more powerful sometimes than just reading it.”

Performances of Christ’s suffering and resurrection originated in the Middle Ages, with Easter and Passion plays that grew out of the already dramatic elements of church-based worship.

The Rev. Gerald Gurka, a Roman Catholic priest in Larksville who has written more than 30 Passion plays or less elaborate living stations of the cross, said the medieval plays, like stained-glass windows, were used to share the Gospel with a public that could not read or write. The teaching tools were also beautiful and affecting.

The practice persists because it still works, he said. This year, a cast and crew of about 100 people put on his newest Passion play for a packed audience at St. John the Baptist Church.

“Every year, something wonderful happens,” he said. People return to church or patch over personal grievances. Once, an alcoholic father of children who were acting in the play checked himself into rehab after the performance was over.

“I don’t look for that to happen,” he said, “but I think it’s the way God’s message speaks to people through that art form.”

Other Christian holidays also lend themselves to dramatic recreation. Christmas pageants and living nativity scenes abound. But area pastors say that Easter dramas, and dramatic aspects of Easter religious rituals, emphasize the proper center of the faith and enliven the long period of reflection that precedes and follows the holiday.

The 90-day season of Lent and Easter “is the whole core and heart of the Christian faith,” said the Right. Rev. Bernard Nowicki, bishop of the Central Diocese of the Polish National Catholic Church and pastor of St. Stanislaus Cathedral. “Then the church spends the rest of the year discussing what all that means.”

Easter dramas, like the living stations of the cross performed at the cathedral during Lent, continue to be instructive for seekers, he said, and offer the parish youth a leadership role in worship. They are also vivid and emotionally moving.

“The action taking place – Christ falls once, twice, three times, quite a crash when the cross hits the floor – it makes it almost visceral.”

At Peace Lutheran Church, which is located on a busy stretch of Main Avenue, the congregation uses its high-profile space to reenact Jesus’ crucifixion on Good Friday.

Costumed parishioners walk with a Jesus character bearing his cross for several blocks then act out the crucifixion near the church steps.

“We want to use it as a witness for the rest of the world passing by,” the Rev. Kristian Bjornstad said.

At times, they have been ridiculed for it. People in passing cars shouted obscenities during past years’ performances.

“Sometimes when we read the text, we don’t get a clue what it was really like for Jesus to be mocked and made fun of,” he said, “until we’re reenacting it and they do it to us.”

However uncomfortable, the portrayal helps bring Christianity’s most important historical moment into the present, he said.

“To reenact that is to affirm its reality in our lives today.”