AMONG the many gods and goddesses depicted in Egyptian temples and tombs one of the most striking is the sky-goddess Nout, depicted as an overarching figure, through whose body the sun and the stars daily pass. Night and day, light and darkness, the setting and the rising of the sun were the underlying rhythm giving a framework to human life and a context to death, of which for the ancient Egyptians Nout was a powerful symbol.

The religious imagination has in many different ways and in many different cultures provided symbols and images which enable us to relate our personal lives to an overarching story of meaning and purpose. Many of those symbols and images which, like the goddess Nout, once spoke powerfully to human need do so no longer. Complex ancient mythologies which told stories of creation and redemption, and of the warfare of good and evil, have lost all vitality and are as ruined as the remains of the temples tramped over by tourists in ancient cities. Their gods have gone down the chute, leaving only traces of the power by which they once shaped human life.

In our own day, contemporary individualism in a world of consumerist choice scorns the need for any overarching story. Yet, without an encompassing larger story life fails and falls apart: it is an inescapable part of our human flourishing. Good Friday and Easter point us to the enduring larger story of our human lives.

In Holy Week Christians walk the way of the Cross, living close to the story of the Passion of Christ. Jesus comes to Jerusalem at the time of the Passover festival which celebrates the deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. In an occupied land, in a holy city tense and jittery because of the possibility of revolt, protest and insurrection, Jesus, who had proclaimed that His presence heralded the coming of God’s Kingdom of justice, love and peace, is betrayed by one of His closest disciples. He is arrested, dragged before religious and political authorities and condemned to death. Nailed naked to a cross alongside two criminals, with Roman soldiers playing dice as they keep watch, His mother and His beloved disciple and a couple of women are all who are left of those who had followed Him from Galilee. He cries out: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” and dies in frightful pain as inner and outer darkness overwhelm Him. Such a death is of a piece with all the disfiguring violence of our world. Betrayal and desertion and trumped-up charges are terrible realities in our world and in our lives. So too is the mockery and the scourging and the friend who denies that he ever knew him. His life is blotted out in the nothingness of death.

The Christian Church dares to proclaim that here, in this life and this death, we encounter God, the source and the sustainer of all life and being, emptying Himself, coming down to the lowest part of our need. Today, Holy Saturday, is the most paradoxical day of the Christian year, a day when indeed God is dead. In love He chooses freely to know our dying, and Christian devotion and imagination speak of Christ descending to the place of the departed, shattering the imprisoning gates and chains and bars of Hades. Tomorrow, Easter Day, the nothingness of today explodes into a fullness of life, which is a new creation, blowing history open. The horizon of our human life is no longer death, but risen life in Christ.

This is the overarching story, “the one story only which will prove worth your telling”; for it is the story of the God who made us, and loved us, and in thirsting love has re-made us. Easter is indeed about the resurrection of Christ — which is neither a descent from or denial of the cross, nor a resurrection of relics, but a new creation, a transfiguration of human life and history. Easter touches us with eternal life, and the Lord who breathes on His disciples on the first Easter evening, is the Lord who is still the Lord and Giver of life, making of His Church an Easter people. This indeed is a love and a life which will never let us down and will never let us go, an overarching story which transforms both our living and our dying. “Christ is risen and the demons” — the dark, imprisoning powers of every kind — “are indeed fallen!”

Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe