It doesn't happen very often, but it turns out that Western Christianity will be observing the solemnity of Good Friday 2016 exactly nine months before it celebrates Christmas 2016. The death in the secular calendar comes before the birth -- a minor but intriguing reversal. It means that those to whom the story is important already know its denouement before the beginning and middle is told.

 

It is a story pretty much along the lines of the Greek myth in the sense that it is not detailed truth-seeking, who-what-when-where-why reportage but epode-like giving body to thoughts and images that lay beyond the strengths of ordinary prose.

 

The annual observance of its several subplots follows the custom of virtually every religion known on the planet with competing diurnal, solar and lunar rhythms. Where tradition becomes set in stone, though, the annual go-round tends to become static and unchanging and less and less related to the inexorable movement of time beyond cycles and from a past to a present and into an unknown future.

 

The key is figuring out how to keep the solar- and lunar-guided rotation from becoming the story itself. The story is how the tellers of the original myth relate its truths -- such as they may be -- to the forward movement of time in which today becomes yesterday and tomorrow becomes today and so on and so on.

 

Thus does Christianity have its story -- that of the appearance on Earth of an infant first lauded by shepherds; later by court magicians from another culture; reared in Judaism; attracted to then-and-there apocalyptic, but later to here-and-now ethical wisdom; caught up in a quiet defiance of traditional religion and indirectly the regnant empire of the time; arrested, tried and found guilty of blasphemy by one court and sedition by another and finally executed by crucifixion -- a grisly method Rome borrowed from the Phoenicians and they from the Persians.

 

There the first part of the myth ends. Comes next an act of the biblical deity that was said to have reclaimed the dead blasphemer and seditionist from everlasting oblivion and given him a new and different life that allowed him to appear in different forms first here, then there. Such incidents are certainly illusory, but each individual is entitled to draw his own conclusion about them.

 

What clearly partakes in myth is that the one brought back from death is said to have been God or God-like and therefore deserving of universal fealty and worship. However, he seems so rooted in an identifiable past and in the supposed events of his brief life that it is difficult to connect him to the ongoing life of today's tomorrow -- not, say, like the figures of Sisyphus and Icarus whose labors were so plain in their consequence that anyone anywhere can apply the particular failure of each to himself.

 

One way to work that out is to go right ahead and observe and celebrate the various parts of the myth, but not simply over and over again from year to year as if nothing of importance had occurred in the universe since the presumed events of a 2,000-year-old story.

 

The key is to connect the significance of the myth to the present moment and to each moment that becomes present, one after the other. What does it mean to remember now one whose birth 20 centuries ago was said to have been in a cattle stall with the first visitors being lowly animal handlers at the bottom of the economic ladder, yet greeted by a heavenly host that would drown out 100 choirs of 10,000 singers each all singing forte at once?

 

What does it mean now to imagine the young man who, it is said, became a public intellectual and took his message of fundamental human ethics to those who would listen ("turn the other cheek, walk the second mile, give up your coat as well as your shirt, forgive as often as it takes, love both neighbor and enemy and treat others as you yourself wish to be treated")?

 

What does it mean today to envision him apparently going to his own gallows uncomplaining, knowing that his corpse would probably be cut down and left to the mercies of feral dogs, such being the everyday cruelty of the Roman military occupation?

 

And what can it possibly mean to believe that, even though he died, he lived again in some way beyond our understanding?

 

Does it mean that his old, old story told over and over again year after year is a story that can confer meaning on what one inspired by his life and work as told of in the gospels -- no matter how exaggerated their accounts may be -- can actually give to the furtherance of justice, human dignity and a peace that passes understanding?

 

If the answer to that question is, "Yes," then tell and re-tell the story with all its liturgies and mythological language because it is in its own way one of the truest of all stories -- but only if its telling is telling enough that it advances the good of humankind and its planetary home. Then it becomes today's and tomorrow's story.

 

As the 19th-century English priest John Keble wrote: