Article

Comment

Easter

Politics

6 March 2025

4 min read

Amid the power plays the Passion of Zelensky stands out

How to respond to the Trumps and Pilates of this world?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

President Zelensky, wearing black, sits silently.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

It started with prime minister Keir Starmer’s shameful toadying to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House, when he flourished a letter from his King inviting Trump for his second state visit to Britain.

My first thought was what Starmer was going to produce for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky when he visited London shortly afterwards. A Fortnum & Mason voucher? My second thought was marginally more profound. Thirty pieces of silver came to mind. And I wondered why. Was it possible that Starmer was betraying Ukraine for the trinkets and baubles of our monarchy, just to stay in favour with the world’s most powerful man?

As we have just slid past Ash Wednesday into the season of Lent, these thoughts take on a fiercer focus as the ends of our stories look like they’re in our beginnings, as the cast of characters in Passiontide ahead of Easter seem to take their places in our world politics now.

Is US Vice President JD Vance a little like the Temple high priest of Jerusalem, Caiaphas, when he demands rhetorically: “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish”? Isn’t the price of bringing Zelensky down and appeasing Russia’s Vladimir Putin worth it for peace in Ukraine?

It might be customary in a column such as this to continue to ascribe characteristics of the cast of the Passion of the Christ to the leaders of today’s great powers. But that’s too easy and doesn’t really work. Starmer is no Judas. His courtly flattering of Trump preceded the attempted humiliation of Zelensky in Washington and since that event Starmer is widely applauded across the political spectrum for playing a blinder and not putting a foot wrong.

He is no betrayer of Zelensky, quite the reverse. And, anyway, casting him in that role risks the sacrilege of deifying Zelensky, who is definitely not the Messiah. Indeed, you don’t have to be a devoted Trumpian to invoke Monty Python’s Life of Brian and note that his performance before Trump and Vance was not messianic, but that of a very naughty boy.

Such comparisons are not going to get us very far. Maybe it’s better to turn them the other way around. Of greater value, perhaps, is to use the power plays that we’ve just witnessed on our global stage better to understand the one we’ll shortly be commemorating from a couple of millennia ago in Jerusalem.

In doing so, we may even begin to peek into some insights that demolish any case that the historical events of Passiontide are of no relevance today. And this isn’t just about politics, it’s about our human capacity for abusive power.

Like Trump, Pilate just wanted to make a deal to keep the peace. Like Trump, he told Jesus that he wasn’t being sufficiently appreciative of what he was trying to do for him.

Take that scene in the Oval Office when Zelensky was bullied by the two most powerful figures (Elon Musk excepted) in the new US regime. It’s a classic weapon in any domestic abusive relationship to blame the victim. So it was that Trump/Vance sought to blame Zelensky and by extension his nation for his and its oppression by Russia.

And so it was when the Nazarene stood before Pontius Pilate, the mouthpiece of the most powerful man on earth of his day, the Emperor of Rome, Tiberius. The similarities between the two situations are striking. And not just because one can reasonably doubt that Jesus of Nazareth wore a suit on that day either.

The latter, a battered artisan and preacher from the provincial hills and a man described as being “without sin”, was a classic subject of victim-blaming. Like Trump, Pilate just wanted to make a deal to keep the peace. Like Trump, he told Jesus that he wasn’t being sufficiently appreciative of what he was trying to do for him. Like Trump, he told him that he had absolute power over his fate. And, like Trump, he is certain that truth is anything he wishes it to be in the moment when he asks contemptuously: “What is truth?”

The intriguing question is how this tells us to respond to the Trumps and Pilates of this world. In the immediate circumstances of interrogation in both the Oval Office and the praetorium, the answer seems partly to be silence. The Christ chooses it; Zelensky has it forced upon him by the coercive control of his interlocutors.

Again, I make no claim for a Christ-like Zelensky. But silence as a human response invariably has its source in humility. In the most worldly of senses, that is now very apparent in the conciliatory words of the Ukrainian president towards his bully, calling his leadership “strong”, regretting how the meeting turned out and expressing willingness to return to the table.

Humility isn’t weakness. It brings the power of peace and enables the triumph of love. That’s the lesson from two thousand years ago. And the lesson is also that no good can come from a total lack of it, just as for Trump as it was for Pilate.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

P.S. Not sure, why not sign up and sample our articles. Enjoy our newsletters.

Join now

Review

Art

Character

Creed

Easter

Suffering

18 April 2025

5 min read

Why sculpt the face of Christ?

In Nic Fiddian Green’s work we feel pain, strength, fear and wisdom.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A man looks up a shaft of light that illuminates him and a crucifix higher up a wall.

I Accepted, 2025.

Richard Foster.

The seeds of faith were sown in the life of Nic Fiddian Green by his father. As he has explained recently, he “was shown a way and a faith, and an understanding around the faith of Christianity, in the way my father lived”.

Later, his wife-to-be, Henrietta Hutley, asked him to help create Stations of the Cross for the Wintershall Estate in Surrey where, today, The Nativity and the Life of Christ are regularly performed. Henrietta’s father, Peter, wrote and brought The Passion of Jesus to Trafalgar Square, while her mother, Anne, had the vision for the Stations of the Cross project after a life-changing visit to Medjugorje.

Fiddian Green says that “The Face of Christ has been with me for over 40 years” and that he has “searched for His face through my art as part of my spiritual journey, and also in the work of many others – especially Renaissance artists like Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Michelangelo”.

Fiddian Green, who is internationally celebrated for his monumental equine sculptures, has created a deeply personal and spiritually resonant exhibition entitled The Face of Christ. The exhibition features 20 new sculptures including works in bronze, copper, lead, marble, plaster, and silver, together with a series of drawings. The exhibition ranges from the Nativity to the Resurrection but focuses primarily on the crucifixion.

The exhibition is deeply personal for Fiddian Green because it is informed by the harrowing encounters he had with an array of life-threatening illnesses a few years ago. These caused an obvious and honest creative re-assessment and it is from these experiences that a stronger, deeper and more contemplative vision has emerged. One that permeates the new work via modes of stillness and reflection.

The Face of Christ offers a profoundly meditative engagement with the image of Christ, capturing a sense of serenity, resilience, and transcendence in bronze and stone. In these works, he shows us how his spirit and his faith help him triumph over the physical as he explores the enduring power of faith, suffering and redemption. In the eyes of his work, we feel pain, strength, fear, wisdom and more as he asks questions of the viewer that leave a powerful and spiritual resonance.

Fiddian Green says: “These works are a reflection of my journey of faith. I have come to find that His power to elevate us underpins everything I strive to do and The Face of Christ is an attempt for me to convey in my work all that He conveys in my heart. Christ gives me the key, but will I open the door…?”

A sketch shows the hanging head of Christ wearing a crown of thorns.

This Storm Will Pass, 2024. Slademore Gallery.

A crucifix hands on a round-topped slab.

I Paid, 1993. Slademore Gallery.

Crown of Thorns, 2025. Nic Fiddian Green.

While the exhibition focuses on the crucifixion and the face of the crucified Christ, the expression on Christ’s face is generally one of peace, rather than pain. In part, this is because many of the heads of Christ included are images of Christ resting in death prior to the resurrection. The brokenness that the crucifixion brought is shown in these images through damage to the body of Christ, as opposed to the expressions on his face. This is most powerfully the case with ‘Broken for You’, a bronze crucifixion sculpture where Christ’s torso, as well as being scarred by a long spear-like fissure, has also been fractured with the two parts fused together using brace brackets. Similar fissures appear on other of the crucifixion sculptures but ‘Broken for You’ goes furthest in graphically showing the pain Christ endured on our behalf.

It seems to me that Fiddian Green could go further in revealing the horrors that Christ endured and that his love of Renaissance art with its focus on beauty and balance might hold him back in this regard. Another artist to have regularly depicted the Crucifixion in images shown in mainstream galleries in recent years is Peter Howson, whose images of the crucifixion are much more expressionist graphically capturing the depth of pain that Christ endured. Fiddian Green’s drawings, more than his sculptures, tap into the sense of pain endured, particularly ‘This Storm will Pass’, a partial image of the face of the crucified Christ which in its frenetic pencil-marks and incomplete state speaks particularly powerfully.

Fiddian Green, by contrast, primarily gives us a sense of the peace that he receives from Christ on the face of Christ. ‘I Forgive’, a bronze head of the crucified Christ depicts the love with which Christ looks on us as he endures the cross. ‘Christ is Laid to Rest’ is a huge head encircled by a crown of massive spikey thorns with green verdigris overtones suggesting the sweat and blood of anguish which has led to the completion of purpose that Christ finds in death. ‘Peace’, a plaster sculpture of Christ’s head, is also redolent of the supreme achievement of the cross; ‘It is finished’, meaning that all his work is complete and done, enabling him to rest and enabling us to enter rest.

In these images, Fiddian Green is reading back into the events of the crucifixion the outcomes that it gains for us and showing, in his Christ figures, the peace that he personally finds in the love and forgiveness which overflows from the crucified Christ to each and every human being throughout time and history.

Fiddian Green writes of having “been given materials to use by the God of heaven and earth” – those materials of the earth that he uses in his sculptures – and says that “it is my hope that some of these pieces may rest and resonate with those who see it; that they may find a deep connection by gazing on the works which takes the eye, the heart and the soul to the One who helped me create them”.

While Lent, Holy Week and Easter are often times when art is offered to enable us to walk in the footsteps of Christ it is not common for commercial galleries to specifically invite meditation on these events, so don’t miss the opportunity for contemplation that the Sladmore Gallery is providing through this exhibition.

The Face of Christ, 10th April – 2nd May 2025, Sladmore Gallery, London.

Find out more