Hold or cut the golden thread?

There's a ‘mysteriously beautiful’ vision threaded through our world, writes Stephen Cottrell. In an extract from his Dear England book, the Archbishop of York considers the Beatitudes.

Stephen Cottrell

Stephen Cottrell is Primate of England and Archbishop of York. He has authored 20 books.

A CGI render of a grid of golden lines receding into the perspective

The golden thread.

Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

The heart of Jesus’ teaching is found in the longest teaching passage in the Gospels, it is known as the Sermon on the Mount.

It begins with a mysteriously beautiful passage known as the Beatitudes.

Here Jesus sets out a series of maxims that at first sight seem to be his equivalent of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, the Old Testament prophet who received the latter, when Jesus receives the Beatitudes he has gone up a mountain.

And like Moses he has a series of short, pithy things to say that will then need a lifetime to work out.

However, the Beatitudes are not a moral code. They are not things you can either do or not do. They are attitudes to which we can aspire. Rather than describing the moral life, a code by which we can justly live alongside each other in society, they describe what it looks like to 'go the second mile’. They describe what perfect love in action looks like.

Here they are:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I don't propose to spend ages unpacking these. But alongside the Ten Commandments themselves, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, the Beatitudes have become one of the central documents of the Church.

Living by them is the work of a lifetime.

They are the centre of Jesus' teaching. Their meaning, however, isn't always self-evident. Like his stories, they need inhabiting.

They are very challenging. It isn't easy to be merciful. It isn't easy to make peace. Especially if the likely outcome is the persecution we usually make efforts to avoid. Not that there is anything good about persecution. As we know, mockery and ridicule hurt. How much more hurtful is it to be hunted down because of your witness to peace? Nevertheless, it is witnesses to peace that Jesus is recruiting here. His own life, and everything that he teaches, led this way: to the peace that is beyond the world's understanding and is about a wholeness and totality of giving and receiving love.

Jesus is inviting us to live with a different set of attitudes. And he does not baulk from acknowledging that these attitudes will bring us into conflict with the carefully protected interests of those who secure power and influence for themselves at the expense of peace. They exchange it for what is little more than a truce. At best, an absence of war, what we live in our jealously guarded siloes and forcibly protect our borders, repelling intruders and stamping on those who even dream differently.

In our own society, thankfully, we enjoy freedoms of speech and action. This means that we rarely meet with much opposition beyond people's unreflective apathy or polished disdain. But these freedoms we enjoy should not be taken for granted. They have been hard won. They could easily be lost. Especially if we fail to see where they have come from; precisely this realisation of the dignity and worth of every person and our responsibilities to each other that arose through Christ.

Unfortunately, these things that underpin what is best in our society are not self-evidently the best. We've got so used to them that we easily imagine they are. But actually, we don't observe them in the world around us. Nature, for instance, is not democratic. Nor particularly caring. The weakest usually die first. The fittest survive. Nor is it much different in human communities. Our history - always written by those who win - is one bloody story of conquest after another.

Empires rise and fall, and there is very little to suggest that there might be another kingdom where a different set of values prevails, and where the king turns out to be the servant of all. But that is precisely the Christian narrative. It is a golden thread running through human history. In every age it can either be held on to, or cut away; left to our own devices, especially when our backs are to the wall, we find that the human compass is usually set towards self-preservation. Our empires and systems are usually designed to keep others out. Or at least in their place, so that they can serve us. In this so-called ‘real world’, shepherds do not go in search of one lost sheep, as Jesus suggested God does, in one of his parables. That would be uneconomic. Like the rest of us, they play a percentages game, and for the sake of the ninety-nine, we accept the loss of the one. The strongest and the wiliest prevail. That's just how it is, we say. If we can help the weak, we will. But if we can't, or if it affects us badly, we won't and we don't.

This is why the world needs a set of values - and a story - that will save us from ourselves, and our worst instincts. This is why we need a set of values that are rooted in a tradition whose stories and whose very heart are, gloriously, the life and teaching of a person who is himself the revelation of God's love and purposes for the world he made and loves - who even laid down his life to search out those who are lost: the very image of the invisible God. More than that: someone who loves us and knows what it is like to be us, who has experienced from the inside just what it is like to inhabit a divided and compromised world.

Therefore, the Beatitudes are a set of values and attitudes by which we can inhabit the world differently and through which we can begin to see what matters in the world and what must be done.

Dear England: Finding Hope, Taking Heart and Changing the World is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Review

Creed

Film & TV

Friendship

6 June 2025

4 min read

Testament soulfully re-tells the acts that changed the world

What happened after The Chosen?

Giles Gough

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

A man stands the landing of an external staircase and stares out.

Angel Studios.

Testament reimagines the story of how Jesus’ disciples spread the good news of him to the world by transplanting it to an alternate-modern era. Swapping Jerusalem for London. As the followers risk everything to preach the good news, the Temple races to silence them before the oppressive Imperium retaliates. But public miracles and divided loyalties force both sides to confront the true cost of their choices. In the first episode it asks the question, what would it be like if the Son of God had come down from heaven, come to your very hometown, and you’d missed him?

Most re-tellings of the early church usually end the story either with Jesus’ resurrection, or his ascension into heaven. Testament starts the action just after Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus’ death and resurrection. In Christianity, Pentecost is the day when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles like “a violent wind” and gave them not just the ability to be understood in any language, but also the courage and conviction to go out and tell people about Jesus. We see much of the action through the character of Stephen, a young man who decides to follow Jesus after hearing the Apostles preach. Consequently, Stephen’s mother accuses him of heresy and throws him onto the street, making him fully dependent on this early Jesus movement.

In the first episode, the storytellers seem to have presented themselves with a bit of a challenge, by starting the action at Pentecost. Not only does it seem like the most interesting events have just happened off camera, but we’re also meeting these characters in a moment of spiritual awakening and holy joy, which is notoriously hard to depict on screen. Especially with characters we’ve just met. Nonetheless, as they navigate the logistics of having so many converts all at once (the kind of happy problem any church minister would like to have) we see that the Apostles have a familiar, lived-in quality to their inter-personal dynamics. You can easily believe that these very different men have spent every day living and working with each other for the last three years until they’ve sanded off the rough edges of their relationships.

Whilst the show doesn’t always hold together at first, it builds momentum by tackling some of the more difficult parts of the book of Acts with sensitivity and nuance. It’s helped by the performances being incredibly watchable. The colour-blind casting is a delight, and perhaps reflective of Christianity being the most ethnically diverse religion on the planet. Tom Simper, who plays Peter, has an incredibly expressive face and a compassionate manner. Kenneth Omole who plays John can be vulnerable as he returns to the garden of Gethsemane to mourn the absence of his friend and saviour. Yet the next scene, where he is confronted by a Temple priest, he emanates a quiet authority. You can’t take your eyes off him.

If nothing else, this show gives Saul a compelling backstory and a terrifying characterisation.

Making Stephen the point of view character is a bold narrative choice. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the New Testament might feel anxious for the character, and having him be played by such a young actor as Charles Beaven underscores the upcoming tragedy. Mogali Masuku plays Mary as a woman with her head thoroughly screwed on. Her storyline shows Mary ministering to addicts and victims of human trafficking, looking gangsters dead in the eye and telling them these lost souls belong to Jesus now. On the other side of the divide is Saul. Eben Figueiredo plays him with the type of zeal that allows people to do both wonderous and terrible things. If nothing else, this show gives Saul a compelling backstory and a terrifying characterisation. It’s Saul, not the Temple establishment, who is the main antagonist of this season.

If there is one clear misstep, perhaps it’s the depiction of what the show calls ‘The Sentinels’, the foot soldiers of the ‘Imperium’, a stand-in for the Roman Empire. Rather than being dressed in modern military fatigues, they are clad head to toe in a red, faceless body armour. The type that would be more at home in the Star Wars universe. They’re possibly dressed like this to represent the empire’s overwhelming and sinister military power, but as we see repeatedly through world events, human cruelty looks painfully normal.

The timing of this show seems noteworthy as well. This show drops roughly a year after Angel Studios, the producers of Testament, were forced to split from the creators of The Chosen. Following the lives of the Apostles as they begin to follow Jesus, The Chosen became a monster hit and the flagship show of Angel Studios’ catalogue. So a show following the lives of the Apostles after Jesus leaves them (albeit transplanted to a different time), might be an attempt by Angel Studios to recapture some of the popularity they have lost.

Testament definitely has a faltering start, but it has all the ingredients to be compelling TV. If you can stick with this show as it finds its feet, you will be treated to a soulful depiction of an oft-overlooked part of the Jesus story.

Watch the trailer

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