Happy Easter Sunday and Happy Easter weekend to all. There are soca carnivals, beach j’Ouverts, crazy parties, sports festivals, good plays, music camps, and wild shows all in the mix. This is where the weekend goes, with Good Friday and Easter Sunday church services clinging by a toehold in the midst of all these events.

The advertisements are so overwhelming that there seems to be no connection with the religious reason for the season. Familiar sermons are being preached this morning, but by mid-afternoon we will be well into the wet weekend parties.

My understanding from history is that the ancient church merged the celebration of the resurrection with celebrations that involved spring fertility rituals in order to make Christianity more attractive to the heathen and to the newly converted. Serves us right. Obviously these rituals are the source of many of the pagan-like activities surrounding the current weekend parties.

Be that as it may, Easter Sunday not only marks the end of Lent, but is the culmination of activities that make up Holy Week. Pause for a moment before you open that bottle, and think of the events that unfolded from Palm Sunday to the Last Supper, and from the surreal trials in the Praetorium to the crucifixion at Gethsemane. A week of human drama of epic proportions and implications.

And it all centres on a man by the name of Jesus, son of a humble carpenter who, together with a bunch of nondescript fishermen and small farmers, had excited the province of Galilee with a three-year ministry that was turning the world around.

At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus had proclaimed himself to be the Messiah long promised to the Jews. There had been other claimants to that title, but they were all what you would call ‘flashes-in-the-pan’. This commoner, without any pretence to great education, nobility or inheritance, was different from the rest. Without any promises of political insurrection to overthrow governments, his movement grew and grew. As he walked from village to village, and from Judea across Galilee, word spread of his extraordinary powers of healing, his miracles, and his seeming personal acquaintance with the kingdom of God.

To those who opposed him, like the Sadducees and the Pharisees, he was sacrilegious and a distinct threat to the stability of the State and the established church. But most of his followers were simple folk – fishermen, shepherds, the poor and dispossessed. They were from the very strata of the society where heresy would thrive, and from where the temple leaders realised that he could raise up a following.

But he taught with such self-confidence and authority that men would ask, who did he think he was, or in Jamaican parlance, “A weh dis ya man come from?”

His opponents tried to trap him with leading questions and with provocative debate, but his knowledge of the law was overwhelming. And then one day came that outrageous pronouncement of his in the precincts of the temple: “Before Abraham was, I am.”

Wow! What a shocking statement! What blasphemy! The High Priest Caiaphas had been kept up to date with the activities of Jesus, and when he heard of this latest claim he became convinced that the man was not only deranged, but needed to be removed. The Jewish leaders were now fearing that he might be the centre of a popular uprising against Rome, which would lead to reprisals and the loss of their own positions.

Well, that didn’t bother Jesus. He was certain of his impending death. If any reminder was needed, he had been seen earlier in his mission, at the scene of the transfiguration, conferring with Moses and Elijah on the things that would take place in Jerusalem, including his suffering and death.

And then there came that fateful day when he left Galilee for Jerusalem, never to return – at least not in mortal form. As he commenced the last lap of his earthly ministry, “He set his face steadfastly towards the city….and told them again that he would be put to death.”

This scared the disciples. They tried their best to dissuade him from travelling. “They were on the road going up to Jerusalem,” St Mark tells us, “and Jesus was walking ahead of them; they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.”

Their fear was not without justification. It was a mere two years since the bloody suppression of protesters in Jerusalem by the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate. And during the Passover Feasts Roman forces were known to be on even higher alert than usual.

The stage was now set for the media to move in. What was to follow would have kept modern television, radio and newspapers fully focused as event after event catapulted towards an earth-shattering ending.

In the days leading up to Holy Week the headlines would have read, ‘Pilate orders heightened security for Passover celebrations’. Hmm. Discerning editors would have realised that a breaking news story was in the making. And as Jesus overnighted in Bethany, on his way to Jerusalem, the young cub reporter sent out to cover his movements would have filed the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead.

Now that last item would have made Caiaphas sit up and perhaps call the Sanhedrin together to discuss their own security measures against any disturbance generated by the presence of the madman in the city.

Here we can pause again and ask a very interesting question, just who is to blame for Jesus’s death? Down through the centuries that question has been asked over and over, was it the Jews led by Caiaphas, or was it the Romans led by Pilate? Christian dramatist Dorothy Sayers opines that the people who murdered God Almighty actually had no notion that they were doing anything out of the ordinary. “We judge their behaviour,” she says, “as if all of them — disciples, Romans, Pharisees, men in the street — had known with whom they were dealing.”

But they did not know it. She suggests that if the chief priests and the Roman governor had been aware they were engaged in crucifying God, then they would have been quite exceptionally mad and wicked people. “And, indeed, we like to think that they were. It gives us a reassuring sensation that they couldn’t have been people like us.

“But unhappily,” she goes on to assert, “God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own, with a structured Government, a timid politician, a self-centred church, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.”

Interestingly, Christian theology has never put the blame on Roman or Jew, but on “the sins of the world” or, simply put, on human nature.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Caiaphas did indeed call a press conference, but kept it low key, avoiding the issue of the threat of possible public disorder, and instead reminding the public that the temple authorities had organised the usual market where unblemished lambs could be purchased to offer such for a Passover sacrifice.

But suddenly, and before Caiaphas could complete his press statement, there was a roar from a massive crowd outside the city walls. The photographers and the journalists rushed from the conference. Jesus and his disciples had joined the throngs of worshippers who were streaming towards the Holy City. Cameras started rolling as the crowd converged on the man who was seated on a donkey and was riding to Jerusalem’s walls. The people waved palm branches and spread their coats on the ground.

The excitement had barely died down when Jesus entered the temple and began to drive out all the vendors and money changers who were doing business. He took a whip to them and turned over their tables. It made prime time news that night. Neither the Romans nor the priests could now ignore the risk of a violent demonstration. About 40,000 people lived in Jerusalem, but that number swelled to more than 180,000 during the Passover. Jesus was now a marked man.

The city is buzzing. Reporters rush from one scene to another as Jesus keeps them busy. The headlines: ‘Arguments in the temple’, ‘Herod throws lavish holiday party’, ‘Jesus weeps over Jerusalem’. He is hot news; even the donkey that brought him into Jerusalem is interviewed. There is a news photo of Judas leaving Caiaphas’s house that night. An innkeeper is quoted as saying that the disciples are enjoying the Passover meal in an upper room. The media is in a frenzy.

Then comes the breaking news all over the networks: Jesus has been arrested. The press follows the trial, although cameras are not allowed inside. ‘From Pilate to Herod and back’, scream the headlines. ‘Pilate washes his hands’ (‘About time, says his wife’ as reported in the afternoon scandal paper). ‘Crucify Him,’ roars the midday news.

And then, at 3:00 pm, more breaking news. Jesus is dead.

There is mourning. The streets are quiet. Passions are subdued. Groups huddle on street corners, but most people remain indoors. The disciples are in retreat, the dream is over, and their candles are all out. ‘The skies over Jerusalem darken,’ reports a famous broadcaster.

Seventy-two hours later, headlines blaze around the world: ‘HE IS RISEN!’

Lance Neita is a public relations consultant and author. Send comments to the Observer or lanceneita@hotmail.com.