BACK in the days when I studied Latin poetry, Virgil held a special place as the gold medallist on the podium of poetic beauty and pathos. Everyone who reads his epic on the origins of Rome wrestles with what is called “double motivation”, or “double perspective”. Virgil depicts a world of human beings striving and suffering, with a shadowy, partial awareness that the world they inhabit is thronged with another kind of being. The choices they make have their human motivation, but are also driven by the agendas of gods and goddesses.

This “double perspective” is characteristic of epic literature. So, perhaps, we should not be surprised that it can help us to understand the epic Passion Gospel, too, in which human beings make choices, while the writer shows us — the audience — the gap between what the characters in the story know, and the epic providence that is working out in events.

We call this gap between the two perspectives at work in the story “dramatic irony”. There is truth for us to absorb from the Passion as a one-off event in human history. But double motivation reveals another truth; for history is never only about the past. Elements of the Passion go on being played out in every human community from that day to this. The Passion is the purest distillation of the cup of human pathos and suffering from which we drink daily.

The centuries that have passed since the actual events of Good Friday have given us time to develop tools for interpreting this relationship between divine and human motivation. We do not rely only on the Gospel itself. There are writings from the past before the Passion (Isaiah, Psalm 22) and from the future after it (Hebrews), both of which help to close the gap, and bring the two motivations together. They are tools for us to prise open meanings, securing for us the blessed assurance that the suffering we behold is not random or meaningless.

Double perspective helps us to sympathise with the problems faced by all the participants in the Passion epic. I cannot call it tragedy, because there is no fault or mistake in the protagonist (Jesus) which dooms him to be the agent of his own downfall. But it is undoubtedly epic, because it deals with human beings in that grander scale of history. The characters in the Passion have only a partial understanding of their own actions and feelings, and an even vaguer sense of the possible consequences of their choices. But we see — and every year remind ourselves — that the redemption of the world is in their hands.

And this is literally crucial: by providing the divine perspective, the Gospel enables us to see as God sees. On Good Friday, we get a glimpse of what perfect and complete divine knowledge is like.

There are good reasons that we come back year after year to witness the Passion of Christ. It is not rational argument that draws us: it is the comfort, the reassurance, the goodness that we draw from the experience, repeated annually, of seeing person after person make unkind, thoughtless, self-interested, cruel choices, which turn out not to make the world more wretched or worthless, but, rather — despite the inherent horribleness of those choices/decisions/actions/silences — to contribute to a divine epic of salvation in such a way that God’s holy, heavenly purpose is achieved.

Tragic dramas usually end with some kind of resolution. But the Passion is epic, not tragedy: a kind of history in poetic form. It does not batter us into understanding with rational propositions, but makes concessions to our human nature. And, in history, as in the habitations of God’s eternity, there are no beginnings or endings. Beyond the Passion Gospel’s boundaries, human life flows on. Choices continue to be made — and made by people who only partially understand their own motivations (never mind God’s), and scarcely think at all of the future those choices are helping to fashion.

Unlike the Gospel characters, we Christians today are privileged with insight into the meaning of those long-ago events. We can perceive, too, the hand of God at work. And, unlike anything in Classical literature, we behold one character who bridges the divide between the two perspectives. In Jesus Christ, there are no gaps between one level of knowledge and another, no gulf between the human and divine. On this day long ago, a man hung dying on a cross. Then, and now, the story is only just beginning.