Lineker has more followers than Christ
Solidarity saved the BBC commentator, writes George Pitcher. How very different from the Passion
Looking back over Gary Lineker’s run-in with the BBC, I’m struck by how touched I was – moved even – by the support he received from his professional colleagues, which brought football coverage to a standstill over last weekend.
Top Match of the Day pundits Alan Shearer and Ian Wright were first to lay their sizeable money on the line with their we’re-with-Gary withdrawal from the studio. Alex Scott (who, it’s worth noting, earns considerably less than her male colleagues, though she’s a former England international too) didn’t hesitate in following them.
Then it became an “I am Sparticus” parade. Commentators and players alike declared that they weren’t playing with the BBC, defending Lineker’s right to free speech on Twitter to call the Government’s immigration policy “immeasurably cruel”.
Why was I moved by this show of solidarity? Maybe it was simply because it was reminiscent of the “one out, all out” commitment of the old Labour movement. Perhaps, if I may risk the blasphemy of this paraphrase, it was because greater colleagues has no one than this, that they lay down their jobs for their friend.
Almost tearful
In any event, I admit I was almost tearful to witness how so many of them stood by Lineker. And it had very little to do with the issues at stake, the rights and wrongs of Government policy or the effectiveness or otherwise of the BBC’s guidelines on impartiality. It was, I think, simply the widespread demonstration of loving support for an obviously decent man.
And that fascinates me because, to be brutally honest, that isn’t a quality that is rooted in our Christian narrative at this stage in our Church calendar. Difficult as it is to own for those of us who aspire to be faithful, the story of our Holy Week, preceding Easter, is one of betrayal and abandonment.
Even those without faith are unlikely to dispute that the Nazarene was a decent man, who spoke up for the desperate and the vulnerable. Yet here he is utterly abandoned to his fate by his followers and friends. Not one of them now is to be found who will say that “what’s good enough for Jesus is good enough for me”.
Beloved leader
The burly Peter does the opposite of saying that if they want his beloved leader they’re going to have to get past him first. This is the polar opposite of strength in numbers. No solidarity. No #metoo.
Yes, the difference is one of scale. Even the most hyperbolic of Lineker’s supporters might claim that he was being crucified only in a narrow metaphorical sense. His friends risked their careers in supporting him, not their lives.
Fellow insurgents who attended their comrades’ crucifixions risked summarily being nailed up themselves by blood-lusted Romans. So it is that when Jesus is crucified, there were only some women, who were marginally safer from the Roman soldiers, “watching from a distance”.
Still fruitful
But it is still fruitful to consider the nature of human solidarity in this context. And there are other intriguing parallels to draw between then and now. Pontius Pilate can initially “find no fault with this man”, which resonates with the luckless BBC director-general Tim Davie, who eventually gave in to the political mob.
That mob exercises its power today through platforms like Twitter; in those days they simply shouted “crucify him!” in a somewhat more analogue fashion from the public square. But the manner in which politics is done is surely still disturbingly similar.
The lessons to be learned from all this can be painful in Lent and maybe should be. The truth is that when the going gets tough, Christian disciples are all too often nowhere to be seen. Yes, there are notable and, again, deeply moving exceptions to this rule down through history.
Okay to be scared
But it must also be true that, for the faithful, it’s okay to be scared, to run and to hide when threatened, because that’s what we’ve always done. Even those who were with the Christ, and witnessed what he was doing in the world, did that. Hard as it is to process, abandonment has been a Christian way since the beginning.
And that means something more too. There really is no solidarity at the heart of Christianity. We are a scattered people, not a cohesive movement in which, much as we might pretend otherwise, we’re all for one and one for all. We’re individuals, in the sight of God, trying to make a decent fist of it in communion with others.
But there is no single Christian community, just as there is no universal gay or trans or black or women’s community. So there is no consensus. That’s a thought to apply to the worldwide Anglican Communion.
To be honest, it’s why we’re touched by solidarity when we see it, because it’s the opposite of our Christian instinct, which is to disperse, look after ourselves and try to understand.
We can take comfort that it won’t always be like that. Because we’re passing through a protracted history of three days, the Paschal Triduum, from being abandoned and alone on Good Friday to a whole new and eternal solidarity at Easter. But we have to wait.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest