We see the genius of Maclean when he recapitulates the “God is Love” of the Sunday school wall in the “LOVE” tattooed on the whore’s ass and the disciples’ surprise at the empty tomb in Paul and Norman’s surprise that the beer they buried is gone (“we enacted the rite of staring at the emptiness of stones that have been rolled aside”). Neither take, the banal or the elevated, is rejected. You don’t get anywhere if you don’t deal with both.