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The mesmerising Westminster melodrama, which came to a climax yesterday, continues to be compelling viewing. In the background are the great forces of politics: a bold new government, volatile markets, intimidating opinion polls, and the raw fissures and ruthless sinews of a political party laid bare. In the foreground are real people with genuine hopes and fears, attaining high offices of state before losing them again within weeks, days – or even hours: careers shattered, hopes dashed, humiliation splattered everywhere.

Meanwhile there’s another drama going on in the country at large: retired people wondering if their pension’s safe, benefit recipients measuring their payments against inflation, those in a housing chain half-expecting the purchase to fall through because their buyer can’t get a mortgage. People who don’t care who the Prime Minister is are playing out a different politics – making painful household choices, indefinitely postponing holidays, taking on second and third jobs, dreading a cold winter.

This is how big stories work – the constant interplay of the personal and the political: what’s sometimes called the lyric – the passionate, lived experience of the subjective individual – in tension with the epic – the broad-canvas, objective view of the distant observer. The best journalism and the finest novels interweave the lyric and the epic to create what’s known as the truly dramatic. The dramatic is captivating because huge events hang on personal issues – yet those personal issues hang on other grand forces.

The notion of lyric, epic and dramatic is especially revealing when trying to understand what kind of a document the Bible is, and what story it’s telling. The Bible is full of stories like yesterday’s that weave together personal catastrophe with wider, indeed cosmic significance. Consider Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem: you’re looking at the interplay of the lyric intrigue, betrayal and restoration of Jesus’ closest associates, in the context of the epic world-changing nature of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

Even more than the decline and fall of the Trussian empire, the gospel story is gripping because it identifies the larger implications of our very personal actions, and reveals the personal ramifications of grand events. For Christian believers, there’s always two stories going on – the human one and the divine one – and you can never disentangle them. That’s the point.

It’s easy to feel isolated and think of ourselves as powerless and our own crises as insignificant; assuming the real drama happens in Westminster. But politics is about ordinary people realising the wider implications of their everyday actions and struggles – while at the same time perceiving the very human fears and challenges of those in visible positions of power. Politics happens when powerless people exhilaratingly discover their true power, while powerful people are confronted by their own utter powerlessness.

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