The bleak but beautiful Russian film Leviathan has been reviled by religious leaders as "an odious slander of the Russian church". It tells of an innocent, Kolya, methodically destroyed by an Orthodox priest who covets his land for a church. But Leviathan is more interesting even than that. For the victim, fly-trapped in a web of power, is himself a Jesus figure, refusing to do what it takes to save himself from priestly evil. Leviathan is a parable of the church's war on Christ.

This is what we should remember at Easter. Not just the bouncy rites of spring, the bunnies and chickens, the rebirth. Not just the despair that necessarily precedes it, nor even the deliberate mangling of good by evil; the Easter chiaroscuro. The real story, like Leviathan's, is yet more complex. It's an attack by the masculine virtues embodied in the hierarchy – certainty, strength, power, reason – on the feminine ones embodied in Christ – love, compassion, self-sacrifice and unreasoning trust.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari.

These attacks are driven by fear that the apparently weaker virtues are, paradoxically, stronger. The fear is well based. It is a common mistake of those in power – be they squarehead politicians or bratty children – to see love as weakness, and to exploit it. But in the only slightly longer term, might cannot win.

Kolya's story was unusual in being played by a man. Cast him as a woman, and you see immediately that women are the Jesuses of history. Indeed, Jesus' role and resonance are so intensely female it makes me wonder. Was Jesus actually a woman?