Ruminations on the Cross, Good Friday 7 April 2023

Good Friday.  A bank holiday.  A sombre day for those engaged with the Jesus story.  It's an annual remembering of the brutal execution of one who had been thought of as having profound answers to the problems of human existence.  But he was killed anyway.

The Cross is a symbol of oppressive power but we can and must also ascribe to it the symbology of hope. 

Life is oppressive and brutal.  And in the time of Jesus the ultimate sign of brutality was the Romans' choice of torturous execution — crucifixion. What did Jesus say about the Cross? — “Take up your cross and follow me.”  And what does that mean but: 'Live a life of self-discipline in the service of love of all, even though you know it means a certain death for you’?  Or even a slightly more abrupt and shocking interpretation: ‘If you love, they will kill you.  But if you do not love, you are dead anyway.’

So where could we find hope in the Cross?

Perhaps what the Jesus narrative is showing us is that it is possible to love and trust God so much that you can even walk to your death in that trust and love.  Jesus' triumph is that he knows what is going to happen, and, though he struggles (in that he wants it not to happen), in the end he goes anyway.  The story of Jesus, even if metaphorical, reminds us that we know fully documented stories of people who acted in this way.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example.  So the motif of Jesus can be used to represent them.  This act, truly, is humanly possible.

Another hope in the Cross is this: at the Cross we see that even under the most horrific and unlikely of circumstances it is possible for people to change, to act so as to fulfil the hope that 'might as right' and power to oppress will not ultimately triumph.  There is much more on this on another post on this blog, linked here March 2022

"X marks the spot”.  A long tradition is that God  — or if you prefer, the source of divine vitality — meets us in material reality, in our bodies.  And nowhere more so than at the Cross, a metaphor for our suffering.  The sense of the nearness of God as we suffer has roots in Jewish scripture (Isaiah 63:8-9): 'For he said, Surely they are my people, children that do not lie: and he was their Saviour.  In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the Angel of his face saved them: with his love and with his clemency he redeemed them; and he bore them and carried them all the days of the age.’  

There again, how about hope that can be inspired through the icon of the Jesus story?  The self-sacrificing love that we can witness in Jesus at the Cross, if it stirs in us through our imagination, will untie us from our knotted-ness and wrongness, our failure to hit the mark, and put us right with God.

The Cross  (by Darren Canning)

Gallow tree

And Gibbet 

Raised to frighten me

A shade

To cow

And bow

The head

Or break the back

Of those beneath it

At the foot

Under the heel

Of a cruel world

Where those that write the text 

And those who drive the nails 

Seek to fix

And set the story

Forever 

In their favour 

But whether in the eyes

Of those who look on

Mournful 

Or in the eyes 

Of those who suffer on

Outraged 

The light

Burns 

With every rise and fall

And rise again

As the walls of this Jericho

Are slave-like circled

Waiting for the sounding cry

That will see them fall

And a New Jerusalem

Arise

Be wanton

The welcome

Given

Freely

For the tree

Of life

Of sweet scented blossoms

Will never frighten me.