As we prepare to unveil the Cross in the liturgy of Good Friday may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts unveil the truth of Christ crucified.
Some of you have been following the talks earlier in the week and maybe the social media discussion about God and the Cross which followed posting the sermons online. That discussion has ranged over how God has a sameness to us whilst being profoundly different from us. Love is his sameness, holiness his difference. My Facebook friend Chris put this comment on one of the talks I posted: ‘It is a very challenging question of Christian's when asked..."Why do you worship someone that insisted on a human sacrifice for him to forgive the people. If he was such a divine and noble figure… surely he would have just forgiven them anyway. The lesson that seems to come from this account is that forgiveness will only be given after sacrificial and excruciating punishment’.
This was my answer to Chris: ‘When people outside Christian circles debate with us about the Cross we find common ground in a perception that the world needs putting right by forgiveness. To get beyond the stumbling block of divine love willing suffering requires a vision of God with loving sameness to yet holy difference from us. Attaining such a vision can follow scrutiny of Christian basics where there is readiness to take seriously what God might have said of God, history and the future through scripture and the community of faith. Faith seeming to contradict logic brings an invitation to seek the understanding beyond reason the Holy Spirit supplies seekers’. On the same conversation thread Bishop Lindsey added in a simpler way: ‘The minute you take your eyes off the crib when you gaze on the cross, your doctrine of the atonement becomes mystifying rather than a mystery. ‘God was in Christ...’
It takes God to understand God and God to explain the Cross. I can speak, as I am doing, but no words of mine can provide a reasoned base for Good Friday. God speaks of it in his word today. ‘He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all’ (Isaiah 53:3-6).
The loving action of God in sending his Son to suffer goes back to the design of creation and its intended redesign in Christ to make eternal friendship with God possible by dealing with what breaks that friendship.
Jesus died in our place to live in our place. He accepted the just penalty for sin, in the face of God’s holiness, on our behalf. This has become a transformative power in our lives as Christians. When we come repeatedly to the Cross our sinful nature is repeatedly put to death and the life of his Holy Spirit repeatedly gains power within us. That nature will rise again and again to our dying day but the death of Christ reveals its number is up - the decisive victory over sin, death and the devil has been achieved though we remain in a ‘mopping up operation’ in the wake of that victory.
The conflict of those two powers, one life-giving and the other death-dealing, is evident to faith. Priest poet Raneiro Cantalamessa writes: ‘In the Alps in summer, when a mass of cold air from the north clashes with hot air from the south, frightful storms break out disturbing the atmosphere; dark clouds move around, the wind whistles, lightning rends the sky from one end to the other and the thunder makes the mountains tremble. Something similar took place in the Redeemer’s soul where the extreme evil of sin clashed with the supreme holiness of God disturbing it to the point that it caused him to sweat blood and forced the cry from him, “My soul is sorrowful to the point of death… nevertheless Father, not my will but yours be done.”’
Holy Week is an invitation to climb down to the level ground at the foot of the Cross where all are on a level due to sin. As we seek forgiveness for our pride, anger, lust, envy, gluttony, avarice and sloth, sin’s power over us is broken. As a priest privileged to hear Confessions I see again and again people coming to that level ground before the Cross and being lifted up by the loving forgiveness shown there for them as individuals. ‘Go in peace, the Lord has put away your sins’. I heard those words for myself earlier in Holy Week.
The pandemic has opened new dimensions of suffering through bereavement, frustration and depression. On Good Friday we recall how the Cross stands tall for us as Christians in all of this, giving us grace to accept the things we cannot change and help to be witnesses of the love of God in our situation. Our best resource as believers, and indeed as human beings, is the sense we have of our need for mercy. That mercy is displayed from the highest place on this holy day.
We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world!
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