Tapestry is one of the things I do. Regular visitors to this blog will know this. Birds, houses, stain glass windows, flowers, Greek and Hebrew scripted words are amongst the subjects designed and sewn over the years.
In recent years I've become more theological in some of my designs, using tapestry to explore and express the colour and forms of religious texts and symbols. This started as an experiment when I was studying and teaching Trinitarian theology, and I was intrigued by the possibility of using colour and form to explore the mystery at the heart of the Christian understanding of God.
The most recently completed tapestry is called Eucharist and Pentecost, and the small central panel focuses on the Cross, in the colours of the passion. The scale of the detail shown is 3cm.
An hour or so after posting yesterday's entry on Images of the Cross, the news broke of the bomb attacks on Brussels. Throughout the day the horror and anguish that befell ordinary folk unfolded with a frightening predictability as figures of casualties rose, and the cruelty and range of the injuries were described. As I watched I recalled again the words that go to the dark heart of human evil and brokenness, and illumine from within with the determined purpose of Eternal Love, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…"
We live in a world where it is becoming increasingly easy, perhaps even attractive, to hate the enemy, to wish vengeance, to make retaliatory violence our preferred modus operandi. I for one need a theology of the Cross that feels the full force of the evil we humans inflict on each other, and does not despair. One of the most lethal strains of despair is to give up on reconciliation, to educate our hearts in hatred, to train our emotions away from mercy and justice and to seek the elimination and destruction of the enemy. If we despair of reconciliation, give up on peace, refuse to even try to understand and listen to the reasons why we have been attacked, then we surrender hope and settle for a mutual exchange of deaths and inflicted suffering, which in turn fuels hate, fear and fury, that unholy trinity worshipped best with weapons and strategies of terror.
The Cross of Christ stands as God's decisive No to that despair which implies our preference for death, our own or those we wish to kill. Despair is never more dangerous than when we decide, choose, conclude, that hope has ceased to be an option. Centuries before Jesus was crucified Isaiah spoke more than he knew: "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed."
I've spent the best part of 50 years gazing into the theological abyss which opens up beneath these words in Isaiah 53 – but it is not an abyss of despairing darkness or blank, bleak silence. The Cross is an abyss in which "we hear the plunge of lead into fathomless depths." And so today, at different times, I sit and will sit, before the Cross, and think of all that it means for Jesus, the Son of Man and Son of God, to be crucified in a world like this.
O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life's glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.
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