We are still in the Easter cycle, and we are still in lock down. Passion week is not so much an emotional roller-coaster, as one long descent into the abyss of human horrors only coming to an end with the death of the crucified. Even then, the silence of Holy Saturday was its own further and deeper abyss of meaninglessness, silence and hope's terminus.
Until Easter morning. When in the words of the old hymn. "Up from the grave he arose, with a mighty triumph o'er his foes…." The resurrection is the triumph of love over hate, the hands of peace no longer stilled by the violating nails, hope breaking like the dawn, dismantling the destructive machinery of despair, and, yes, life overcoming death and daring death to deny its own demise, "O grave, where is your victory?"
The wonderful Tony Campolo once preached a sermon which used the repeated refrain, a kind of resurrection slogan for folk feeling the weight of suffering, despair and life getting too hard, "It's Friday, but Sunday is comin'!" It's a brilliant rhetorical rejoicing in anticipation of resurrection.
But. The Easter cycle, with its Passion, reaches beyond the resurrection. In a world where resurrection happened, people still die, suffering is still a given of human existence, and there are times when hope is hard to come by. Sunday or not, Friday's shadow is long and still falls across the road we have to travel.
The triumph of the resurrection is not a Christian licence to print the currency of triumphalism. Hope is not an exalted form of denial. It is a form of trust that defies despair; hope is a form of truthfulness about the realities we live through, but insists on the equal reality of Christ crucified and risen; hope is therefore faith in the love that suffered and died for a broken and fallen world, and is not defeated. Note the present tense – is not defeated.
We live our lives in the shadow of the cross. "It's Friday…" I know Sunday is coming, but I also know that Friday too is in the present tense, and in the life we have to live we will know times when we are carrying our own cross, and staggering under its load. Resurrection does not cancel the reality, cost and depth of Christ's suffering, it vindicates it, redeems it, and sets free into God's world, the light of God's own power as God speaks again the creation words of life, hope and peace.
For a while now I have collected images of the cross from all sorts of places. Unexpected coincidences of shape and light, moments when I am surprised by what comes into view, brief epiphanies of the man of sorrows, "by whose stripes we are healed. I may do a series of brief posts using some of those visual encounters when a cruciform image became a sacrament of surprise, and a moment of prayer
The photo is from one of our walks the other night. The lock down imposed by the Covid 19 crisis keeps us within a limited orbit from home. At the end of the road which passes by the cemetery where our daughter Aileen rests, there is this old broken down fence. Forget the aesthetics of church furniture, crosses carved in wood or shining cast brass and bronze. Broken concrete held together by rusting metal and tangled wires, strewn stones from a broken down dyke, an image as bleak as it is useless.
At dusk, looking to the hills, heart sad and still sore with grief, and facing all the uncertainties of the current pandemic, there is this eyesore at the turning point of our walk. Like the One who died there, "there is no beauty that we should desire it." But in these post-Easter days, as we live in a world made strange, and hear a daily litany of suffering and deaths, images like this matter. They matter when we are humbled to the point of tears at the utterly unselfish love shown by all the healers and carers in our hospitals, care homes and throughout our communities. It is images like this wrecked fence, broken into a cross-shaped contortion, that remind us what suffering love looks like. It's Friday.
But Sunday is coming. The resurrection did not reverse the suffering of Jesus. The nail prints and the wounded side are there as evidence of how far the love of God will go in bearing human pain. Our own suffering, of grief and anxiety, of depression and pain, of weakness and all the losses that come on our finite humanity as our life passes, are all alike drawn into the heart of God in Christ. God's love is cruciform.
The unknown writer of that difficult New Testament book Hebrews, written to Christians facing an uncertain future, gave us some words that might help us understand better our own suffering, and how the suffering of Jesus helps us: "Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." (Hebrews 4.12-16)
The resurrection is the guarantee of "grace to help us in time of need."
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