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In 1974 I was called to be student pastor at Cornton near Stirling. By 1976 I would soon be moving to my first full pastoral appointment in Partick, Glasgow. By then I had started to build a study library. One day that summer, in the John Smith Bookshop on Stirling University Campus, I came across a new commentary by G B Caird, someone I had only recently been reading on the Book of Revelation. The new volume was on Paul's Letters from Prison. 

Now you need to know, I read biblical commentaries. I know they are reference works to be consulted, not novels with a narrative, an unfolding plot, character development and mysteries to be resolved and revealed. But some commentaries do have some of those features. There is a story behind the text, there is an inner coherence that answers to situations and circumstances outside the text, there is indeed a flow that moves forward and characters within and outside the text. A text is written for a reason, by someone and for someone. And we are talking about the Bible. For me it is a sacred text rooted in the realities of human life, and so is of a different order from other texts that need notes, learned commentary and contextual studies to understand and not misinterpret them. 

Exegesis is detective work. The aim is to identify writer and written for, situation and circumstance, meaning and purpose. Which brings me to my thin book, 224 pages, on four letters of Paul. It cost £2.95, which today equates to £21.76. Over the summer I read it, and ever since Paul's Letters from Prison have been my favourite letters of Paul. And ever since I have read commentaries, especially when they are as readable and careful as Caird.

In sixty pages I was drawn into the drama of Paul's love affair with the Christians at Philippi. Every time Paul thinks of them he is filled with joy, gratitude, confidence and love. As a young minister reading this very personal letter from Paul the pastor in prison, to the church that has supported him through thick and thin, I was given an education in encouragement, affection and generosity as fundamental virtues in Christian relationships. 

The crux passage of Philippians 2.5-11 takes just over six pages; that compares with the standard major commentaries which take respectively Bockmuehl 34; Fee 37; Hawthorne 45; Hansen 50; O'Brien 84. There's a set of figures you don't really need to know! The point is, Caird was working within clear publisher's word limits. But that's the point. Not everyone could have reduced the complexities of an immense amount of scholarship to six readable pages of elegant, lucid conclusions.

G B Caird's most famous student is N T Wright. Wright's first commentary was on Colossians in the Tyndale series. The Preface includes a moving tribute to the influence of Caird's scholarship in the  formation of his student who has since become a major and global voice in New Testament scholarship. That makes it all the more intriguing that Professor Caird's six pages on the Christ Hymn in Phil 2.11, is given explicit support in Wright's widely influential treatment of the passage: 'Jesus Christ is Lord, Phil.2.511', in an early collection of essays, The Climax of the Covenant, ch.4).

Two comments about N T Wright, and Professor Caird's ongoing influence in his writing. When Tom Wright came to Aberdeen for a day of seminars on his magnum opus, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, (just short of 2000 pages!), there was a book signing afterwards. I took my much prized hardcover copy of The Climax of the Covenant and asked if he would sign it instead of the big Paul book. He was visibly moved, and said of all his books this one had given him the most pleasure as it showcased some of what he considered his most important work, especially the fourth chapter.

My second comment is a long held and fervent hope; footnote 2 reads "I shall discuss these in my forthcoming commentary on Philippians in the ICC series." That was in 1991. For those who might not know, The International Critical Commentary has long been considered the premier critical commentary on the Bible. The volume on Philippians by N T Wright remains a scheduled volume. It won't be thin book!

Back to Caird. Here is his take on Phil.2.5-11.

"The decisive point is the rhetorical balance of the passage as a whole; he who renounced equality with God to become man can adequately be contrasted only with a man who sought equality with God. The contrast therefore is with Adam, and it is because he grasped at equality with God that Christ is said not to have done so. The logic  of this balance further requires that Adam, who grasped at a dignity to which he had no right, should be contrasted with Christ,who renounced a status to which he had every right…" (page 121. emphasis original)

Less than 100 words. A thickly textured thin book. 

   

Year ago I was part of a Board exploring the vocation and gifts of candidates for Christian ministry. One later in life student was asked if he had enjoyed College. The responses went like this, and I won't attempt the phonetic spelling of the broad Scots accent.

Candidate: Eh, enjoyed it? No, but I learned a lot.

Interlocutor: What did you learn?

Candidate: The definition of a good book.

Interlocutor: So, what is the definition of a good book.

Candidate: A thin one.

It was a wonderful moment of humour, honesty and humanity. The candidate would never be a scholar, and had no aspirations to be. But he was a learner, and like Nehemiah restoring the walls of Jerusalem, he learned, and built his knowledge, brick by brick.

Multum in parvo. A good book. A great deal in a small space. A thin book. I'm not sure I've come across a more discerning and discriminating definition. Of the quite a lot of books I've read, the ones that have been most memorable, helpful, mind-changing, educative, life transforming, game changers in understanding myself, such readings have mostly been thin books. There are exceptions. From the top of my head, Hans Kung, On Being a Christian, J D G Dunn The Theology of Paul, Walter Brueggemann, The Theology of the Old Testament, Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, and recently John G Barclay, Paul and the Gift. These are thick books, keepers that keep giving.

Recently I took each book off the shelves to dust them, the books and the shelves. It's a good time to ask what gives that book the right to be replaced on said shelves. So a small number will move on elsewhere once we are free to move somewhere other than our for exercise! But handling every book became a slowed-down process more akin to browsing than spring cleaning. And I met up with some thin books that have been around for years, and will stay on the shelves as they have stayed in me. 

The word Jesus used in John's Gospel for "remain" or "abide" describes what I think some books have done for me, to me. They abide in me, their truth remains, their insights continue to inform, and sometimes their influence is unconscious and independent of their originating source. My experience of intercession was profoundly shaped by Bonhoeffer's Life Together; my understanding of God's love was decisively deepened by W H Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense; there are few better explorations of Trinitarian theology as a way of living the Christian life, than Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God; and Esther De Waal's Seeking God introduced me to The Rule of St Benedict, and the discovery of several life principles that have shaped my inner life for four decades.

Over the next week I'll introduce a number of thin books, including some of those mentioned already. Think of it as one beggar directing another beggar where to go to find bread. The books will be mainly in areas of Christian thought and experience; significant novels, poets, biographies – well they may well come in series of their own.

But here's a favourite sentence from Nicholas Lash, mentioned above. It reads like a poem so I formatted it as such:

God's utterance lovingly gives life,

all unfading freshness:

gives only life,

and peace, and love,

and beauty, harmony and joy.

And the life God gives is nothing other,

nothing less,

than God's own self.

Life is God, given.   (page 104)

See what I mean? 

 

For a number of years we have organised a Summer School in Aberdeen. "We" being the Centre for Ministry Studies which sits within the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Since retiring from full time ministry I have been an Honorary Lecturer in the School, with my main responsibilities supporting the work of the Centre, though that will broaden into a research role once we are through the current restrictions.

Walking through the campus in the early morning the crown of King's College was shrouded in mist and framed in the green leaves of summer. The history of King's College dates back to 1495, work on the Chapel beginning in the year 1500. The Crown Tower was damaged in a storm in the 17th Century and the original crown replaced as now seen in the photo.

This was taken on a cold summer morning, and is one of many I took of our activities and gatherings during that week. Two of the keywords of the week were faithfulness and relevance. We were exploring the uncomfortable tensions between ministry and mission, the need for conversation between church and world, examining the relationships between message and medium, and finding there were as many perspectives as participants!

Relevance and faithfulness don't have to be mutually excluding; but neither do they easily accommodate to each other. The desire to be relevant is for many an attempt to be faithful to the Gospel; but if relevance becomes the primary driver, then how far does accommodation to cultural norms, expectations and values go?

Equally, faithfulness to the Gospel ought to keep the church alert to its cultural, historical and social context. Unless the church remains critically aware of when it is becoming so set in its way that the church and the Gospel have become irrelevant, incomprehensible and remote, then it loses the right to be heard, and anyway, the audience will have stopped listening.

When the church is treated with indifference blue lights should flash and the klaxons of the Spirit should be heard. But, faithfulness to the Gospel is not served by dancing to the tune of the zeitgeist, or losing confidence in the realities of God's Kingdom, of Christ crucified and risen, and of the Holy Spirit the source and energy of God's new creation and purposes of reconciliation.

All of that, and much more, we argued about, prayed about, disagreed and discussed further; and all within reach of the shadow of the chapel, its crown, and its cross. In the tension between relevance and faithfulness the cross stands as a stumbling block. No surprise there. "For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." (I Cor. 1.18) 

Perhaps one of the key problems with a concern for relevance is our reluctance to live the scandal of the cross. Faithfulness to the Gospel is a call to embody the self-giving love of God in ways that are imaginative, costly and deeply disruptive of the settled norms, cultural values and social arrangements of our times. It may be that relevance is not about accommodation. or compromise, or cultural alignment. Instead of seeking to be more attractive, less different, we are called to a determined faithfulness to challenge greed with generous living, to answer competitive structures of advancement by compassionate accompaniment of those left behind, to live a cruciform life in a world that crucified Jesus.

The power and wisdom of God as displayed in the cross cannot be repackaged to make it seem less foolish, or to disguise its weakness. That would be an apology for an apologetic. There is a deep irony when, in the chase for relevance, the church seeks to increase the marketability of its message, which is essentially a scandalous story that is hard to hear. The church is at its most relevant when it is faithful to the Gospel of reconciliation, and embodies the teaching of Jesus in a community rooted in values and practices of the Kingdom of God. The Beatitudes as lived and practised in the community would make the church a community of contradiction, a moral and spiritual resistance to the counter claims of a competitive and acquisitive consumer culture. 

For the church, the first priority of relevance is that the life of the followers of Jesus is congruent with the Gospel. The evaluating criterion of relevance is not what the surrounding world thinks of the church, but how well the church engages with, cares for, gives itself in service to, this world of which it is part, into which it is sent as agents of peace and conduits of love, a world for which Christ died, making peace by the blood of his cross.  

The Scottish puritan Samuel Rutherford was exiled to Aberdeen. From there he wrote some of his letters of spiritual direction, letters that are now classics of Scottish devotion to Christ. With King's college crown and cross in mind, here is one of his sentences:

"Those who can take that crabbed tree handsomely on their back, and fasten it on cannily, shall find it such a burden as wings unto a bird, or sails to a ship." (Rutherford's Letters, Epistle 5, to Lady Kenmure, Nov 22, 1636.) 

Several years ago, after a winter storm and unusually high seas, we went for a walk at Aberdeen beach, down near the village of Footdee (locally Fittie, contracted from Foot of Dee). Large areas of sand had been washed away or shifted elsewhere on the beach, leaving some old breakwaters exposed.

Beach walking for me is usually as near the sea as I can get without getting my feet wet; and sometimes prepared even to risk that. The old wood, eroded, worn and tempered by who knows how many years of surging sea water and shifting sand stood dark and defiant, a reminder of why they were put there in the first place. I stood beside them, looked closely at the grains and patterns, the whirling contours and ridged lines, and simply enjoyed the sculptured skill of wind and wave and sand, the labour of years.

As I walked away, watching the waves still rushing shoreward, the posts receding and changing their alignment, I stopped. And the photo is the reason. From one precise angle the shape of a cross, the waves visible through a cruciform window. I remember stopping, transfixed by the beauty of an entirely coincidental moment when angle of vision and merging shapes produced a different kind of vision altogether. 

This is the only photo I have printed and put up in our home. Within the cross, the shape of a heart. The theological interconnections are obvious enough. What moves me about this image is its accidental nature, the serendipity of the moment, the gift of a seascape in which, it seems, love comes rolling towards us in irresistible waves of mercy. 

We all have our ways of imagining what divine love is, and how God's love could ever be portrayed in words, art, music or any other form of human creativity. And yes I can resonate with the most powerful words written about the cross, look longingly at the finest art articulating the meaning of the cross, and listen to music fit for heaven expressing the pathos of God surrounding Calvary, and each will leave its mark on the soul.

This was different. This wasn't human art or contrivance. This was a moment of epiphany, impossible to repeat, and impossible to forget. I could have missed it, but once seen, it was unmissable. A seagull cry, a wave on the cusp of tumbling, a cobble shaped like an egg from constant friction of wave and sand, any or each would have been sufficient distraction for me to take a couple more steps without looking. But I did look, and see, the calling card of God.

I've tried to understand and explain to myself what happens inside us when we know we have been addressed. A passage from T S Eliot has long helped me to appreciate and revere those fugitive moments when something is spoken into us that we can never unhear, and something is seen that becomes a lens through which, subsequently, everything else can be viewed, if we are lucky enough to look, and sensible enough to pay attention. 

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

(The Four Quartets, Dry Salvages, V. lines 23-31)

No it isn't a hand made version of the Swiss national flag. Much more mundane than that. This might require a more imaginative hermeneutic. It's masking tape on a carpet. It was stuck there for a reason. Not to measure, not to tack down trailing cables. It was to tell people where to stand.

When our children and young people are helping us with our worship service, it's a mixture of careful preparation and winging it. The mix depends on who has been learning their lines, practising the music, or remembers the words of the song, or who just turned up on the day, and who had time for breakfast; usually the speed of thought in improvisation by the stressed out Sunday School staff is also essential to pull it off. 

On the platform are the props, pieces of costume, musical instruments, and space for the performance. And at strategic places, white marker crosses that let each performer know where to stand. And yes, being someone who notices such things, this one was obvious.

Advent, Easter and Harvest are definite calendar dates for these risk filled liturgical interludes. But time and again our worship rises in praise, gladness and deepened love for God because our children and young adults got out of bed, learned enough to make it work, cared enough to stand in front of all the rest of us, and gave us their gift.

Nobody is there as a performance critic; at least not if they have come to speak with God and hear God speak. In the mix of well rehearsed or forgotten lines, the Gospel is proclaimed. In songs that need a bit of work still, and through Bible stories and readings that could be delivered better, we nevertheless hear the good news. And so by amateur dramatics in the idiom of those who are still learning, and who can teach the rest of us a thing or two, we are drawn into the Story that interprets our story.

It was an Easter morning that I took the picture of the white tape on the red carpet. The dramatised story from John's Gospel was all about running to empty tombs, arguing about what really happened (advanced hermeneutics this was not), men thinking they knew everything and women knowing, that whatever else men knew, men never knew when to shut up, and those meetings with Jesus when Mary Magdalene, Thomas and Peter came out the other side of sorrow.

So on Easter morning, our young storytellers and minstrels and dramatists, standing in the place marked by a cross, told us the Story that is our story, and sent us away to live into the story of a world reconciled to God by a love from all eternity. 

I've always been fascinated by the geometry of botany. The precise arrangements of petals and stamens combined with colour and light, provide an entire world of beauty in one flower head. One of the best ways of looking closely at a flower is to stop, and look, closely. 

Yesterday morning, leaving the house for our exercise walk, I stopped to look at a small anemone growing in our front border. It was breezy so it was moving around. I only had my phone and I stood there bending down waiting for the breeze to calm down so I could take a close up photo.

The picture here is the result. 

Only when it was downloaded did I notice the sunlit leaf above the flower head. I could look for the rest of my life and not find such a coincidence of colour, light and shadow. But unmistakably, there is the shape of a cross.

So of course the photo has to come into this series on seeing the cross everywhere. But I have already chosen the photos, and thought about what to write about some of them. This one is an interruption, an entirely accidental by product of my focusing on a flower. And once you see the Cross you can't unsee it. Which makes it both an unlooked for bonus or an inconvenient gatecrasher. Not often a flower is photo-bombed by a leaf.

More seriously, because I do take seriously those momentary epiphanies of God's grace, and I do try to attend to those intimations of Presence, when we notice God's fingerprints on his creation. More seriously, then, purple is the liturgical colour leading towards Easter. Purple is also the colour of the robe that draped the humiliated body of Christ. The juxtaposition of a purple flower and a leaf engraved by sunlight with the shape of a cross, I found a deeply moving discovery. Call it a moment of revelation, when the deep truth of who God is clarifies in the fusion of two images, and in the midst of all that is happening, the imprint of the Father's love.  

The cross is the hallmark of God's love, the authenticating signature written across Creation. The link of that thought with Julian of Norwich is irresistible: 

And in this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind's eye it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, "What can this be?" And the answer came to me, "It is all that is made". I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, "It lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and in the same way everything exists through the love of God".

And as if by intended accident, the coincidence of light and shadow in my photo, the telltale fingerprint of God discreetly impressed on his Creation:

"In this little thing I saw three attributes: the first is that God made it, the second is that he loves it, the third is that God cares for it."

For a good number of years I have had to hand a small cross, carved from olive wood. It's made to fit comfortably while being held in hands clasped in prayer. 

It was given to me at a time in my life when there were more burdens than could easily be borne. That happens to all of us sometimes, when the emotional cost of being who you are, and the outgoings of personal investment in the lives of others threatens to overwhelm. 

For some it's the incremental demands of the job, or recurring anxiety about family, or the advent of threatened illness, or chronic financial pressures with no easy way out. It doesn't really matter now what my own situation was.

What matters is that one day, sitting at my desk, trying to work out a way to manage impossibly conflicting demands, a friend and colleague came in and said very little. But he placed the palm cross in my hand, saying it might help.

Think about that. How could a small hand carved piece of olive wood, sourced from Palestine, and albeit thoughtfully handed to me in a gesture of kindness I have never forgotten, how could it help? What I needed was a change of circumstances, a lessening of load, or even, God help us, a couple of brilliant ideas of how to fix what I knew deep down I couldn't fix? By the way, "God help us", however pious or defiant the tone, is a prayer.

The number of times I've held that gift in my hand since! You see it isn't the wood, or its shape. But the kindness that gave it, and the originating thought that sent someone looking for it because they were thinking about me, and the unpushy way it was given, – these represent, as a sacrament, exactly what the cross stands for in hearts that have come to understand it. 

Olive wood, carved by skilled and practised hands, bought and given away by other hands, and then placed into my hand, a symbol of those other hands so long ago, "hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails surrendered…" At a precise time in my life, my own inner suffering was acknowledged by another, and brought into relation with the suffering of God in Christ.

Long before that over worked and lazy cliche, "There are no words", that gesture of kindness demonstrated the kind of care and understanding that make words redundant, and still says the right thing. "And it came to pass", in that moment of gift, that gift of a moment, the equilibrium shifted, and I held in my hand a word from God.

Through those difficult times I began to hold this gift of a cross when praying, and especially when silent because words would not come.The inner shift in my own mind and heart in the days that followed made it possible to work through some of the most difficult weeks in my life. There is something unashamedly and unequivocally Christian about sharing in the sufferings of Christ, and knowing Christ shares all there is to bear of our own suffering.

A hand carved cross, clasped in hands that are praying, is a confession of faith in the God who in Christ, has come to know, eternally know, the broken heart of humanity. All of this is hard to explain. But Paul knew something about what I'm trying to say. "For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows." (2 Cor.1.5) Yes, it's a hard verse. But then, it's a hard life, sometimes. God help us!  

It was a Saturday morning and we were on a mission. We needed a new mattress so headed for our favourite shop. Previously the approach was straightforward. Lie on it, find out if it's comfortable; decide if you want firm, semi-orthopaedic, or soft; try to stay within the budget; buy it. 

But oh no. There was a new smart bed, all wired up with sensors that read your body's position, weight and impression on the mattress and the clever programme told the sales person what was needed to accommodate my particular body. And don't worry about it being for two people; it would read the same data for Sheila and recommend a bespoke mattress specific to the needs of each. Eh?  The price elicited a quick no thank you, and we looked at and tested the available ready made mattresses in another favourite shop, chose one, and arranged delivery.

You wouldn't think that scenario would lead to deep theological reflection. But standing waiting for the order processing, and the paperwork I looked down at the floor, took out my phone and took a photo. Breaking in on the thought processes of the past half hour, the familiar symbol of the cross. 

The tiles had curled at the corners; someone had effected a quick repair with tape. Except that tape had been down there for a while, and had been walked on by countless feet, as people went about their business, from the sublime of choosing a mattress, to the ridiculous of having a mattress chosen for you by a computer. 

Over time, this image has grown on me. I've thought about those feet scuffing and wearing the tape away over weeks. Trainers and boots, sandals and high heels, people getting on with their lives of working and buying, coming and going, talking and thinking, laughing and maybe crying. And all of them trampling unawares, over these four tiles, joined by tape for their safety.

"If anyone will come after me let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me." Discipleship is about feet, and the cross. To follow Jesus is to walk, to travel, to go where he goes, and live the Christ life. The connection between feet and faith has a long history. It's the call to walk into whatever future is ahead of us, and being willing to carry the cross by following faithfully after Jesus.

That trampled floor and worn out cross is a reminder, that we will find Christ in the ordinary, even the whimsical ordinary of a worn out floor.   

Oh, let me see Thy footmarks,
  And in them plant mine own;
My hope to follow truly
  Is in Thy strength alone.

I finish with a quotation that has haunted and inspired me since I first read it: 

“He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside,
He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”

(Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 

On a dark November afternoon I walked down to the village of Skene, about three miles round journey. By three o'clock it was getting dark.

Early on when this building was being completed, I had noticed the juxtaposition of the cross and behind it the pylons and power lines.

But in the gathering gloom of winter mist, the light radiated into the darkness, highlighting the sharp-edged shape of the cross.

Overshadowed by pylons which were themselves cruciform, the connection wasn't difficult to make.

The cross, a symbol of weakness, suffering and death, but behind it the very power that enables it to shine.

The cross, combining in itself darkness and light, and even that deep darkness cannot eclipse the light.

Darkness takes many forms; death, suffering, depression, fear, cruelty, violence, hatred, injustice. These are all abstract nouns, but the concrete realities add up to so much that afflicts humanity and the life we share on this earth. 

What makes this cross specific, is our ability to see in our own life, and in the lives of all our fellow creatures, what it is that diminishes, crushes and afflicts human life. The Cross is the place to which we bring the suffering of humanity, our own and the world's pain.

Kneeling as those who do not have the answers, and sometimes can't even articulate the questions, we look at the light of God's love that shines out into that darkness, gloom and greyness. And we pray, for the healing of our world, and the healing of our times, and the healing of our hearts.

For Christians, power should never be about coercion, competition, domination or subjugation of others. The cross is the negation of all ideologies of power over others.

The power of God's love in Christ shines in unbroken patience, determined purpose, faithful persistence, redemptive mercy, and an infinite hopefulness that from all eternity, has ever been self-giving and infinite in creative intent.

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." 

(This is the first in a series of reflections on the Cross. Each one will focus on an image of the cross based on photos I've taken. The photo above shows Westhill Community Church front, exterior.)  

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."