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On one of my regular walks we pass the Episcopal Church. The side of the building has this cross displayed. It faces the road, the car park, and towards the distant hills. Do those parking their cars notice it? What about the regular walkers going down to the village for their daily constitutional, does it ever occur to them to give it a passing thought? Do passing motorists glance over and see it? If not, then who is it for?

I photographed this mathematically precise cross on one of those late winter days of bright sunlight and blue skies. It was the shadow that made me look twice – it was evocative of lines that came to mind without searching through the memory files.

Whatever else Holy Saturday conveys of emotion, image, memory, devotion or whatever, it's the day when we face the reality of an empty cross, without the comfort of an empty tomb. I find the sharp angled plainness of this cross deeply disconcerting, which is as it should be. The cross is not a thing of beauty, and perhaps we are too quick to soften its lines, round off its angles, give it some colour, make it more aesthetically and therefore more emotionally acceptable.

But what can possibly make the cross acceptable, attractive even? All this week I have explored images of the cross, and tried to understand even the first fringes of truth knowing it would still be beyond our grasp. And yet. One of the paradoxes that goes to the heart of our faith is that there is, despite all that points to the contrary, a beauty and a cause for wonder in the cross, whether imaged in art and photograph, sung or played in music, read or prayed or written in word. There is a strange beauty in the brokenness, a glory in the tragedy, a truth that renders hopeful so much else in our lives that seems cause for despair, or at least indifference. 

The words that came to mind as I took this photograph are these: 

I take, O cross, thy shadow
  for my abiding place:
I ask no other sunshine than
  the sunshine of his face;
content to let the world go by,
  to know no gain nor loss;
my sinful self my only shame,
  my glory all the cross.

The hymn begins:

Beneath the cross of Jesus
  I fain would take my stand,
the shadow of a mighty Rock
  within a weary land…

Forgive the following personal reminiscence, but it helps explain much of what my life has been, and been about. Fifty five years ago today, exactly to the day, I enacted those first lines of the hymn. I can remember the place, the time and the circumstances in which as a young man of 16 years, I took my stand alongside Jesus, and beneath his cross. Yes, a classic evangelical conversion narrative, complete with a life already in trouble, potential squandered, and life chances already decreasing in a life going down the drain. But on April 16, 1967, in repentant faith and then wondering gratitude, I offered my life to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Ever since, beneath the cross of Jesus has been my abiding place.

All that has happened in my life since, I owe to what I now know was my response of faith to a love that came looking for me, love such as I never imagined. Throughout the subsequent years of Christian existence I have prayed and read, preached in churches and shared in conversations, written books and articles, about the love of God in Christ. These Holy Week blog posts are part of that same ministry of glad indebtedness 'beneath the cross of Jesus'.

On this Holy Saturday, 55 years on, looking again at this steel grey cross engineered with such precision, its shadow cast by sunlight, the remaining words of the hymn take on a deeply personal note of gratitude:

Upon the cross of Jesus
  mine eye at times can see
the very dying form of One
  who suffered there for me:
and from my stricken heart with tears
  two wonders I confess,
the wonders of redeeming love
  and my unworthiness.  

This Triptych is comprised of three studio models of The Stations of the Cross. They are a personal gift from the artist. Standing before them, if we look carefully, we overhear the conversation between art and theology. When, in contemplation, we are attentive to beautiful and accomplished art, that conversation continues, even in silence.

So much of Christian faith is expressed and communicated in words, but words have their limitations. The Scottish theologian P T Forsyth, died almost exactly 100 years ago. His writing was once described by a reviewer as "like watching fireworks in a fog". Forsyth was well aware of his own stylistic limitations. But in fairness, the difficulty is experienced by every theologian seeking to talk with reverence about what for Christians is the deepest mystery of the universe.

"Words are hard to stretch to the measure of eternal things, without breaking under us somewhere," Forsyth once confessed. But few have wrestled with more determination to find thought and words worthy of such an urgent and sublime subject as the Cross of Christ. Some of Forsyth's most passionate and persuasive writing is found in such volumes as his slim masterpiece aptly titled, The Cruciality of the Cross.

Back to the triptych (above), and a theology of atonement without words. The first panel is brutal in its historical realism. Roman soldiers had done this work, and it was all in a day's work, hundreds if not thousands of time. The third panel conveys gentle tenderness as powerfully as the first portrays banal brutality. Between the indifferent act of crucifixion by a soldier, and the loving actions of those who loved Jesus, is the anguish of the Crucified, in the presence of His mother.

The centre panel has its own story, hinted in the detail. The extensive empty spaces surrounding Jesus, create a sense of stark contrast with the suffering Jesus. The flat, vacancy visually shouts a hard to grasp truth, that in the presence of such suffering every human word and artistic statement is silenced.

On one side, Jesus' mother stands, unable to help. Her presence is one of impotent love and infinite tenderness, physically helpless yet powerfully present. On the other side, beneath Jesus elbow, the outer edge of one of the other crosses, a reminder that Jesus is just one of three executed that day, and one of countless thousands in the history of Roman Imperial power and administration.

On the ground, the only other telling detail, a small pile of refuse, mere rubbish. Calvary was a dump, a place where worthless detritus was disposed of, and thrown away.

In the triptych, the crucified Christ stands between two panels, we could call them Cruelty and Love. In the central panel Christ stands between the determined love of the mother who gave him life, and that small pile of worthlessness which is a world broken, futureless and worthless.

Except, it is not so!

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting humanity's sins against them."

The Christian gazes on the cross with a hushed and grateful joy, with the quickened heart of the penitent and with the awakened wonder of the forgiven. Forsyth likewise for all his theological writing, acknowledged again and again: "It is beyond all thought, beyond poetry…God himself in that mighty joy, refrains from words."

Three panels. The first, sin in all its banality and brutality, the third, love that stays and will not go away. And in the centre, Jesus. Yes, it's all beyond words, beyond poetry. Though George Herbert, perhaps comes closest to stating the real mystery of Good Friday:

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.

Wonderful art as they are, and profound the theology they convey, but these three Stations of the Cross, like every other art form and literary effort, ultimately fall short of our human capacity to explain. But then, they join every other human attempt to describe the love of God in Christ. How could it be otherwise when, "In vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of Love Divine."

We've learned to live with Covid over the past two years. But that first lockdown. The shock of learning a life threatening disease was spreading; the perplexity engendered by the unreality of immediate restrictions on when we could leave the house, go shopping, visit family and friends, go to a concert, attend church, play a round of golf and almost everything else that was ordinary, normal and routine.

The one concession was an hour's exercise, but within a set radius of home. So we walked. And walked. We varied the route, half an hour outwards, half an hour return. Right, that's it till tomorrow. Where we live, ten minutes takes you to the edge of town and into rural Aberdeenshire.

The photo is of a broken down fence, two concrete posts, the steel reinforcing bent and rusted, the wires only just holding them up. A crazy cruciform wreck of a fence, no longer needed to keep animals in the field which for several years has been intensively farmed. 

I remember quite clearly taking this photo. The digital date shows it was April 17, five days after Easter Sunday which was April 12 in 2020. It was the first and only year since 1967 I wasn't in church on Easter Sunday.

On 17 April 2020, the date of this photo, there were 54 deaths from Covid in Scotland, and the 7 day average was 48 and rising. The sadness and anxiety were palpable. It was hard not to be scared. Each day we, and most other folk, went out for our walk, came back, watched the news briefings, found something useful to do or interesting to watch. Then there were the reinforcing rituals of face-coverings, sanitiser, and the new aversion therapy called social distancing.

So at the turning point of our walk down to Skene village, there is this crazy broken down fence, its ruined posts an Easter conspiracy, an emotional ambush, like a mocked up Calvary, but witnessing to something deep enough to bear the weight of what had befallen us. I had cycled past that broken cruciform wreck so many times and didn't notice. But walking down that day, living now in a changed and chastened world, those concrete posts took on concrete significance.

Behind them the outer edges of the Highlands, and visible to the left, a glimpse of Loch Skene. The looming, hard-edged grey posts, stark against a light sky, were making a statement, or so it seemed to me. In all the suffering that was unfolding in the world, here, right at the turning point of the path, a Cross. We were troubled about illness and an increasing mortality rate, praying and cheering and willing on our medical scientists and virologists working flat out to find treatment and perhaps a vaccine, anxious on behalf of Health Service staff under increasing pressure and knowing worse was to come. And this broken old fence pushed us back to the previous Sunday, Easter Sunday.

Amongst the first casualties of a pandemic, if we're not careful, is hope. Followed quickly by faith. In a way too strange to explain, two accidental fencing posts interrupted whatever I was feeling – probably anything between self-pity, being more scared than I admit even to myself, and that inner guilt of those who are still safe (so far as we knew) when so many others were not. Corroded steel reinforcements, rusty wire, and crumbling concrete had conspired to demand my attention, and turn my mind to the Easter Christ, crucified and risen. 

In all the suffering of our world and our lives, there is the not always discernible reality of the Easter Christ, whose suffering for our broken world takes us, and our suffering, into the heart of God. I still pass these fenceposts on foot, on the bike, in the car – I cannot un-see what I've seen. 

Inscribed upon the cross we see
in shining letters, 'God is love';
he bears our sins upon the tree;
he brings us mercy from above.

The balm of life, the cure of woe,
the measure and the pledge of love,
the sinner's refuge here below,
the angels' theme in heaven above.

And to finish, two brief sentences from Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God, one of the theological masterpieces of the 20th Century. The first one could not be more apt for the photo!

“In concrete terms, God is revealed in the cross of Christ who was abandoned by God." 

“The theological foundation for Christian hope is the raising of the crucified Christ.” 

This image evokes so many memories for me, and so provokes numerous thoughts and emotions. It never fails to touch that deep place where faith, hope and love abide.

I choose that older quaint word 'abide' quite deliberately. "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love." (John 15.9) In the background and foreground of those words is the cross, foreshadowed. "I take, O Cross, thy shadow for my abiding place…"

The photo is of the rose window in Crown Terrace Baptist Church. I remember nearly forty years ago asking one of the church members, a gifted carpenter, to make a plain cross as a focal point beneath that window. The combination of light and shadow, of word and image, creates a complex intersection which centres on the centre of the cross.

The text from the prologue of John's Gospel is relevant for both Advent and Easter. But especially in Holy Week, and with Good Friday approaching, those words surrounding the sunlight and shadow, vibrate with significance. "In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men." (John 1.4) Light comes through the cross; life comes through the dying of God's Son; the One who is Life and Light is God's gift to the world. 

Looking deeply into the centre of this photo, where the window of light is circled by sacred text, and is supported by the shadowed cross, I found my mind rehearsing the verse of a Christmas carol which, like the text, easily translates from Advent to Easter:     

               Light and Life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings.

mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die

born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth,

Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the new born King.  

The Cross is the necessary prelude to resurrection, and resurrection the required climax of God's triumphant love. Easter combines darkness and light, death and life, despair and hope, violence and peace, hate and love, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Those simple spars of wood, joined and shaped, placed just so beneath the lights and under the source of sunlight, draw our wondering eyes, and tell a story. And often enough, as I sit somewhere in this church, and reflect on my own story, of light and darkness, of life and death, of hope and despair, of joy and sadness, the words of that text, encircling the window and crowning the cross, reaffirm what it is I believe.

Because the story of Jesus draws us in, and invites us to join our story with His. I think of this text, window and cross, as a special place where it's possible to be put together again, the mind's fugitive thoughts regathered, the heart's anxieties and regrets brought to the place where we are fully understood, and where the story of my life so far can pause, before continuing on.

Because of Holy Week and its penultimate act of crucifixion, followed by the ultimate event of resurrection, some anonymous follower of Jesus wrote words that explain the mystery and the miracle of Easter, and how the story of Jesus becomes our story:

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 empathize 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.  

Window frames, door panels, fence posts – these are a few of the everyday furniture I notice cruciform intersections. But it turns up in other places, some of them surprising and even incongruous.

We were in John Lewis in Aberdeen (before it closed down!), in the furnishing department. As we walked round, I saw this and took a photo. Some health and safety conscious member of staff had taped down the corners of the tiles to avoid customers tripping, with perhaps litigious consequences!

This is one of my favourite images of the cross, despite the lack of artistic intent. Isaiah 53 is one of the most powerful poems in the entire range of literature that makes up our Bible. It has from the earliest beginnings of Christian thinking, been associated with the passion and death of Jesus. Phrases like " no beauty", "despised and rejected", along with emotions of shame, and dismissive scorn are woven into a poem about the sufferings of the Servant of God – for Christians, Jesus of Nazareth.

Try it. Read Isaiah 53, remembering the tied hands, the soldiers' mockery, the stripes, the thorns, the whole paraphernalia of interrogation, humiliation and dehumanising torture. The parallels between Isaiah and the Gospel passion stories are unmistakable. One of my favourite Holy Week hymns, sung to a tune in minor key, expresses the anguish of being the despicable one whose suffering is mere entertainment, and whose body is there to be violated, trampled – yes, despised and rejected. 

A purple robe, a crown of thorn,
a reed in his right hand;
before the soldiers' spite and scorn
I see my Saviour stand.

He bears between the Roman guard
the weight of all our woe;
a stumbling figure bowed and scarred
I see my Saviour go.  

On a Saturday morning in John Lewis's, I saw a cross made of tape, trampled by countless feet, mostly unnoticed, dirty and worn, an image not worth a second look. Until, following that first look the sign of the cross and its deeper significance is allowed to emerge. Trampled, dirty, worn, but the cruciform shape still unmistakable. 

The cross has been an artefact throughout Christian history, and not always as a sign of reconciliation and peace. Manufactured crosses are strewn throughout history and place, from fabulous gold encrusted with jewels to plain wooden carvings, from wrought iron to paint and canvas, and from textiles to sculpture. But now and then there is the accidental, the incidental, when the cross is seen where it is least expected to be – on a shop floor for instance.

I look at this photo now and think of the Crucified Christ, that whole parody of justice in which a life of perfect love to God and others was besmirched, trampled on, by countless eyes unnoticed. Holy Week can easily become a form of domesticated spirituality, the cross seen through eyes that are familiar with the story, its anguish domesticated and diluted over decades of Holy Weeks

An image of soiled duck tape used as a temporary repair, might just help us to acknowledge how easily through familiarity and years of practice, we filter out the banality of evil, the lack of beauty, the scorn and cruelty and terrifying spectacle of indifference to human suffering. 

There is a carelessness by which the cross of Christ doesn't always tower over the wrecks of time; instead it becomes invisible to hearts too preoccupied to realise what it is we trample. 

Fast to the cross's spreading span,
high in the sunlit air,
all the unnumbered sins of man
I see my Saviour bear.

He hangs, by whom the world was made,
beneath the darkened sky;
the everlasting ransom paid,
I see my Saviour die.

(There is a good rendition of "A Purple Robe" available here. )

For a long time now I have collected images of the cross as and when I see them. It is one of the perplexing but crucial realities about being a Christian that the cross is central to Christian discipleship and devotion, and an essential focus of Christian theology.

After all Jesus defined discipleship as taking up the cross and following him, and Paul, Jesus' greatest interpreter, declared the paradox, "I am crucified with Christ, I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me…"

During this Holy Week I would like to offer a brief reflection on one or other of the images of the cross that sheds some light and insight into the dark recesses of the greatest mystery of our faith. 

This is an olive wood, hand-held cross that sits on my desk. It was given to me by a friend at a time when life was hard and prayer was even harder. We all have times, episodes, events in our lives when we suffer, when our inner resources are dangerously depleted, the heart is sad and the mind struggles to think clearly. More than that. Without ever trivialising the passion of Christ, or suggesting our suffering compares with that of the Crucified Christ, nevertheless, there are times when it feels as if we are sharing the sufferings of Christ. 

This small piece of wood is shaped and smoothed to be held on to. It is something tangible, the hand and therefore the body responding to the cruciform shape of wood so that it becomes a wordless prayer; or at least wordless until the words eventually come. In that sense holding and clutching a few ounces of olive wood becomes an act of sacramental grace, when a created object reminds us of God, the Creative Subject of our lives and life of the world.

On this Monday of Holy Week, I hold this cross as I read the updated news on the war in Ukraine. Sometimes I have words, but they never seem adequate, though I pray they are at least honest. The suffering of God in Christ is played out through the anguish and cruelties of human conflict, so perhaps my prayers are a way of aligning my heart with that of the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Perhaps that is the true meaning of intercession, to love the world in all its brokenness.

Perhaps too, Christian theology has to recover a deeper, more searching, and more honest doctrine of sin and evil. I am not aware of a recent major theological work that compares to Emil Brunner's Man in Revolt, or Reinhold Niebuhr's Nature and Destiny of Man, both written in contexts of gathering conflict, ideological confrontations, and major threats to human peace and justice.

So I pray, I hold my cross and I imagine the cries of those who are suffering and bereaved, made homeless and brutalised by acts of human aggression, cruelty and, yes let's name it, sin. And this Monday of Holy Week, holding this cross, I ponder the meaning of the coming Good Friday. Like the angels in the Palm Sunday hymn, it may be that our sadness speaks our prayers more truly than words that for all our trying, fail to grasp the depths of human suffering and Love Divine: 

Ride on, ride on in majesty!
The angel armies of the sky
look down with sad and wond'ring eyes
to see th'approaching sacrifice. 

I have a letter, now 47 years old, written by an elderly widow, in which the first words are, "Dear Pastor, while I’m waiting for the tatties to boil”. She was writing to me on Sunday after the morning service to encourage her minister. At the end of it she mentions a couple of folk in the church with equal appreciation and gratitude to God.

I mention this because I want to recommend that you read part of a letter that was written to a church made up of all kinds of folk, some of them I guess not unlike Mrs Todd, the elderly saint who made it her mission to encourage the minister.

Romans chapter 16.1-17 is a long list of greetings from Paul to various friends, colleagues and other Christians whose presence in his life had been blessing, for him and in the life of the Church in Rome.

Here’s some of Paul’s reasons for thanking God for some of his fellow Christians. “They risked their lives for me.” “My dear friend Epenetus who was the first convert to Christ in Asia.” “My relatives who have been in prison with me.” “Greet Ampliatus, whom I love in the Lord.” “Greet those women who work hard in the Lord.” Then he greets Rufus, “chosen in the Lord, and his mother, who has been a mother to me too.” And so on.

Read it for yourself. Seventeen times Paul says Greet… the church…my dear friend…our fellow workers…all the saints. You know how at a vote of thanks there’s always the worry that someone will be missed out and be offended? No such problems with Paul. He’s on a thanksgiving roll. The word he uses, “Greet”, means to warmly welcome, to say hello and wish someone well. It also means in this letter pass on my good wishes, remind them of me and my affection for them. In fact he finishes the list with “Greet one another with a holy kiss.”

What is very clear from this catalogue of friendships and affection is that Christian fellowship runs deep, and the love of God is a powerful current that runs through the Body of Christ. There’s a lot of heart searching going on about how local churches, churches like ourselves, rebuild and recover their impetus, energy and vision after all the disruptions during the pandemic. And there’s no doubt a lot of thinking, praying, talking, praying, deciding and praying will have to be done!

But there’s something that hasn’t changed, and shouldn’t change. Two things actually. Paul mentions them in this letter to the Romans. “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us.” (Romans 5.5) We love because God first loved us – not only so, but the Holy Spirit is God’s gift to us, to live in our hearts and to inhabit and guide the church opf Jesus, wherever it is locally expressed.

So yes, let’s think and plan and pray and seek to discern the mind of Christ as in all our churches  we look to our future together. But we do so as those transformed by the outpouring of God’s love and the gift of God’s Spirit. Two things – (1) God’s love poured into our hearts, and (2) the Holy Spirit, the Gift that keeps on giving, the Giving Gift of God, the Giver of Gifts to the people of God.

God’s love for us, God’s love in us and flowing through us is the great presupposition of Christian fellowship in any and every church seeking to be faithful to Jesus. In the Body of Christ, our love for each other presupposes God’s love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit and overflowing in love, joy and hopefulness for our life together. That’s one great presupposition – and it changes everything. Charles Wesley gave us the exact words for our prayer:

O Thou who camest from above, the pure celestial fire to impart.

Kindle a flame of sacred love on the mean altar of my heart.

Jesus confirm my heart’s desire to work, and speak, and think for Thee;

Still let me guard the holy fire and still stir up thy gift in me.

Over the past two months or so I've been working away on the new tapestry. The idea came from a reading from the Book of Revelation, chapter 21.9-27. I knew roughly what I wanted to do, but like a number of previous projects, I tried to listen to the text and find ways of giving image, form and colour to what is a remarkably precise description of the Holy City.

The angel with a measuring rod lays out the geometric contours of a celestial cube, a city of inconceivable dimensions. But this is Heaven, so mathematics comes into conversation with eschatology, geometry is informed by theology, and the architect is drawing up a blueprint for a city where there will be inhabitants "from every tribe and language and people and nation."

Throughout John's Revelation the figure of the Lamb is central, enthroned, the focus of worship and the guarantor of the victory of God. So John sees, and says in a pivotal passage,

"I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb is its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light and the kings of the earth will bring their treasures into it" (19.22.3-5 

So I started at the centre and worked out. I decided to use three basic geometric shapes; the square, the triangle and the circle. The full central panel is done in tent stitch allowing the mixing and detail of colours. The centre of the City is represented by the small and intermediate squares. Beyond them are the 12 large triangles, which represent the 12 foundation stones of the city walls. Each is the colour of one of the precious stones described in 19.19-20.

The large square is superimposed on a circle, representing a universe filled with the glory of God, emanating from the centre of the Holy City. Once the basic outline was worked came the tricky part of embroidering with metal threads, – copper, silver and gold. These are notoriously difficult to work without them breaking, snagging or getting into a fankle on the underside of the canvas.

I chose to use them because the entire descriptive passage is about a city the glitters and glistens and that is an integrated layout with streets of gold, and everything converging on the centre. Like a gold and silver maze, these threads can be followed from the edges, through the circle, triangles and squares to the small central panel. 

Based on the descriptions of the Lamb in Revelation 5.6 and 12, and the reference here in ch.19.22 and 23 I opted for a small cross, from which everything begins and towards which everything returns. The metal threads emanate in all four directions from the centre of the cross, with the effect of making the entire tapestry crucicentric, the cross emphasised not by its size, but by the outward movement of increasingly complex geometric connections.

While doing all of this, every day I read the passage, and often when working it I listened to certain pieces of music including the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, "Worthy is the Lamb", various versions of "The Holy City," Jessye Norman "Sanctus" by Gounod, Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, Andrea Bocelli "The Lord's Prayer", Bonhoeffer's "Von guten Mächten" and a variety of other music from Mozart's Laudate Dominum to a big sing version of Crown Him with Many Crowns!

I read commentaries on the passage, did my own exegesis of the text, and was glad that some of them were as puzzled as me about what colour those blessed precious foundation stones would have been! I doubt if any one visual representation can do justice to such a multi-layered text, but it seemed important to make some attempt to visualise, however one dimensionally, the impossibly beautiful vision of God's reconciliation of all things in Christ. Worthy is the Lamb! 

This is now the seventh tapestry I have completed based on a biblical text, and intentionally using the practice of contemplative tapestry work. It's a form of visual exegesis, each one an engagement with the text at a serious level of scholarly study, but also with imaginative freedom nurtured by music, prayer and seeking to inhabit the text. For myself, it is a form of sacrament, a textured and tactile expression of something much deeper than the pattern, the colours and the action itself. By such a process of inhabiting the text, eventually and perhaps, there is a sense that the text is inhabiting me.   

God is love. An entire creed condensed into a phrase. In the age before sound-bytes one of Jesus' closest followers was writing letters littered with sound bytes. God is love. God is light. God is spirit. The First Letter of John has been a deep well of water to which I return regularly for inner refreshment, restored faith, re-energised devotion, and no nonsense reminders of what it is I'm saying when I use the words God is love.

Autobiography first. Not long after my conversion I was thirsty for knowledge, not knowing what I needed to know. I was pointed to the then premier Christian Bookshop in Scotland, Pickering and Inglis in Glasgow. For reasons now forgotten, I picked up the Tyndale Commentary on The Epistles of John, by John Stott, and bought it, my first purchased commentary, and the start of a lifetime's immersion in exegesis as devotion.

Ten years later in my first pastorate I was preaching through John's Letter. My companions were John Stott, Robert Law's quite outstanding The Tests of Life (1909), and the just published Epistles of John in the prestigious NICNT series by Howard Marshall. My memory is the congregation appreciated, sometimes perhaps affectionately tolerated, my attempts at communicating the passionate confession and defensive polemic of an apostle whose entire core was energised by the eternal coincidence of Divine love and human response – "we love because He first loved us", and in an older translation, "Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us."

1982 saw the publication of Raymond Brown's ridiculously massive commentary in the Anchor Series, 800+ pages on a letter of 2000 words. It's brilliant, exhaustive and exhausting to use, but crammed with information and deep scholarship. Names like Schnackenburg, Brown, Smalley, Lieu, Youngblood and many other mid level commentaries, demonstrate a diversity of theories and interpretive options.

I've kept up with much of that scholarship, learned new ways of reading and understanding John, and had to think and rethink again. But what remains constant is that urgent voice arguing and commending, expounding and defending, explaining and contradicting, reassuring the faithful and condemning those who mess with the heads of "his little children."

The relevance of my own journey with John, for me at least, is the attractiveness of his mixture of passion and precision – passionate love for Christ because in Him we see the passion of God. In words like these:

"God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." (4.9-11)

The love of God is both centre and circumference in my spirituality and theology, and therefore in my preaching and understanding of the motives and energies of pastoral care. The letter of John runs like a continuous thread through the story of my life and how I've tried to live it as a Christian, a minister and a human being called to live responsibly and responsively before God. This text is a vocal, persistent and penetrating critic of my failures in the Tests of Life. But it keeps me honest, it keeps me wanting to be more faithful, and it keeps me hopeful.

For John there are unbreakable links between being loved by God, loving God in response, and proving that love by loving others. You can't say you love God if you hate your brother – not shouldn't, can't! The commentary by Robert Law I mentioned earlier says it in the title: John's letter provides the Tests of Life, the criteria by which we can claim to be Christian. John doesn't do compromise or exception clauses. John delivers an ultimatum like Jack Reacher, perhaps without the physical intimidation! Love! You're loved by God who is love. So love in the same way, to the same extent, to the same people. That's how it works. God loves you, you love others. Give what you get. Freely you received, freely give.  

Oh yes, John has a lot to say about sin, confession, cleansing and being made righteous. But the test of righteousness is love. And yes, John insists that a Christian is someone who confesses that in Jesus the fullness of God's love is revealed, but the test of such confession is love in practice, that is, the same love of God revealed in Jesus is to be evident in those who confess they have experienced and live by the love of God. 

At this stage of my life, half a century on from my first reading of Stott on I John, I'm ready to try to preach the message of 1 John again. Maybe five sermons, core samples of a text that really ought to upset us as much as uplift us; that is, if we can be honest before God and confess the sin of not loving. And if we can seek again the inner renewal of the heart that comes from opening ourselves to the love that opens us up in vulnerable, humble and determined love of others.

Meantime here's John the pastor, who manages to be both compassionate and uncompromising: 

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.