Lenten Reflections
Posted: 28 March 2007, 18:04
Two to three years ago, while working in Westminster, I’d switch my laptop to the web to check world news at midday. And every day the news from Iraq seemed to get worse. One bomb after another blowing up ordinary people at market places, work queues and street corners.
Three or more years on very little seems to have changed. As I write, news has come in of a hundred deaths from the latest explosion.
Wickedness and fanaticism apart, the truth is that if you live in the wrong place at the wrong time you can so easily be a potential victim, and with no means of escape.
Where in all this is the cross, and what is its eternal meaning? That’s a difficult question to answer. For anyone who passed by the green hill outside Jerusalem on that first Good Friday, nothing would have seemed out of the ordinary. Just another Friday afternoon execution of miscreants, who no doubt deserved what they got.
For the soldiers who conducted the executions and the crowds of goulish bystanders it may even have been entertainment. That was certainly the case in 18th century Britain, when men, women and children could be executed in public. One of the last public hangings in England was of a boy less than 12 who had stolen some potatoes.
But on Good Friday outside Jerusalem, nothing particular would have appeared to have happened. It may indeed have got a bit darker; perhaps it started to rain. But as for humankind being redeemed, there would have been nothing to indicate such a thing had just happened.
Then, much later, and on reflection, men and women who had been followers of Jesus would have realised, that perhaps after all, such a good man going to his death in this way, could effect the salvation of the world.
St Augustine reminds us that this was a ‘once for all event’, that would indeed affect the world’s history. Since then, and at a thousand and one other executions, Jesus Christ has been re-crucified to the end of time.
Christ was crucified again in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. He was crucified again in the old lynching of black American’s in the deep south, and in the deaths of many innocent men and women since then.
The cross stands until eternity as a symbol of just what humanity is capable of. Its shadow falls over children in the gas chambers, and the violent deaths of so many others who have been innocent. The truth is that God allowed the world to do to him what it can do to you and me.
The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was himself hanged in April 1945 by the SS, said, not long before he died, ’God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross…’ Adding that it was only by being alongside us so ‘weak and powerless’ that God can actually help us. ‘…it is not by his omnipotence that Christ helps us but by his weakness and suffering’.
It may seem a difficult and strange notion to grasp, but as we stand before the cross on Good Friday we know this is the reality of human existence, and that because God has been there, we also know that there is nowhere he has not been. Even on the cross, especially on the cross, God remains in Christ, Emmanuel, ‘God with us’.
