*** DEBUG START ***
*** DEBUG END ***

Company at the foot of the cross — three hours with David Scott

by
06 April 2023

David Scott, the poet-priest who died at the end of last year, produced a series of sermons for the Three Hours of Good Friday for St Lawrence’s, Winchester, in 2010. We reproduce it here with permission and thanks, listing the poems and hymns that interspersed the talks to make up the complete service

Alamy

The Elevation of the Cross, triptych by Peter Paul Rubens, 1610, in the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp, Belgium

The Elevation of the Cross, triptych by Peter Paul Rubens, 1610, in the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp, Belgium


Hymn: “When I survey the wondrous cross”,
Isaac Watts (1674-1748), 1707

1 The Good Man Crucified

I want to begin, not with the crucifixion, but with the wonder of being at all. We get so used to the world that we spend little or no time imagining that there could be nothing at all. We tend to take the world for granted. It is a given.

More recently, however, with the information we receive about global warming, our thoughts are stirred by the idea that there might indeed be no one who can survive on the planet, and only an empty planet be left, or nothing at all.

Attempting to reverse that situation through the careful guardianship of the earth’s resources is a “Genesis Agenda”, and is absolutely at the forefront of our spiritual as well as our scientific thinking.

Yet, as we encourage the scientific agenda for survival, we also need to have faith in the spiritual agenda. The world has a habit of destroying what it loves; of abusing the very life it needs to live fully on this earth. And, as we destroy our planet, though we depend on it for life, so our thoughts on this Good Friday turn to the way we destroy those things we also depend on for our moral and spiritual well-being.

Jesus Christ was put to death on the order of Pontius Pilate. The world made a terrible mistake in that moment of time, because it killed the one who loved the world his Father God had made. We give thanks to God that Jesus found it in his heart to forgive those who put him to death. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

The story of that ‘tragedy redeemed’ is our story today, and it is not just a matter of local Christian concern. The crucifixion is like global warming, a matter for the whole human race to come to terms with: why we destroy goodness. Why it matters that Christ was crucified is because it was the crucifixion of love, the death of goodness and of hope. It mattered, and matters still, that the one who represented in himself the aspiration for good, and a love for every human being, was crucified.

To underpin and explain that concept of suffering love was the task of the Gospel-writers. Their witness, that the crucifixion was the crucifixion of love, remains a miracle of witness, and inspires and supports us in the Christian Church to this day. We mourn a perfect human being. We mourn the crucifixion of goodness, and we grieve over the rejection of a spiritual purpose at the heart of the world. We watched the world kill God.

Speaking of the crucial place of Christ in the world and his death might suggest that we put a lesser worth on the death of a child in a road accident. To the family of the child, a child’s death is everything. “Every death”, wrote John Donne, “diminishes me; for we are all part of the continent, the main . . . ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” The child killed and the God crucified bear the same fate: it is the same tragedy.

The crucifixion of Christ is absolutely of no greater importance than the death of that child. So, what is the significance of the death of Jesus, over and above the death of anyone else in tragic circumstances? Why do we hold up Jesus as unique in the world’s experience of love and death? Why does the crucifixion continue to speak to us as being a cause of hope, significant for the whole world, for all time? What proof have we got to countenance such great claims?

I’ve set myself some big questions, which many in their turn have tried to answer. From the Gospels, we get a particular sort of goodness in Christ. When we were young, we tended to equate goodness with the “goody-goody”, the “too good to be true” teacher’s pet. Yet the goodness Jesus holds out to the world is very different from that. It is a goodness that links with truth. It was a goodness that Jesus located in the widow giving her little, which was for her a great deal, compared with the parsimonious giving of the rich.

Goodness was something that demanded the sacrifice of reputation rather than its building up. It was a life-giving goodness that filled Jesus through and through. It was a goodness that was reflected from God: the good that made the good, or the “very good”, in the beginning: a goodness that we equate with God.

We laugh at the idea of goodness today. How impossible it is to maintain a sense of goodness in the world, so racked are we with fear, and so short on love. Yet such goodness Christ embodied, and it is that goodness that I want to track through the Gospels and other religious texts, in these three hours together, as we wait on inspiration at the foot of the cross.


Poem: from
The Dream of the Rood, Earliest MS from the tenth century. Hymn: “Love Divine, all loves excelling”, Charles Wesley (1707-88), 1747

2. The Temple of Christ’s Body

Our Lord has been on the cross such a short time, and already he has received the derision of the crowd. They had heard him speaking in the temple and saying he would “destroy the temple and build it again in three days”. What we know now, in retrospect, and because we have read the Gospels, is that Jesus was, as so often, using a turn of speech.

In some way, it is not surprising that the ordinary temple worshipper did not understand this enigmatic phrase “destroying the temple and then building it up in three days”. It was, of course, nothing to do with building with bricks, but God giving Christ the heart of holiness, and the knowledge of his will. Christ through his death would himself be the temple not made with hands, or bricks, but made in him by God.

Now this takes some understanding, even for us, and we are on Christ’s side, and fairly well versed in Christ’s desires and demands. Temples, cathedrals, and churches come and go, hostages to the ravages of time. All that the temple stood for as the place of the presence of God was now to be understood to exist within the risen Christ himself. It was to be understood not as a place, but as a person. We can get very attached to buildings, and they certainly are important; through their beauty and their sense of the numinous presence of God.

“God is spirit and we must worship him in spirit and in truth.” Some buildings, though, really help us to do just that, worship in spirit and in truth. Some places where, as the poet T. S. Eliot put it, “prayer has been valid.” That is, where prayer has been soaked into the very fabric of the church. Eliot found just such a place in Cambridgeshire in the hamlet of Little Gidding, full of atmosphere, and of what we call the numinous, the sense of the presence of God.

Yet Jesus got put on a cross, partly for saying that he would destroy the temple, and build it again in three days. We know now, because the Gospel makes it very clear, that the three-days-constructed temple is the Holy Spirit, and that the Spirit was built on the foundation of Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross.

There are so many gifts that have come to us from the sacrifice of Jesus, and one of the most important of all is the gathered people of the Church, of whom we here are a small part. We, in our small way, are the Church.

Yet we are the Body of Christ: “by one spirit we were all baptised into one body”: and we have that gift through baptism, that indelible mark of belonging to Christ.

What a privilege our baptism is! It is good to be reminded of it in the context of the crucifixion. That gives us a jolt of meaning. Us baptised into the cross of Christ — surely not.

Surely yes. Baptism is not just a piece of paper: it is a lifetime’s commitment to the cross, the cross that Christ carried to Calvary, and we now carry for him in our daily life: in our meetings, in our relationships, activities, and decisions. We imagine quite often that we are doing God a favour by coming to church, but the favour is all God’s to us, and to us in our undeserving state.

Building or no building, cathedral or country church, beside the lake in Nazareth, home communion with the sick or the dying, in hospital, or open air in Basra: the temple is the Christ, the Holy Spirit. Where the Spirit is, there is Jesus among us. Place can help or hinder but it is not of the essence.

Then what is the essence for us? It is that we see our worship of God in Christ Jesus, in his name, and in his very being, wherever we are. Our worship in Christ, our adoration, a thanksgiving, a cry from the heart, the adoration of Christ to the Father on Calvary: open air, a parched cry; no organ, book, bread, or wine, but with his love, his sacrifice, his very self, broken, exhausted, in a place of shame, yet an offering of love, obedience, and love again.


Poem: Sonnet 44,
Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hymn: “Glory be to Jesus”, Italian, c.1815, tr. Edward Caswall (1814-78), 1857

3. He saved others, he could not save himself

How strange, how paradoxical, that what the crowds shouted at the crucifixion was true, but not in the way the crowd imagined. They shouted like any football crowd, “He’s useless”, “He’s hopeless”, “He’s half-dead”, “He cannot save himself”. That’s what some people call a paradox, that is, a strange twisted, muddle-up of the truth.

Paradox is a word I like to use because it helps me talk about the difficult things and situations, and names that area of life which is just not straightforward. Jesus being both human and divine, the son of man and the Son of God enters into that mysterious category of paradox. Jesus is both God and man — unbelievable until now as he is nailed to the cross: “God in man made manifest.”

It’s true that Jesus was unable in his humanity to do anything but submit to the agonies of the cross, and inevitable death. He had to go the way we go — not, of course, necessarily in such dire and cruel circumstances, but his humanity common to us, and utterly in sympathy with the human race, made it inevitable that he should suffer, and submit to that sense of impotence, that powerlessness. “He saved others, himself he could not save.”

The Gospels are full of miracle and wonder. Jesus may have been guarded about his power, cautious to let pride or boastfulness not get the upper hand, but he did work miracles. The New Testament is witness to that. The five thousand fed, the walking on the water, the raising of Lazarus, and the healing of the centurion’s daughter; withered limbs made whole, the raving calmed, the dead raised up. But the crowd was right. He couldn’t save himself.

Why not? Why didn’t Jesus use the power he used for others on himself? Was it because the power he had in himself was not really his own but something that belonged to God; and here at the cross, God had another miracle to work, but this time it was the miracle of obedience; a miracle in two stages, a descent and a rising into heaven.

The descent into hell came first, and the resurrection came second. The descent into hell is mentioned in the Apostles’ Creed, and we hardly ever refer to it, except when we say that particular creed in morning or evening prayer. Yet say it many of us do, and, interestingly enough, the descent into hell becomes ever more frequently a modern phenomenon, although hellish wars have been part of human experience for all time.

Most people believe that the descent into hell refers to the visit of our Lord after his death to the realm of existence which is neither heaven nor hell in the ultimate sense, but a place or state where the souls of pre-Christian people waited for the message of the gospel, and where the penitent thief passed after his death on the cross as recorded in St Luke’s Gospel. The penitent thief says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” and Jesus replies, “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

It was God who was directing Jesus into unknown territory, and it was a miracle of obedience that Jesus served his father, seeing to the desperate and waiting in hell. The importance in all the stories of the crucifixion is to note that there was a seeming absence of the miraculous as the easy way out. The miracle is that Jesus was obedient, and obedient to death, in waiting on the will of his heavenly Father.

Turning to ourselves in relation to “faithful waiting” in matters of life, which really vex us, exercise us beyond bearing sometimes, how do we cope with that? Waiting for the dream to come true, waiting for God to act the way we want him to. Waiting in pain and suffering, and watching and waiting on others, loved ones who are dying, whose quality of life has seemingly gone?

Do we, like Estragon and Vladimir in Becket’s Waiting for Godot, get used to endless vacuous waiting, because in reality there is nothing to wait for, and so we amuse ourselves as best we can?

Or do we take the gospel way and do our waiting on God the Father who will guide us unerringly. Indeed, let’s do more than that; let us offer ourselves to God for his guidance. Let us listen for his word, wait on his moving Spirit, trust his prompting, accept his seeming absence, and keep faith and joy alive, by reading his words in scripture, and continue to be faithful in love and care of others.

Sometimes we simply cannot save ourselves. We wait in the dark night of the soul, and so take our share in the crucifixion of Christ.


Poem: “Invocatio” from “A Hymn to Our Saviour on the Cross”,
George Chapman (1559-1634). Hymn: “O love how deep”, ascribed to Thomas à Kempis (c.1379-1471), tr. Benjamin Webb (1819-85) 1854

4. Theologians of the Cross: (1) St Paul

What I would like to share with you in this coming hour in particular, are three brief glimpses into three people who have been able to express their thoughts and feelings on the crucifixion. You get a very real sense of each of the three meditating deeply on the purpose of the Passion, and then finding words to explain to us how they feel. None of the three were physically at the crucifixion.

The first is St Paul, the apostle who lived and wrote in the period just after the death of Christ; the second is Simone Weil, a French born Jew, a writer and philosopher living in the first half of the 20th century; and the third was Thomas Merton, a Cistercian monk for all of his adult life. All three were profoundly influenced by the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and each in their own way is able to reflect for us what the death of Jesus meant for them and for the world ever since that day in the common era AD 33.

Paul the apostle was not at the crucifixion of Christ in Jerusalem. He died possibly in AD 62-65. His practising faith was Judaism. He was a Hebrew, and a deeply religious one. The Jewish law shaped his whole life, his whole way of being, his daily routines the family customs, his behaviour. He must have begun to hear about Jesus and the Christian Jews, to learn about this prophet figure who was crucified.

Like other strong religious Jews, Saul as he was called before his conversion, probably felt like many other orthodox Jews, that this Jesus was a subversive rabbi who was a threat to orthodox views and religious practice. He would also have been wary of the claims that Jesus had made of being intimate with God.

Paul’s amazing turnaround in his perception of Jesus is well documented in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 9. The experience he had on the Damascus road was explosive, literally. A light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul why do you persecute me?” Saul asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus who you are persecuting.”

Saul’s eyes were closed, as a result of the light. It was a preparation for a new life, and he was led into Damascus by hand, says Acts; “and for three days and three nights he was without sight and neither ate nor drank.” The leading of the blind Saul, the greatest of rabbinic scholars, was a massive trauma for him. Who but God could have brought that about?

Before long, Paul is writing theological letters to the growing church in the busy metropolis of Corinth. And what was he writing about? It was the cross of Christ. Jesus’s death had affected him deeply. It captured his own heart and mind completely. His whole teaching life from then on was based on the way the cross had made a difference to the idea of faith. The cross on Calvary to which Christ was nailed, and on which he died, became Paul’s, this great intellectual’s starting point, for a new life “in Christ”.

There are no better words for this than the ones Paul wrote himself to the Corinthian church, as they set up their small community in that hub of trade and boiling pot of seamy religious practices and the presence of the military. In that city of Corinth, there were also the Christians. They had taken into themselves, some literally to death, the call of Christ.

Paul writes, and there are no better words than his: “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’

“Where is the one who is wise? Where are the great debaters of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? . . . Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1.18-24).

It was the death of Jesus on the cross, that supreme act of divine humility, that had touched Paul to the very core of his being. Paul went on to die a martyr’s death. God really wanted Paul for himself, both in his life and in his death. It was because of the cross that Paul began to understand how humility, and becoming one with Christ, energised him to shape the communities that would hold precious the example and message of Jesus Christ for all time.

The message is unfailing: share the cross of Christ, and you will know Christ, and become like him.


Poem: from “Good Friday 1613 — Riding Westward”,
John Donne (1571/72-1631). Hymn: “It is a thing most wonderful”, William Walsham How (1823-97), 1872

5. Theologians of the Cross: (2) Simone Weil

It becomes increasingly difficult in the modern world to come close to the feel and the experience of the crucifixion. Perhaps in other cultures where capital punishment is served out in much the same way as it was 2000 years ago, then, yes, it becomes a dreadful reality, but in our culture, capital punishment is no more, and for many reasons we are grateful for that.

So, we rather depend on the Gospels for our knowledge, and every minute detail has been pored over, analysed, debated, carbon-dated for the fragments of wood. And that material is as precious as anything our world has experienced and preserved.

Yet, what about the immediacy of the cross? How do we turn the cross from being merely history into a living reality that makes a difference to how we take the next turning in our day, and in our day-to-day world? How do we stop the cross from simply being the means of something happening to Jesus, and turn it into something that happens to us, because of what Jesus did for the whole of humanity; and that is to offer a salvation, and to open up an eternal dimension to life, which all can receive through faith and trust in Jesus Christ?

Most of the original bystanders at the crucifixion would have been lone outsiders. Of course, we know about the soldiers and the small band of friends and family members, but the crowd have no names. Not all will have been voyeurs. Perhaps there were some who had something special to thank Jesus for: a healing touch at some time, a healing touch that even Christ himself may have forgotten, but he or she most certainly had not. Just one or two, or it would certainly have been remembered and recorded.

One of those who secretly and quietly stood at the cross in her own life was a French Jew, Simone Weil. Let us imagine she was standing on Calvary, probably at a distance, alone, not wanting to be noticed, but with something to thank Jesus for.

Like many orthodox Jews, she was particularly concerned with the idea of sacrifice. The scapegoat is the one who suffers on behalf of, or in place of, another. Simone saw in Jesus the one God had chosen, God’s own Son to suffer for the whole world, past present and future. That was Christ’s unique destiny. Christ dies for us, and us is everybody.

Simone experienced a mystical sense of the presence of God. She wrote: “In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God, I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact person to person, here below between a human being and God. In this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile of a beloved face.”

We move here from something which is much more than just “knowing” what happened on Calvary all those years ago, however important the story may be. To understand Calvary as a permanent reality for us, we begin to see Christ as the one who is eternally now, eternally present with all mankind, through his redeeming love, which is to be shared.

Simone was a poet and an intellectual, who, in order to ground herself, felt she ought to work with her hands, doing manual labour in a factory. She felt very keenly her sense of failure, and she kept going back to the cry of Jesus from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And she realises, too, that you cannot stay at that point. You must continue to love, and, if we continue to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, which is not joy, but something which is the very love of God.

What I am trying to make clear is that we must try to take the lesson of Calvary, acknowledging its historical context, its historical realness, its “happened-ness”, and live the lessons of the love of God in our own circumstances, our own place, our own time; for God is always contemporary, always in the now, available for us, both in our need, and in our creativity. So we have Jesus assimilated into the Father, grown into the Holy Trinity, and at the heart of our being; and all this possible through allowing our simple souls to be simply loved by him.

In the case of Simone, she was in many ways a symbol of the troubled times in which she lived. In a world war, starvation, suffering, and anxiety, she tried to give a meaning to these things by bearing them, literally, in her own body, and reflecting them in her writing. She was too clear-sighted to see any easy remedies, while the nature of her own gifts prevented her finally from seeing the deep-rooted connection between a sense of guilt and a sense of God.

Like Christ, she was a sacrifice, a scapegoat, taking on the pain of the world, for the love of the world.


Poem: “Love (iii)”,
George Herbert (1593–1633). Hymn: “There is a green hill far away”, Cecil Frances Alexander (1818-95), 1848

6. Theologians of the Cross: (3) Thomas Merton

Those of you who have been bearing with me for long enough will have guessed that one of the theologians of the cross we are looking at in this second hour was likely to be the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton.

Merton’s early life and upbringing in France, and then in England, first in Surrey, then at Oakham School, and then in Cambridge, was somewhat peripatetic. The death of his mother when he was six, and his father when he was 15, might give you some idea as to why he may well have had a fractured and troublesome early life. It wasn’t until he went to America to continue his studies in New York, and finally discovered his vocation to be a Trappist monk, that we can begin to understand what the cross might have meant for the life of Thomas Merton.

The sacrifice that Jesus offered at Calvary has been taken on in the Christian life by an uncountable number of people — each unique, as we all are unique in the sight of God. Merton gave up his essentially random existence and took on a life of monastic discipline dedicated to the service of Jesus Christ. It was a service lived in silence and worship. Merton gave up a lot of his external freedoms, to receive back the glory of belonging to God, and feeding his spirit from that deep source of infinite wisdom.

Merton wrote: “If you want to have in your heart the affections and dispositions that were those of Christ on earth, consult not your own imagination but faith. Enter into the darkness of interior renunciation, strip your soul of images and let Christ form himself in you by his cross.”

What might that look like and feel like for us? We, who are unlikely ever to be seeking formation in a monastery, how do we live in Christ in the ordinary world? How do we shoulder the cross day by day?

First, we have to let Christ into ourselves. We have to invite him in. Some people experience Christ breaking in. St Paul experienced that, and Merton did as well. Before becoming a monk, he walked off the street into a church in New York, because he felt he had to.

Once he was in the church, his life began to shift its orientation from self to the holy other, to the loving Christ, and to the father who welcomes back his prodigal son. What Merton felt, and ultimately felt in the heart of himself, was that he had been made new. It was the Spirit’s work, the work of love, the Spirit of Christ. He describes it like this: “You keep finding this anonymous Accomplice burning within you, like a deep and peaceful fire.”

He said: “Life in Christ is life in the mystery of the Cross. We are involved in a sacrifice which brings struggle, but it also brings peace and a sense of rightness.”

And he also says this about sacrifice, which comes fresh to my ears: “The implication seems to be that sacrifice is something subjective and hard. The true notion of sacrifice is, on the contrary, something quite objective, and the note of difficulty or pain is not essential to it except in so far as our weak and fallen nature comes into conflict with the divine will.

“By rights, there is no reason why a perfect sacrifice should not also be painless: a pure act of adoration, a hymn to the divine glory sung in ecstatic peace.” That’s original! That our sacrifices for one we love can be a joy, a matter of deepest love.

“The mystery of the Cross, of the redemptive death and resurrection of the Saviour, is renewed each day in the eucharist,” says Merton, for us no doubt less frequently; but it would be good for us to remember that that is what our Sunday eucharist is doing. “It is making real for us the bread and wine, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.”

Merton’s life was not always so perfectly ordered and serene. He had a running battle with the Abbot, mainly over the freedom to become a hermit in the woods around the monastery. In one sense, he became a bit of a law unto himself, eventually with good grace and permission. He continued to feed many people with his spiritual writings, which touched the mood of the times: that is, the 1950s and ’60s, and still does.

Christ became for Merton a more universal Christ: Christ longing to be with all sorts and conditions. Christ’s cross remained a focal point in his hermitage. By his prayer and his writing and by the grace of God, Merton won back many souls for the love of God, and, if you’ll share the theology, continues to do so.


Poem: “Untitled”, u
ntitled poem by Thomas Merton (1915-68). Hymn: “To mock your reign”, F. Pratt Green (1903-2000)

7. ‘My God, my God. . .’

Who knows what thoughts go through the minds of those close to death? We surely don’t know very much about the thoughts of Jesus our Saviour as he hung upon the cross; but we know a little, and that little has taken us a long way though the centuries.

They are precious nuggets. I’ve left it to the last hour of the three to reflect on these “Last Words”, these particular cries or prayers, these calls to God. As Jesus slowly began to lose consciousness, it is only fragments that we have: “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?”, a fragment from Psalm 22 in Aramaic, which was Jesus’s own tongue: “Eloi, Eloi, lama Sabacthani.”

This is called the cry of dereliction, because Jesus is sensing the absence of God. From boyhood, he would have known the Psalms of David. He would have recited them weekly when he was young. Then, as he grew up and began to love the psalms as friends, he would have used them in times of darkness of mind and heart, at times of celebration and of joy, and in his prayers to his heavenly Father. Jesus made them his own.

And so now, at this part of the crucifixion, although he knows that what he is undergoing is necessary for the salvation of the world, and it is God’s will that he goes through this, still he has this psalm on his tongue, “My God, my God”.

Of the two natures stirring within him, this comes from the human side — the side that we know so well ourselves: “O God, save me from this hour, but not my will but thine be done.” We have on the lips and parched throat of our Lord just the short few words of the Hebrew psalm, but who knows whether he was continuing it in his heart, silently to himself?


Why are you so far from my
    salvation,

from the words of my distress?
O my God I cry in the daytime
But you do not answer,
And by night also but I find no rest.


How useful these words are to us in our times of doubt! If our Lord is allowed to doubt on the cross, and feel forsaken, so we are, too, but not with anything trivial. As we look around at the state of the world, we see our lack of love and care for the very planet we depend on for our earthly future, the future of life, which is such a precious gift of God to us.

Hear the song that the world longs to sing in a later verse of the psalm:


The poor shall eat and be satisfied,

those who seek the Lord shall
    praise him,

their hearts shall live for ever


But our Lord must have been lamenting the way in which human nature had lost its ability to care about and appreciate the gift of being at all. Part of that carelessness is due to a lack of love, given and received from one to another. Also, it comes from a lack of taking seriously the second commandment, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

We may recall the scriptures, and know all about them in our heads, but will that knowledge drop down into our hearts? Will it keep us close to Jesus on the cross? Jesus was prepared to give up his life for love of those who couldn’t care tuppence either way, and were probably glad there was a crucifixion that day that they could gawp at.

Let these three hours bring us once more to our senses, and reawaken in us a commitment to following Christ into the hard places. Consider how many times we forgive others for the wrongs they have done us. Is forgiveness one of the words we turn into action? Is it one of those words we work on in our hearts?

It is at these times when we seriously settle into prayer that these matters begin to take root, and the Lord feeds us with determination through the presence within us of the Holy Spirit. Then we hear again what Christ suffered for us, and the whole of mankind past, present and to come:

 

I am poured out like water; all my
   bones are out of joint; my heart
   has become like wax melting in the
   depths of my body.
My mouth is dried up like a pot-
    sherd; my tongue cleaves to my
    gums; you have laid me in the
    dust of death.
They pierce my hands and my
    feet.
I can count all my bones; they
    stand staring and looking upon
    me.
They divide my garments among
    them;
they cast lots for my clothing.
Be not far from me, O Lord:
you are my strength; hasten to
     help me.



Poem: “Come Down”,
R. S. Thomas (1913-2000). Hymn: “My song is love unknown”, Samuel Crossman (1624-83), 1664

8. “Into your hands, O Lord”

Those of you who have watched over the dying in their final hours will have both raw and also rich memories of what that was like. Whatever the feelings, it is always a poignant and mysterious time.

A poem, a short book-length poem, has just been published by a contemporary poet, Christopher Reid. The poem is an account of his experiences through that period of illness, death, and bereavement. He writes the poem as a diary of events, feelings, and comment. It has the ingenuity and the depth, at times the lightness, and — above all, important for poems on such a subject — the sense of what to say, and what to forbear from saying. It is a remarkable poem, mainly because of what the poet allows us into through the poem. It is a generous poem.

The four accounts of the death of Christ are similarly generous in their letting us share the experience of Jesus’s death. The Gospels are not as domestic, inevitably, as the contemporary account. The Gospels are statuesque, magisterial, yet there are within them, too, those moments of human vulnerability. Jesus cries out; he comforts the prisoner beside him; he hands the care of his mother to St John, and John takes her into his own home. “Jesus said: ‘It is finished,’ and he bowed his head and gave up the ghost.”

The humanity of Jesus on the cross is paramount. There are no miracles here. Jesus was born into the world miraculously, but he dies a human death, as everyone will.

And, as Christ’s death was human, though in terrible circumstances, let me share with you a few lines of the modern poem. The contemporary poem says to me, Christ and this young wife have much in common. Both were once alive, and now they are alive again in a different mode, and it is we who wait, and watch, and wonder, and mourn at the great mystery of death. So a short section of the poem:


Sparse breaths, then none —

and it was done . . .

I never heard
the precise cadence
into silence
that argued the end.
Yet I know it happened

Ultimate calm.

Gingerly, as if
loth to disturb it,
I released my arm
from its stiff vigil athwart
that embattled heart
and raised and righted myself
the better to observe it.

Kisses followed
to mouth, cheeks, eyelids,
    forehead,

and a rigmarole of unheard
    farewell

kept up as far
as the click of the door.

After six months, or more
I observe it still.


From the poem: “The Unfinished” by Christopher Reid, taken from
A Scattering, published by Areté Books

 

Poem: “Sepulchre”, George Herbert (1593-1633). Hymn “My God, I love thee” Latin, 17th century, tr. Edward Caswall, 1849

9 ‘A Place of Hope’

There is no escaping the deep emotional power engendered by the crucifixion. Death touches us more profoundly than any other emotion, bound up as it is with the mystery of “What next?”

St John paints the sense of grief surrounding the cross of Jesus in words in his Gospel with the utmost restraint. Grief has drained the mourners to a standstill. “Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.”

The cluster of mourners, family and close friends, reminds me of so many funerals that I have conducted through the years of my ministry — the saddest those of the young boys who died while I was a school chaplain; yet each funeral had opportunities within it for grace, and for the mutual sharing of tenderness and love and peace at the last.

Families are exhausted with grief, and gentle with one another, on all but a very few occasions — at least on my beat. Within the Christian context, I would say that the Lord Jesus could often be closer to those in grief than he is in other situations in life. It is at times of loss and grief that the tenderness of Christ comes quietly alongside us, without words, but in the silence of palpable love.

Jesus taught us through his life and death that what we may fear about death is overcome by the knowledge of his love and presence beyond, although it may seem an insoluble barrier to hope.

Jesus’s death was not a personal, private matter. He was going the way we all have to go. Jesus went into that mystery as fully and completely as we shall have to: “he died and was buried.” He went the way our forebears have gone, and we shall go, but Jesus holds out to us a heart of hope, and gives us faith in a life everlasting.

Some words of John Keble (part of Good Friday from The Christian Year.):


Lord of my heart, by thy last cry
Let not thy blood on earth be
    spent —
Lo, at thy feet I fainting lie,
Mine eyes upon thy wounds are
    bent,
Upon thy streaming wounds my
    weary eyes
Wait like the parched earth on
    April skies.

Wash me and dry those bitter
    tears,
O let my heart no further roam;
’Tis thine by vows and hopes and
    fears
Long since — O call thy wanderer
    home
To that dear home, safe in thy wounded side
Where only broken hearts their
   sin and shame may hide.


Keble, a parish priest at Hursley in the 19th century, wrote those words. I think he got Good Friday right. It is the penitent, the one conscious of failure who will need Christ’s sacrifice most; and we remember it was Christ who died for the failures, the sinners. He died to give us hope in our failure.

The penitent in this poem calls on Jesus to spare him some of the blood that will wash away the failures that so much trouble him: “Wash me and dry those bitter tears,” and, as we look on the dying Christ our search comes to an end. We have found our saviour. “O let my heart no further roam, ’Tis thine” and has been for a long time, we know that. “Call thy wanderer home To that dear home, safe in thy wounded side.” And, of course, Christ opened his wounded side for us, the shameful and sinful ones, “for us to hide our sin and shame”.

We don’t want to anticipate the resurrection just now. We want to rest in Christ, and spend time spreading on the precious ointment of his love. Love. His wounds will heal our sins. Only with that balm will we be ready for the glories to come and to take our place with all the faithful of the centuries preceding us, now transformed into glory. We wait now, on that, in faith.

“When Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said in order to fulfil the scriptures, ‘I am thirsty.’ A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up the ghost.”


Hymn: “Praise to the Holiest in the height”, John Henry Newman (1801-90), 1866

Browse Church and Charity jobs on the Church Times jobsite

The Church Times Archive

Read reports from issues stretching back to 1863, search for your parish or see if any of the clergy you know get a mention.

FREE for Church Times subscribers.

Explore the archive

Forthcoming Events

Inspiration: The Influences That Have Shaped My Life

September - November 2024

St Martin in the Fields Autumn Lecture Series 2024

tickets available

 

Can a ‘Good Death‘ be Assisted?

28 November 2024

A webinar in collaboration with Modern Church

tickets available

 

Through Darkness To Light: Advent Journeys

30 November 2024

tickets available

 

Festival of Faith and Literature

28 February - 2 March 2025

tickets available

 

Visit our Events page for upcoming and past events 

Welcome to the Church Times

 

To explore the Church Times website fully, please sign in or subscribe.

Non-subscribers can read four articles for free each month. (You will need to register.)