I am just in from the procession of witness in Rye. It is a warm, sunny day here today. This is a picture from last year's, very different weather. I certainly regretted wearing my winter coat this year.
Good Friday for me is about knowing a God who knows what it is to suffer, to know I am never alone when hard things come, to know that in the end, and the end might be a long way away and I can't see it, all will be well. The Bishop of Leeds on Radio 2 this morning spoke of needing to stay with today for a while. To know a Jesus who hangs, is bloody, is vulnerable, is forsaken, helps me face things I find difficult. To know those things can be faced in partnership with a caring God is really good news today.
In my service before this at Calvert I invited people to stand round the cross as we sang My song is love unknown. A lot of people came forward. I love the hymn. It as one website puts it takes the singer from Palm Sunday through the crucifixion. But its purpose is not simply to retell the events of the Passion. From the beginning we find this is a love song - sung to the Saviour who demonstrated pure love, even to the "loveless" that they might be "lovely."
I also used these words from George McLeod which say all there is to say today. Thank God for a day I remember a God who puts his body where his mouth is and calls me to make a difference in the world, not simply muck about in church!
"I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the centre of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves, on the town garbage dump, at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It was the kind of place where cynics talk smut, thieves curse, soldiers gamble. That’s where he died. And that’s where we as Christians ought to be and what we as Christians ought to be about."
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