How would you feel if you were reading a book and a chapter towards the end of the story has been ripped out of it?
How would you feel if you were watching a drama on television consisting of six episodes and suddenly the BBC decides not to show chapter five?
How would this sermon be if say it was ten pages long, I decided not to bother with pages seven, eight and nine?
What if you were doing a jigsaw and so many pieces were missing you can’t get the complete picture?
What if you get one of those boxes of celebrations and all the bounties have gone? That’s how these next weeks are for many good Christian people. They rush to Easter. The city is already bedecked with knitted bunnies and chickens and eggs.
I get missing out bits but like the novel, the tv drama, the sermon and even the chocolates we need the whole experience, the whole story, for anything to make sense.
I get it. Holy Week makes us uncomfortable. There is glorious life and victory to come on Easter Sunday, but to get there we must pass directly through the darkness of Good Friday. We must remember the day when human malice broke barriers and reached levels of previously unmatched atrocity. The Messiah, the King, come to save humanity, was nailed to an accursed tree and left to die. And we don’t want to think about that.
My first church in Lancashire used to have a Good Friday walk. They’d come to the Good Friday service in their walking boots and didn’t want a long service. Church that day was a gathering space.I’m not sure they really wanted a service at all!
Then a lady in another church I served in had a right go at me after a Good Friday service for making it too bloody… we want to miss it out.
Remember to put someone on a cross was the most terrible way to get rid of someone. A mention of a cross could make you shudder. No wonder the disciples shake. Would you cope with Jesus saying this? “See, we are going up to Jerusalem. The Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death. They will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked, flogged, and crucified, and on the third day he will be raised to life.”
Jesus tried to prepare his disciples for what is coming. But they seemed steadfast in their refusal to believe it; until it happened. Jesus also offered hope to them, that he would return to life after three days. But this also never registered until after his resurrection.
It is, I suppose, understandable that the disciples failed to heed Jesus’ warning to them. After all, it did not fit with their expectations of who Jesus was. They understood crucifixion as defeat, the end of all they had hoped for in following Jesus.
But my friends, as we turn towards the climax of Jesus’ work on earth to save us, we cannot rip the cross out of the story, or not show that chapter, or leave it out because it isn’t pretty, or hope we only need do the nice bits – the orange creams and not the horrible disgusting coconutty bounty awful things we’d rather weren’t in the box. Maybe we need a Jesus who knows what it is to suffer, be abandoned, be kicked about, who is left to rot. Because we experience those things. Maybe we need a God who in solidarity with his people
No one puts it more starkly – or more honestly and truthfully – than Bonhoeffer. We must recognise, he wrote from prison, “that we have to learn to live in the world ‘as if God were not here’. And this is just what we do recognise – before God! God himself compels us to recognise it… God would have us know that we must live as men and women who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us… Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross” – and then down from the cross and into the grave. “He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.”
A God, a Jesus who only knows the pretty bits of life, the nice bits is in my view not a lot of use. I need to know Jesus gets my rubbish and can transform it from the cross, suffering with me. Unlike the disciples who can’t cope with it, there are people right now round the world who stand by the cross and wait and hope because they know that they do not wait and stand alone. They know a crucified Lord. The Skelldale Singers are performing Stainer’s Crucifixion on Tuesday at Sharow Church. I was the minister of a church that performed it every other Good Friday alternating with Olivet to Calvary and one lady used to get vexed if you called it Stainer’s Crucifixion: “Stainer wasn’t crucified. Jesus was.” she’d cry. “It’s the crucifixion by Stainer!” They will sing these words:
Holy Jesu, by thy passion,
by the woes which none can share,
borne in more than kingly fashion,
by thy love beyond compare
By the treachery and trial,
by the blows and sore distress,
by desertion and denial,
by thine awful loneliness
By thy look so sweet and lowly,
while they smote thee on the face,
by thy patience, calm and holy,
in the midst of keen disgrace
By the hour of condemnation,
by the blood which trickled down,
when, for us and our salvation,
thou didst wear the robe and crown
By the path of sorrows dreary,
by the cross, thy dreadful load,
by the pain, when, faint and weary,
thou didst sink, upon the road
By the spirit which could render
love for hate and good for ill,
by the mercy, sweet and tender,
poured upon thy murd'rers still:
Crucified, I turn to thee,
Son of Mary, plead for me.
That’s what the cross is for. We stand by it and we plead for help and we gaze on Jesus who shows us what divine love is despite of what we do to him and still do to him today. I have never understood how anyone who says they are Christian can by pass the cross. I’ve had to tell people that Jesus has to rise from something and without darkness there can be no light. Missing out the brutality and horror is to leave out half the story. We cannot interact with a bloody and selfish world if we cannot stand in that world ourselves. A church that gets crucifixion comes before resurrection will be a sacrificial, deeply loving, authentic worth joining place. A church that does fluffy bunnies or worse is obsessed with power like James and John wanting to have the best seats in heaven, really hasn’t got it.
I urge you this year do some cross standing before you do some empty tomb standing. Stand at the cross and bring Jesus your fears and your doubts, the things that are too hard to bear, enter the darkness, then you will find come Easter morning when we shout alleluia to our crucified and risen Lord your joy will be all the greater.
Let me end with Dali. Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross is a famous painting and hangs in the Kelvingrove Gallery in Glasgow. I went to see it the other week. When it was purchased by the city, for a mere £8,000, there was an outcry that it was a waste of money, but the crowds quickly came to see it and it’s rumoured that the Spanish government recently offered over £80,000,000 for the picture – an offer which was turned down.
Dali painted this work in 1951 and it depicts Christ on the cross in a darkened sky floating over a body of water complete with a boat and fishermen. Dali based his painting on a drawing by the 16th Century Spanish friar John of the Cross. The picture is unusual as, although it is a depiction of the crucifixion, it is devoid of nails, blood, and a crown of thorns. What do you make of that?
Well, maybe it’s pointing us to the end of the story. We need the cross but it will be defeated. The pain, the deaths, the blood, the unfairness of life, the times we wish whatever we face would just go away, the days we can’t cope mentally with our lot, these aren’t the final word. There is calm and peace. The writer of Lamentations had it right. Standing on the rubble of Jerusalem returning from the exile, in the middle of words of agony he can still say God’s mercies are new every morning, great is your faithfulness.
Here’s the point. God is in solidarity with your suffering, you can trust and love this God, and you can hope in this God for your liberation. The story of the cross after all doesn’t end with a dying Jesus, but one who rises from the dead, with a Roman empire that eventually outlaws and banishes crucifixion, and with an image of shame become an image of redemption.
Where your life has included shame or humiliation, suffering or grief, I hope that the cross tells you that God is profoundly with you there, that Jesus has brought God into your suffering to accompany you, to liberate you, and give you life again. Isn’t that amazing good news?
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