In the normal course of the Church year, this Sunday is called “Low Sunday”, because everyone took time to recover from the rigours of the great fast of Lent and the joyful feast of Easter. Today must have the record low of all years since the founding of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Church attendance throughout Europe is at zero. There is no great congregation to celebrate the risen Christ together – only virtual gatherings. It is the “lowest Sunday” because of the corona virus. The lows we have reached have induced a new terror. Everyone’s fears have become real in the light of this disease – no one is immune, even the Prime Minister has succumbed. How can we be anything but “low”?

So, how can we rise? How will we resurrect ourselves from the low of this Sunday? I wonder, will the good habit of Church attendance be re-established when our forced isolation has been eased? Will we return to the building to worship and rejoice with each other when the ban on every congregation, small or great, has been lifted?

I hope we will gather in greater numbers – I don’t think we should remain low, because of this lack of being with one another. We should be learning self-sufficiency even if our being-with is deficient. It is only through being-with- one-another that we develop and learn. The lessons I want to understand from this politically enforced singularity focus on moral behaviour and good manners – two things which, I think, belong with each other, as they reflect each other. They show themselves in our actions toward one another. Morally, we understand ourselves only in relation to those ’round about us. Our morals must reveal themselves through our manner of behaving toward one another.

I think this time of isolation should teach us about how we should behave when we do get to embrace and greet one another in love, the love of people saved, the love of people grieving.

How can we consolidate our graciousness toward each other, how can we show our moral care for the other, except through good manners when we are with one another? The social distancing we have been practising has relieved us of the burden of any close caring contact. It is much harder to look someone in the eye to express any care, when you are two metres apart. How can we pass the peace apart from signing and bellowed speech, when we cannot touch each other, when we cannot reach each other’s heart through the nuanced modulation of speech? Good manners, I think, confirms the moral space we create for each other – the handshake affirms it, our tone sustains it – the embrace of the peace symbolises and substantiates all we believe about the love of God and one another.

“In great fear they cried out to the Lord.” In these times of the virus, when we are keeping ourselves to ourselves, as prescribed by law, don’t we cry out in our anxiety? The anxious hearts today reflect the hearts of the people in medieval Europe during the time of the Black Death. How are we to keep ourselves “safe”? How can we avoid the virus and the sinister dangers of depression and despair – those maladies which can insidiously root themselves into the heart of our lives? How can we be healthy when we are no longer with others in a positive manner? Haven’t we become hermits all too easily? This life of isolation has become the norm for so many of us. It has not really affected how we are deep in ourselves. Dropping contact, staying six feet apart has not changed some of us, has it? We shop remotely, we stay at home – no change there. Has this enforced separation really changed us fundamentally? I know that I am as comfortable now as I was before the “lock down” of this legislated isolation. But even though I have not felt so very different, it has made me realise my deficiencies – how negatively I have experienced life. Now I realise just how dismaying my life has been. Now I know the low manner of my life.

And surprisingly it seems that these negative ways of being with one another just seem to appear all of a sudden. We haven’t seen them coming, have we? They are like “the leaven of malice and wickedness” – quietly taking over the course of our lives, without our even noticing the direction our lives have taken. All of a sudden we realise what we are, where we have been thrown. I suddenly realise how spiteful and mean I have always been. What are we to do when we wake up to those realisations about ourselves, when those scales of unseeing fall from our eyes? How can I remain so despicable, as I recognise myself for what I am? How can I be so wicked, especially in this Easter season, when our Lord gave himself up on the cross, and now leads us to the joy of  salvation?

Our destination of heaven has been revealed in the old, old story. The Easter garden is where we understand just what our ownmost possibility is. But when our feet are mired in the clay of the garden, and we see clearly just what we are, then we come under the spotlight of our ownmost possibility. That finality stares us in the face. What are we to do?

Like the Danish theologian, we stand on a precipice, there is no safe place to retreat into – we are exposed and alone, isolated ultimately – we must make that leap of faith into a future of infinite possibility one way or another. At the focus of all time, I must choose – as the old Welsh hymn has it – between truth and falsehood to become what I should be, the culmination of my ownmost possibility, or live the ultimate lie. I reckon the lockdown has given us that  reality of our ownmost possibility.

The existential nihilists might say that this virus has forced us into the limits of who we are, and we must confront the nothingness of our existence. But that would give us no exit from the banality of an earthly life into any of the joyful mansions of the Father’s Kingdom.

We must leap into the bright future of Christ’s promise. Lent was when the government bans on gathering together, the closing of shops and pubs, the social distancing all took hold. We christians have been able to overcome the limitations of governmental recommendations because of our faith, let alone with the marvels of electronic communication.

What is our isolation today when compared to the isolation of Jesus on the cross in those last moments of Good Friday? The old, old story does not end there, in spite of some biblical scholars’ opinions. The old, old story continues in our hearts, where our faith lives. Not in the lowliness of our fear, but in the gracious love of Christ and one another which joins us together even if we are all two metres apart.

Amen

Six Good Friday Reflections

from

David Runcorn

Reflection 1

(12.00)

“He opened wide his arms’ – the welcome of God”

Hymn – to sing or read

My song is love unknown,
My Saviour’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I,
That for my sake My Lord should take
Frail flesh, and die?

Reading

‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say – “Father, save me from this hour”? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him.’ Jesus answered,

‘This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.

Jn 12.27-33

Reflection

Over the years the words we use in public worship have been revised. One of the newer sentences in the communion service has proved more popular than most. Perhaps it is yours too? It is the line, ‘He opened wide his arms on the cross.’

When someone opens their arms to you – what do you see?

What is being expressed?

What are you about to receive?

And how do you respond? – joy, love, delight, welcome – with open arms in return.

To be unable, or forbidden, to freely offer this in any time or place runs counter to our deepest instincts and feelings. But such is our context this Easter.

In this vigil at the foot of the cross we begin by imagining Jesus on the cross. His arms are opened wide towards us and our world.
Here is love that refuses to keep distance from us.

To imagine love in this place of such dreadful suffering is not easy. The focus is more often placed on judgement, guilt, punishment, debt and sacrifice. And they are all part of this story. But that focus too easily makes the cross a kind of extreme, divine problem solving – one which requires unspeakable suffering and death to deal with our sin.

Well the cross is a place of painful truths but that is not where the story starts. What is original to this world is not our sin or evil. It is divine love. When we begin with the negatives, focused on the problem, we never get out of the cycles of judgment and condemnation. No repentance is ever enough. No effort with make us acceptable.

It is true that human sin has made God’s embrace of us a work of tragic redemption … but it is love that holds him there. Love is reaching out to us at whatever cost. There is no distancing.

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity – “now you can love them after all”. Jesus came to change our mind about God.
God does not love us because we are good; God loves us because God is good.

This is welcome beyond any language of deserving – good or bad ….
The cross tells us that nothing we humans can do will ever decrease or increase God’s eternal eagerness to love us. Divine love is made visible here – forever.

So let us draw near to this love.

There is somewhere is this separated world where we have no need to keep our distance.

There is offered here an embrace unlike anything we have ever known.
It is beyond all imagining or any notions of deserving.

He opened wide his arms on the cross.

Where do you connect with these thoughts?

You might pause and keep silence for a few moments.

Prayer

O God, revealed upon the cross
through the open arms of your Son,
Your love is endless –
Your reach is boundless –
Your embrace knows no separation.
In wonder and gratitude, we turn to you –
and open our arms to receive your love –
A space to add your own prayers.
We adore you O Christ and we bless you
For by your Holy Cross
You have redeemed the world.

Reflection 2

(12.30)

‘The place called the skull‘ – the crucified God

Hymn – to read or sing

O sacred Head, now wounded,
With grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded
With thorns, Thine only crown;
O sacred Head, what glory
What bliss til now was
Thine Yet though despised and gory
I joy to call Thee mine.

Bernard of Clairvaux

Reading

‘As they went out, they came upon a man from Cyrene named Simon; they compelled this man to carry his cross. And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall; but when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his clothes among themselves by casting lots; then they sat down there and kept watch over him. Over his head they put the charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.”’

Matt 27.32-37

Reflection

Executions always took place outside the city, in places of maximum publicity, by the main routes into the city – as a warning and deterrent. That the sign above the cross of Jesus was in three languages (as we learn elsewhere) makes this clear.

This is a message and a signal.

Around the edge of any growing ancient city would have been quarries, close to the main roads, managing the endless demand for building material.

Occasionally the quarriers would come to a rock that was flawed or cracked – perhaps from earthquakes. They would chisel round and continue cutting back so that, over time, the quarry floor would have lumps and outcrops of damaged rock sticking out, standing alone, rejected by the builders.

One of these had attracted the name ‘skull’ – because that is what it looked like.

It was a place used for executions. It was by this rock, or upon it, that Jesus was crucified.

We know that for the first years after the death of Jesus, the Jerusalem Christians gathered by this stone on Easter day. That makes sense of the words of Peter,

‘Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood. “The stone that the builders rejected” has become the very head of the corner’.

1Peter 1.1&2.4-7

The first Christians were often from among the poor, the marginalised, the socially ‘worthless’. To such people comes this unexpected invitation. Come to Jesus. You too are like stones in the quarry, left behind like so much debris, odd shapes and flawed pieces no one found any use for; discarded after the powers have chosen the best by their measures of value and importance.

But you are, in fact, of great value.

Here at the place of the skull – we too come flawed, unpromising and far behind when judged by the preoccupations and obsessions of this present age.

But listen. All the usual measures of what makes us acceptable, impressive or even useful have been suspended – or rather reversed.

‘Come to him’, says Peter. Really?

This takes some trusting. We should expect anything built on such a foundation to look foolish, sound irrelevant, and be easy to mock and despise by any normal measure.

We will not be found on ‘Grand Designs’.

We will never be impressive building materials. But nor was Jesus.

He was a stone the builders rejected. If Jesus, the rejected one, is the foundation stone of life, we are being shown a completely different way of knowing ourselves and of seeing and knowing God. All that has been rejected and left behind as worthless must be seen in a new light.
Jesus, the stone the builders rejected, has become the foundation stone for the only building that really matters – the new humanity built upon his love.

Where do you connect with these thoughts?

You might pause and keep silence for a few moments.

Prayer

Christ our victim, rejected and cast aside as of no worth.
May we not turn away from you,
but find here, with all this world rejects,
a sure foundation for new life and hope.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

(Janet Morley – adapted)

A space to add your own prayers

We adore you O Christ and we bless you
For by your Holy Cross
You have redeemed the world.

Reflection 3

(1.00)

‘Why have you abandoned me?’

– the abandoned God

Hymn – to read or sing

Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on;

O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost a while.

Reading

From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’lclock Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘This man is calling for Elijah.’ At once one of them ran and got a sponge, filled it with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink. But the others said, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.’ Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many. Now when the centurion and those with him, who were keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were terrified and said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’

Many women were also there, looking on from a distance; they had followed Jesus from Galilee and had provided for him. Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.

Matt 27.45-56

Reflection

I have sat with others as their earthly life has drawn to a close. No two stories are alike. But I have come to believe what others have long said – that in a mostly hidden but significant way the last journey of a person’s spirit into death begins long before physical death.

We have some glimpses of what Jesus was going through on the cross – though even those near him struggled to make out his words and meaning.

The creeds say ‘he descended to the dead’. And that, in Christian tradition, was a descent to hell itself.

A television documentary captures the moment when an explorer penetrates remote, deep jungle and comes upon ancient ruins. The breathless voiceover says – ‘who knows when human voices were last heard here?’

Jesus descended to the dead. There must always be mystery in the language and imagination here. But Christian faith has understood this to mean that in his incarnation, suffering and death Jesus willingly and fully entered the farthest, deepest, waste places of human spirit and destiny. All that is most lost.

Now, from the cross, an anguished cry rends the lifeless silence.
‘My God, my God why have you abandoned me!’

And when was a voice last heard from that abyss?

It is the only time in his earthly life Jesus does not call God ‘Father’.

He is there for us … It is our cry.

It is the cry of the world.

It still is.

In that cry is found our hope and salvation – and nowhere else.
In more recent literature and films about the cross the suffering and pain have been presented in overwhelmingly graphic detail. But we will not understand his gift by trying to measure his pain. It is not the quantity of suffering that saves.

It is who is suffering and why that saves.

Nor is salvation achieved by some kind of transfer of punishment from sinners to an innocent victim. The cry of Jesus is not the agony of pain divinely inflicted, punishment pitilessly exacted, payment claimed in blood.

Rather, God takes it upon himself – and it tears him apart.

That cry is the harrowed anguish of divine love.

How are we to express this?

’I want to say it like this’, writes the theologian Jane Williams, ‘so that we can hear it and feel it. God is torn apart from God. Particularly about the cross, that is the only kind of language that I can find to say what I am trying to say. On the cross, God endures the separation from God that is the world’s.

As Jesus cries, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’, he is the life of God, streaming into our separation. Because Jesus and his Father are ripped apart, nothing can now separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. God is in our dislocation from God, as in our connectedness.’

Where do you connect with these thoughts?

You might pause and keep silence for a few moments.

Prayer

Christ our victim
Whose beauty was disfigured
whose body torn upon the cross
who willed to enter our abandonment and loss
Open wide your arms
To embrace our tortured world
That we may not turn away our eyes
But abandon ourselves to your mercy.

(Janet Morley)

A space to add your own prayers

We adore you O Christ and we bless you
For by your Holy Cross
You have redeemed the world.

Reflection 4

(1.30)

‘Take up your cross’

– the followers of God

Hymn – to sing or read

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of Glory died
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride

Reading

Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

Matt 16.24-26

Reflection

Jesus never hid from his followers what his ministry was leading towards.
He regularly spoke of his coming suffering and cross. For their part his disciples never stopped struggling to accept and make sense of what he was saying.

On one occasion as he told them yet again Peter felt he had heard enough. Suffering, rejection, defeat and being killed are not what should happen to real Messiahs is it? Nothing in the faith they had grown up with prepared them for this either.

He takes Jesus to one side and bluntly rebukes him and tells him he is wrong.

This is startling language.

It is elsewhere a word used of Jesus casting out evil.

But Peter’s response to Jesus may owe more to fear than presumption. For if what Jesus is saying is true then they, his disciples, could be in danger too.

Peter expresses what they are all thinking.

Jesus is looking at them all as he interrupts Peter and sharply rebukes him back. “For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

Not only is there no other way for Jesus. The way of the cross is the way of his followers too.

Carrying your cross is the action of someone on the way from their cell to the place of execution. In American prisons, inmates on death row chant ‘dead man walking’ when one of their number makes that last journey.

What life plans, hopes and ambitions make any sense at all in that moment?

This is such a tough uncompromising image of faith.

Yet this is the call of Jesus. ‘Take up your cross and follow me’, says Jesus.

To take up our cross is to surrender all our own attempts to use life, religion and God for our own ends, needs and purposes.

To take up our cross is to turn from our own attempts to manage and control and secure our own lives. The instinct to do this runs very deep. We are engaging in activity that is powerless to save. We cannot save ourselves.

To take up our cross is to turn to Christ and to surrender to the only gift of life that we can utterly trust and depend in – the life Jesus gives.

The story is told of a man seen late one night searching for something under a streetlight. A passerby stops. ‘Did you lose something here? ‘No, I lost it over other there’, replies the man, pointing into the darkness some distance away, ‘but the light is much better here.’ His folly is plain. He has lost something important and knows it. He is looking hard for it. But he is searching on his own terms and while he does so he has no hope of finding was is lost.

To take up our cross is to set our mind on ‘divine things’, says Jesus.

So this all hinges on God and what he about.

All our hope is found here.

The cross is forever the sign of a God who loves, saves, delivers and raise life out of the darkness of what is dead and lost.

Those who are willing to lose their life here, will find it.

Where do you connect with these thoughts?

You might pause and keep silence for a few moments.

Prayer

Lord upon the cross
Give us the grace and courage to take up our cross and follow you.
That in losing our lives for your sake
We may be brought to new life and
May become signs of your love and
your salvation in the world.
A space to add your own prayers
We adore you O Christ and we bless you
For by your Holy Cross
You have redeemed the world.

Reflection 5

(2.00)

‘They do not know what they are doing’

– the forgiving God

Hymn – to sing or read

Amazing love, O what sacrifice
The Son of God, giv’n for me
My debt he pays, and my death he dies,
that I might live,
that time I live.
(chorus from ‘My Lord, what love is this?)

Reading

Two others also, who were criminals, were led away to be put to death with him. When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.’ And they cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, ‘He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!’ The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, ‘If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!’ There was also an inscription over him, ‘This is the King of the Jews.’

Lk 23.32-38

Reflection

‘Forgive‘ … we somehow expect that word to appear here. Even if this reveals we know this story too well and it has lost its capacity to shock.

But it is the second part of the sentence that sticks – ‘they do not know what they are doing’ …

It is one thing to be forgiven for what you know you have done wrong – even if there is pride to swallow and shame to endure. But to be told we did not even know what we were doing …! Hang on a minute!

A feature of our culture is its need to blame – someone must be responsible. It must be someone’s fault. When shocking stories emerge of the abuse of children, tax avoidance, air disaster or a global pandemic … we need to know whose fault it is. It must be someone’s. We need someone to blame.

It is the deadliest diagnosis from the cross – ‘they do not know what they are doing.‘

Who don’t exactly?

Crowds? – mocking. Carnival. Media driven.

Soldiers? – only following orders

Pilate? – political expediency. Ineffectual – did not know what to do.

Religious leaders? – they thought they knew exactly what they were doing.

Judas?

And you and I? What don’t we know?

Jesus’s favourite metaphor for the human condition is blindness.
We just don’t see.

(There are sensitivities to this metaphorical language of course. And in the recorded encounters with Jesus the physically blind often ‘saw’ him the most clearly)

On one occasion his religious hearers challenged him

‘Are you saying we are blind?’

Jesus replied – ‘you are not guilty because you are blind
You are guilty because you say you can see.’ Jn 9.41

If we are blind in this sense, then even are best intentions can be dangerous.

We cannot see our consequences; our effect.

If we come to cross in this place of not knowing, of unseeing, we should not expect the cross to make sense.

The cross is there precisely for all that is senseless, unaware, our unseeing and our wild, deadly assumptions about what we think we know.
Where do you connect with these thoughts?

You might pause and keep silence for a few moments.

Prayer

Father of Jesus,
For the judgments we make that are simply prejudices.
For the times we think we are right but we are actually wrong.
For the times we claim to see clearly but are blind.
Father forgive,
we do not know what we are doing.
A space to add your own prayers
We adore you O Christ and we bless you
For by your Holy Cross
You have redeemed the world.

Reflection 6

(2.30)

‘It is finished‘

– the victory of God

Hymn – to sing or read

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Reading

‘… 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.

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfil the scripture), ‘I am thirsty.’ A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the 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 his spirit. Jn 19.25b-30

Reflection

And what is finished? The phrase comes twice.

Sin? Evil? Death? Pain? Suffering?

Plainly not ….

Whatever is finished this world is not yet problem or pain free. Far from it.

‘It is finished’ completes the earlier cry – ‘why have you abandoned me?’

The gospel accounts express this in different ways.

Matthew tells that, at the moment of his death, the curtain of the Temple was torn ‘from top to bottom.’ Top down. This is God’s doing. That huge heavy curtain hung before the holiest place separating off God’s presence. God now rips it apart.

Something is open that was closed.

Something is united that was divided.

Nothing is outside the love of God.

No one and nowhere is beyond reach his crucified embrace.

There is now no division, no separation. It is finished.

The church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is built over the site of the crucifixion and tomb of Jesus. Climb the stairs and there is a crowded chapel where you can reach in and touch the top of the Calvary stone.

But underneath is an unmarked chapel. It is usually empty.

Behind the altar, behind a glass window is the bottom of same fractured rock.

It is called ‘Adam’s Chapel.’ The message is clear – the cross penetrates down to the very beginning. Nowhere and no one is beyond its reach.

The embrace of divine love on the cross reaches it all.

It is finished.

The story can begin again.

In John’s account, when all is finished, Jesus simply bowed his head and ‘gave up his spirit.’ For a few deadly hours Jesus had been willingly surrendered to earthly powers – passive in the hands and will of others. Now, at the last, Jesus again takes the initiative. He completes his earthly ministry – his total self-offering – in a final act of trusting surrender to the Father’s will. ‘Bowing his head’ is the language with which you might describe someone quietly going to sleep – though here the pain and thirst are acute.

One thing remains ‐ to give up his spirit.

In John’s gospel what is offered ‘up’ is found in the perfect will and purpose of the Father.

The earliest teachers of the faith would teach that if Jesus had not hand over his spirit to the Father at this moment of death the world itself would have ended.

Bowing, laying down, offering up, handing over ….

The final complete, trusting, self-offering of himself.

The sacrifice complete.

It is finished

The Father and the Son are one.

This image of the cross was designed by Scilla Verney, an artist, who was herself dying of cancer at the time. The world is portrayed as split apart – painfully, sharply separated. That split can express anything that is fractured, separated and lost. Christ, in his own body, fills that contorted gap. His arms are thrust into the midst of it all. In his own being he holds it all together. This is our faith. This is where the world is now held In Christ. Nothing is outside of it. That is where all broken and separated things are found – in Christ. Nothing separates us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Where do you connect with these thoughts?

You might pause and keep silence for a few moments.

Prayer

Look, Father, look on His anointed face,
And only look on us as found in Him;
Look not on our misusings of Thy grace,
Our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim;
For lo! between our sins and their reward,
We set the passion of Thy Son our Lord.

(William Bright)

A space to add your own prayers

We adore you O Christ and we bless you
For by your Holy Cross
You have redeemed the world.

3.00 – Closing

worship, reading and prayers

Hymn – to sing or read

O dearly, dearly has he loved
And we must love him too
And trust in his unfailing love
And try his works to do.

Reading

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfil the scripture), ‘I am thirsty.’ A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the 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 his spirit.

As this vigil at the cross comes its close, take a moment to gather thoughts and insights that have particularly touched your heart and mind.

Pause and keep silence for a few moments.

Prayer

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power,
and the glory are yours
now and for ever.
Amen.

Lord upon the cross
Our life giver, pain bearer, love maker
Open wide your arms
to embrace our tortured world
that we may not turn away our eyes
but abandon ourselves to your mercy
and so become life giving, pain bearing
and love making signs of your kingdom,
For your name and glory’s sake.
We adore you O Christ and we bless you
For by your Holy Cross
You have redeemed the world.

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’ But when Jesus heard it, he said, ‘This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.’ Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

Then after this he said to the disciples, ‘Let us go to Judea again.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?’ Jesus answered, ‘Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.’ After saying this, he told them, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.’ Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’ Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow-disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ Martha said to him, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ She said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.’

When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, ‘The Teacher is here and is calling for you.’ And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’ But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’ So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upwards and said, ‘Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.’ When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’

Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.

John 11:1-45

“Well – what a pickle!” as one elderly lady I spoke to on the phone yesterday said. “All we can do is pray I suppose.”

Prayer is, I’m sure, a constant part of our lives but at this point, each sitting in our own little safe bubble, we may be forgiven along with many others for wanting to scream out to God in fear, “Why aren’t you here? If you were really here this would not have happened!”

And it is perfectly understandable that many in the secular world may also ask, “If your God is so loving why do fires devastate Australia? Why is COVID 19 killing the old and infirm, depriving people of their income, making lonely people lonelier? Why do bad things happen to good and innocent people? Why isn’t he here? If he was really here these things would not have happened!”

So it is with all this in mind that I actually find today’s reading helpful. If nothing else it shows us that ‘it was ever thus.’ Along with Martha and Mary trying to understand Jesus’ actions the world still cries, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.”

There is no easy answer to the problem of undeserved suffering. Perhaps that is why Jesus wept. In his divinity he knew that out of even this tragedy good would come, but in his humanity perhaps he also understood the total lack of comprehension felt by Lazarus’ family. We too can know from his earthly experience that he can understand the incomprehension felt by us today, as to why a God, who is supposed to love us, allows such things to occur even if good is the outcome.

After all as day follows day we are seeing so much good – half a million people offering to help the NHS by volunteering, neighbours looking out for each other, if at a distance, and most heartening of all the kindness of strangers, but still, couldn’t God in all his power find a way to bring about that good without appearing to abandon his own to their pain and fear, distress and loss?

There are no easy answers but, strangely, I am beginning to hear stories of people of faith, to whom the worst is happening, sticking with God, trusting him, indeed depending on him. Despite all that has happened to them and its apparent unfairness they would still claim that God is bringing good out of, in one recent case, their multiple tragedies. And significantly their understanding, such as it is, is NOT that God has caused their particular catalogue of disaster but that, in a broken and fallen world where such events do happen, God’s power is sufficient to carry them through and to take and use even the worst things for some eventual good.

Perhaps then, in this part of the Gospel story, Jesus, as ever, is living out the way God is. God is NOT always understandable, he does NOT always respond to our prayers, to our situations, in the way we think he should. In fact, sometimes, it even feels as though he is absent, delays his appearance. Yet we know he understands our life, we know he has been like us, suffered like us and somehow, despite everything, he is able to use every situation, offered to him in faith, to continue his work of salvation in the world.

It may however be that, though we have a deep desire to believe this, sometimes when things are at their worst our faith wavers. I am filled with hope though that later on, with hindsight, we will glimpse the fact that God’s loving purposes were being worked out, his kingdom is still being built, even in this imperfect and often tragic world.

From a personal point of view, though less dramatically, in this season of Lent as we face our own lack of perfection we can still give thanks that, despite the tragedy of our sin, the sadness of our inability to live out the lives we know we should, even from this, beyond our understanding, we have a God who IS capable of bringing good things from bad situations and good things for and from us, his imperfect people. And this, whilst not giving us any pat answers to our lack of understanding, should give us hope.