Friday 14 April 2017

Good Friday: Amen

Jesus seems utterly crushed by the cross.

This work is entitled: Amen – meaning ‘so be it’.

Well, if it was a resolution then it was a commitment to a tough road.

This painting makes me realise that part of my journey this day is to linger with the tension of it all.  For in many ways everything, yet nothing was resolved at the cross.

There was no quick fix here. 

Good Friday and Calvary do not happen with us pressing the fast forward button.  Every hour and every minute and every second have to be endured. 

On Good Friday we have to stay here.

And our Good Fridays don’t resolve quickly either.  The pain of bereavement stays long, the sorrow of a broken relationship lingers, the injustice of a living in the theatre of civil war must seem endless, the pointlessness of a terrorist’s suicide bomb will probably never make sense to the maimed and injured.

Jesus died.  Crushed and broken.  He was forced to be silent and his way of love mixed with justice was so forcibly rejected by the state that his life was cruelly and prematurely snuffed out.

If I were a disciple I suspect I too would have stood a long way off, weeping for the three years we had spent together – now at an end.  A wasted three years?  A mistaken three years? 

If there seemed to be no success at the cross, there appeared to be no affirmation either – once Jesus heard that voice from heaven declaring him to be a beloved son – yet on the cross his cry of dereliction was: My God, why have you forsaken me?

Linger at the cross today and take seriously how love must travel so slowly at times.  Love is patient.  Love is kind, but love is also vulnerable.

It was – and often is today – a long Good Friday.

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