The Cross: conflict and suffering

Hazel's beautiful table piece: Road to the cross - used at Cores End

Over the next three weeks I'll be posting the three talks I gave at The Chiltern URC Group Lent Quiet Day at Cores End URC near Marlow on Saturday 30th March 2019.  Here's the first...

As we meet during Lent I thought it might be appropriate to entitle today’s theme: Cross Roads.

On a journey a crossroad is a moment of decision.  The choice we make determines our destination.

These days I rely far too much on the sat nav on my phone.  I rarely plan out the route and I’ve noticed that just occasionally the signal of where I am can be two or three seconds behind exactly where I am!  That doesn’t matter until I’m at a crossroad or roundabout and those seconds make a huge difference as to where I end up heading.

It seems to me that Jesus grasped the essence of how his life was going to pan out quite early on.  That last journey to Jerusalem seems one full of quiet yet dogged determination to leave the security and safety of Galilee and willingly enter the swirl of controversy and conflict that would await him upon arrival in Jerusalem.

Yet Jesus deliberately makes this choice.

I know of a church which, in its reordering project, made a radical decision about its processional cross.  The new cross would be two pieces of drift wood collected from the beach and clasped together.  This was wood that had undergone the ravages of tempest, storm and wind.  This wood wasn’t pristine, it was disfigured and roughly honed.  I can see why this cross was made the way it was.  It spoke truthfully about life.

But then a wealthy benefactor came along and heard about the driftwood cross.  Perhaps for all sorts of reasons his offer couldn’t be turned down, an offer to cover the cross in gold leaf.  Well, now it shimmers with a different sort of palatable beauty.  In one sense it’s a more precious object, yet in another it’s lost some of its deeper value.

The truth is there have been many attempts, perhaps we have made them ourselves, to sanitise the cross.  All too quickly it becomes an empty cross.  A glorious cross.  A triumphant cross.

Yet I’m not sure Jesus saw it that way, the one who hung and suffered there.  He shouts a cry of dereliction from it.  He feels forsaken by it.

I sense more and more that to Jesus and his friends Calvary was a tremendously bleak and confusing day.  It was a pain-filled day.  Blood flowed, and friends deserted, so the suffering was physical, spiritual and emotional.

You cannot suffer ‘theoretically’.  When the bereavement comes the loss can leave the deepest void.  When families split the ripples keep spreading for a lifetime.  When friends betray us, or we them, the sense that something beautiful has been corrupted can feel irrevocably final.

Suffering is real and there is nothing inevitable that Kierkegaard’s dictum is always right when he said: life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards.  Sometimes even hindsight doesn’t obliterate the pain.

Jesus seems to choose this road, this cross road. 

He sets his face to Jerusalem and he meets with conflict.

His message is toxic to tetrarchs who are puppet kings and to governors who feel Israel is just about the worst posting the Roman Civil Service ever had to offer.

Put this civil opposition alongside the religious self-interest that made genuine debate or fresh insights a complete no-go area and Jesus was a dead man walking even on Palm Sunday.

Part of my journey this Lent has, I think, simply been to name that sense of conflict that dominated the life of Jesus and that sense of confusion, suffering and even failure that was so central in his death.

At that other season of the Christian year when the liturgical colour is purple: Advent, some of us at AFC play a little game as we sing that beautifully haunting hymn; O come, O come Immanuel.  It’s in a minor key.  That somehow fits the sense of intense longing that’s at the centre of the hymn.  We have a rota of organists and it’s interesting to see which ones cannot bear to leave the final chord of the final verse in the minor, instead they just have to resolve it back into the more comfortable major. They can’t linger in the un-resolved.

The opposite is true of a Tenebrae service when the lights are extinguished and the congregation leaves the church in darkness and silence – holding the questions, living with the waiting, not rushing to a forced and maybe too easily explained resolution.

It’s the essence of Holy Saturday.

So, as we ponder the cross today and the road that Jesus took towards it – my first thought is that it can speak of the suffering and conflict that is surely a characteristic of every life.  Suffering and struggle is a normal part of living, it’s not exceptional or unusual.


And to know that conflict and suffering was part of Jesus’ life maybe helps us to own those moments rather than run away from them.