Category: Theology

Good Friday reflection

Reflection

This event is almost inconceivable for me. You see, I do not believe in a vindictive God who sacrifices his Son. I do trust, through faith, in the incarnation – God being human. Hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered. A baby in a manger, ‘the Word made flesh’. But if this is our starting point then it is God who hung on a cross on that first ‘good Friday’. I cannot cope with some vast plan of salvation that requires this carnage. What I can understand is a God of love, from whose love we can never be separated (Romans 8, 38)

So where does that leave us? For me Jesus embodies God’s love in totality. Ultimate, complete and utter love has to be totally selfless and this is what I see in Jesus. It is the sort of love that challenges all hypocrisy, injustice and indignity to which we are exposed and which we still experience. But there is a problem here. The moment we start to love those whom others do not, or cannot, love we become a threat to them. We either have to acknowledge that love and ally ourselves with it, ignore it, or oppose it. We are inherently selfish. Humanly we seek our own preservation. That is a biological imperative. So when Jesus challenged the powers, those around him by challenging their economy – the overturning of the tables of the money-changers, the emphasis on the importance of the widow’s tiny monetary gift, pausing to heal a woman, deemed unclean, who pressed on him in the crowd, when he had been called to heal the daughter of a leader of the synagogue – in all these ways it felt as if he was a threat to the culture and religion, the very economy of the people. This threat was to their very being. And how they behaved was no different from how we, in similar situations, behave. They behaved, literally, naturally.

 

And Jesus response was the only possible response of complete and utter, unconditional, all-inclusive love: that is forgiveness – ‘forgive them for they (literally) know not what they do’!

And the cross becomes wondrous, not as some great theological bargain, or the culmination of a cosmic plan of sacrifice, but in the revelation of the nature of total love that we are called to emulate.

 

And the world is shrouded in darkness, inevitably for in darkness we cannot see, if God is dead this really is the end. And this is why theologians, then and now, you and I, seek to explain away this horror. Yet Jurgen Moltmann, some years ago in a book which still deserves to be read, The Crucified God, sees the cross to be the test of all that deserves to be called Christian, rather than the resurrection, for here we see God’s utter love and willingness to be vulnerable, as we are vulnerable, even unto death in order to be one with us. And the scandal and uniqueness is that gods are not meant to die, wondrous God, wondrous love indeed!

What can we sing in a distorted world? – Written for ArtServe and originally published in the Methodist Recorder (March 2024)

What can we sing in a distorted world?

Language and music are taut and strained. How can we compress into a phrase a modern pieta, or a father cradling body parts?

What can we sing?

We stand in the rubble of a distorted world where dust never settles, light filters through, flickering, faulted. Shadows lengthen.

Creation is cloaked by human action, or indifference.

And, again, what can we sing?

Perhaps we should be silent?

It has been said that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. And we turn up on Sunday morning to offer praise and thanksgiving or, expecting a still, small voice,  a gentle stroll beside still waters. Have we forgotten? Perhaps. Or are we too young? Since October the seventh our  slumbering memories have been re-awakened. And what do we sing? At times like these I wonder at the inability of our Christian churches to lament. Its absence in these times should shock.

I turn to two Psalms, one communal; one individual.

Psalm 137

By the rivers of Babylon—

there we sat down and there we wept

when we remembered Zion.

The nearest we get to these words, a reprise of Boney M singing ‘By the rivers of Babylon’. Notice they never use verses 8 and 9:

Happy shall they be who pay you back

what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones

and dash them against the rock!

Like a hybrid car shifting gear they move to something more comfortable: May the words of my lips and the meditation of my heart…’ They want something deemed ‘acceptable’.

Think of the horror of war, images that can’t be broadcast for what they portray.  What would we feel? Might we not want vengeance? This Psalm says that such emotions are legitimate, human. How can we admit this in our churches? We need to know that we are still held by God when we have witnessed acts of deepest hatred and want to hit back, to wreak havoc.

But a warning. The Psalmist grasps this yet it can never be a justification for repeating the horror, simplistically, ‘because the Bible tells us so’. An ‘eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ should be consigned to the past.

Psalm 22

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’.

This is personal, now. The cry we hear from the cross, from the lips of Jesus, words of a Psalm uttered in desperation in the throes of death: words just for Good Friday?  They are strong enough for a hymn writer to pen: ‘the Father turns His face away’. And sometimes it feels like that. Yet God does not turn away, will not leave us in distress. Nevertheless, we may still feel the reality of personal desolation. If the Psalmist felt this emotion, and Jesus expressed it, then it is common to humanity and not to be condemned. It is cry of wretchedness though not a matter of doubt, rather of supreme faith. That is the foundation lament, a certainty of the presence of God with us in spite of all, even in persecution or impending death. We only complain when our expectations are not met – a train is late, food has gone mouldy, a friend lets us down. In faith we have expectations of God, God with us,  always, in every circumstance or situation. Yet sometimes we feel desolate, abandoned, as though God has gone away. And then we too can lament, we can groan from the depths of our being. And at such times we utter the deepest, most sincere prayer we may ever voice, ‘God help me!’ This is no blasphemy, but a heartfelt, visceral cry of need undergirded by a subconscious sense that when all else is absent, there is a name on whom we can call.

So what music, what language, can we borrow, can we use? Perhaps Gorecki’s Third Symphony? Or a hymn like this? – ‘When loneliness oppresses me’ from Hymns of Hope and Healing/Unravelling the Mysteries sung, maybe, to KINGSFOLD?

1	When loneliness oppresses me; 
	when darkness fills my soul; 
	when grief and weeping overwhelm 
	and none can make me whole; 
	in angry fear I call to you.
	When will you hear my cry? 
	This heavy burden on my heart 
	must lift, or else I die.
	
2	When close companions melt away, 
	afflictions have no end, 
	I cry for help to empty air, 
	darkness my only friend. 
	O God, why have you left me here? 
	When will my troubles cease? 
	If you refuse to hear my prayer, 
	how will I find release?

Hymn - Marjorie Dobson
© Copyright 2012 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, www.stainer.co.uk. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Countering extremism – living with difference (previously on Facebook)

When you relate so closely to another that you feel their pain, and that pain can only be assuaged when your pain has gone, this is true compassion. That is why Jesus touched the leper, why the Samaritan crossed over. To be human, to love, we do not need to believe in God or to assent to a moral code. We ‘simply’ need to recognise and embody our common humanity with all others. This is the essence of love manifested in the idea of incarnation and can never be imposed on others and is not a condition for us to be loved.

A hymn in a shattering, divided world…perhaps?

Reflecting on the world in which we live, what can we, should we sing?

Hymns should at least allow for the expression of everything to which the Psalms give voice. And I am including those words over which we tend to be rather squeamish. This interpretation of Psalm 137 was attributed to John Donne but was probably written by Francis Davison (circa 1633-69):

        Happy, who, thy tender barnes

		From the armes

	Of their wailing mothers tearing,

	'Gainst the walls shall dash their bones,

		Ruthless stones

	With their braines and blood besmearing. 
[Donne, J., The Poems of John Donne, Edit. H.J.C. Grierson, Oxford 1912, p426].

And why should I want to sing this or anything even distantly emotionally related to it? Because sometimes that is how I feel and the Psalms testify to the fact that God can cope with us feeling like that.

Not finding such a hymn in my own denomination’s hymn book at the turn of the millennium, and reflecting on the plight of refugees, I wrote these words. And are they, perhaps, redolent of those of opposing opinions, experiencing hatred and fear, in our world, in our countries today?

1	When anger is our highest creed,

	revenge the motivating force;

	God, understand our depth of hurt,

	our need for action, not just thought.



2	Ejected from what makes us safe,

	familiar ground and well-known names,

	we sicken for the things we've seen,

	all sense of hope and courage drains.



3	We cannot celebrate our faith,

	and faith lacks meaning, all is lost;

	for nothing is as it once was,

	we cannot ever bear the cost.



4	So, God, what should we do or say?

	What is there left of love or life?

	What mitigating cause or plea

	will rid us of this pain of strife?



5	Amid our sense of grief and loss

	where nothing now can be the same,

	stand in the midst of shattered faith;

	rebuild, renew, and raise again.



Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)

Words © 2001 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.

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