Category: Thoughts

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!

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.

The Space Shuttle Columbia remembered – a hymn

The Space Shuttle Columbia – a hymn written at the time of its launch and explosion – remembered BBC 2 12/2/2024 - They reached for stars, beyond our grasp… written 4th February 2003.



1	They reached for stars, beyond our grasp,

	they rode beyond the clouds,

	we gazed in wonder, seized by awe,

	now friends grasp empty shrouds.



2	A thousand searing fiery shards

	had flared across the sky,

	as crowds looked up in disbelief,

	and framed the question 'Why?'



3	Can God be found amidst this loss?

	Is love a present fact

	when torn by pain, in misery,

	we lack the power to act?



4	O God make known your presence now,

	yes, show your boundless love

	as through the tears and loneliness

	we/they search the skies above.



Andrew E Pratt (born 1948) written 4th February 2003. Words © 2003 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.

Metre: CM

Seas, stars and sunsets – a reflection preparing for Lent

As we head towards Lent my mind has gone into reverse!

Rather than what I might give up, I’ve started to wonder what I want to cling to, what I really value. Is there anything I never want to let go of? I suppose for many people the first thing to come to mind will not be a thing but a person. And I begin to reflect. Of all the people I know, or have known, who have loved me and whom I have loved… and I’m brought up short. Immediately I’m conscious of our humanity. Every day we form memories – good and bad. What we do today will be what we remember tomorrow. We may remember some things for a lifetime. But all of us have been born. All of us will die. Some people we love have already already died. Life, for all it holds is transient. Yet  we hold memories. We share grief.  A poem written some years ago began:

All my life I've had acquaintances.

And some friends.

A varied tapestry of faces, 

none permanent, 

born and dying. 



Parents gave me birth, 

both now dead. 

Child born 

and laid to rest.

Life has taught me to expect loss, sooner or later. I owe so much to so many. I hold memories, and they are invaluable. But if this is a bit bleak for you, for me it is realistic. So what will I hold to? Let me share three memories:

I looked out on the sunset. The sky, deep red, but fading, could not be captured by a camera’s lens, held for eternity. I mused. Different wavelengths of light refracted by the atmosphere, received by a retina, passing through a tangle of neurones, conducted by chemical and physiological interactions, perceived by something we might label consciousness. And is this all? Later I played with water colours, fluid, wet on wet, running into one another out of control, unpredictable.

This was nearer to what I believed I saw. But this did not explain or make sense of what I saw, of what felt. And a realisation rose rather than forced itself on me of something ‘other’. Call that conversion if you will. It was a glimpse of the ‘other’, I will go on calling it that for want of anything better, that changed the direction of my life. To that I will hold.

Then with my first real telescope. Marvelling at the myriad of stars in which our sun and the tumbling planets surrounding it are set.

There yesterday, today and forever. This will outlast me.

Even if climate change is ultimately catastrophic those stars will be there. Beyond the point when our sun dies, compressed in a black hole, stars, light years from ours will burn brightly. Sheer wonder.

But I began the title of this reflection with ‘seas’. And that poem to which I’ve referred ended with these words:

Left again to my earliest memories, 

to the rising of the sun 

and its setting; 

to waxing of the moon 

and its waning; 

the movement of the waters, 

the crashing of the waves, 

the constancy of stars; 

to the generation of my faith.



In this dynamic patchwork 

I find my safety, 

lodge securely; 

and so, 

in death, 

I will return again 

to the friendly sea 

and the sky.


The seas lap round the continents. I was born within 400yards of the sea. I long for the sea. And whenever I can go near it the swell, the movement, the scent, the changing light, constant, yet infinitely varied feels like home.

And as I reflect on this creation in which I have been placed, nurtured, grown I return, as some of you will already have guessed, to two passages of scripture. Seas, stars and sunsets remind me of that something, that ‘other’ that we name God, that is LOVE…

‘You, LORD, are all I have, and you give me all I need; my future is in your hands’(Good News Bible, Psalm 16 verse 5) and ‘…I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God (Romans 8: 38-39). Amen to that.

To these things, to this, I will cling, through Lent and beyond.

Grace & Peace, Andrew

Text, Watercolour Painting and iPad Painting all copyright Andrew Pratt. This reflection first used in the Mid-Cheshire Methodist Circuit 2024