25 March
The Cross — the key to understanding the nature of God
Isaiah 52: 13 – 53: 12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10: 16-25 or Hebrews 4:14-16; 5: 7-9
John 18: 1– 19: 42
Good Friday is the day that God is to be seen most clearly.
Isaiah 52: 13 – 53: 12
Is it only by suffering that we learn the true meaning of obedience?
Psalm 22
Jesus quotation of this psalm lets us into the depths of his agony and his conviction that God saves!
Hebrews 10: 16-25 or Hebrews 4:14-16; 5: 7-9
Here is gospel: “We should come bravely before the throne of our merciful god. There we will be treated with undeserved kindness, and we will find help.”
John 18: 1– 19: 42
There are great resources for dramatising this reading enabling congregations to feel the power of the story. It is a story that can help us answer the question: What is God like? — Like Jesus on the cross! “Look at the cross, here…”
- is courageous commitment to a belief that God was intimately involved and in a life-giving relationship that God had established with God’s people, and that there are religious and political and personal ways of destroying God’s life-giving way of living.
- is a picture of God showing that he cannot set a limit to his self-giving, who cannot protect himself against suffering, who cannot be wholly in control of relationships he initiates.
- is a God who is a victim suffering with the people. Jesus did not expect life to work out to his advantage. He never worked any miracles for himself. He took responsibility for himself and did that in very practical ways.
- is no intervention to be a God beyond us, only a terrible silence and a gazing into the darkness that tells us that on both sides of that silence there was pain — God and humanity suffering.
- is love bent on creating the possibility of an answering love. We don’t see God stopping evil to protect his human child. We see God absorbing evil letting it come upon him in his human child.
- love hurts and suffers and bleeds. We cannot avoid that reality either.
- is one who knows the worst that human beings can do to one another, who is not in control, who simply trusts that life is there in its fullness if we will live it with acceptance and grace.
- is forgiveness offered to barbarity, accepting the worst, not judging, not condemning.
- is a God who knows what it is to be human, who knows us, who nevertheless, with arms outstretched offers himself, the one who can be totally true, totally loyal, totally giving, totally loving, awaiting our response.