Good Friday 2008

What are you doing at the foot of the cross?

As you stand there, looking up at the beaten and bloodied figure stapled to the tree by nails beaten in without any human emotion, what is going through your mind?

Can you make sense of the emotions around this event? Perhaps you want to pull Him down from the cross, bandage His hands and His feet, anoint His wounds, stop the pain. Perhaps you want to bring to justice those who have systematically deconstructed the life of a man whose only desire was to bring life and love to a world that has preferred to walk in the artificial neon light of its darkness.

Or perhaps you realise that there is nothing that you can do, save watch Him writhing in agony trying to breathe, knowing in the great illumination of hindsight that in this agony there is hope and redemption and love. Yet how can we watch this ghastly spectacle unfold without wanting to do something to put an end to this?

In our modern society, we reach for all kinds of medicament to ease our pain and distress - paracetamol, aspirin, peptobismol. We have morphine to numb the worst pains, but primarily we seek to obliterate the awfulness of the degradation of our human condition. Thus we gaze uncomfortably at our dying Saviour, wishing an end to this because, frankly, we can't stand it.

However, the Lord shows us another way. We look at Him on the cross in accomplishment. We hear that cry of "τετέλεσται" almost untranslatable into English but nonetheless a cry of triumph, not defeat. All this pain and suffering and misery in this moment makes sense for the Lord, and here in His final moments does He realise what was going on. He accepted the pain with obedience, not wanting to suffer, but doing so anyway to serve God.

So we stand at the foot of the cross watching someone die the most painful, ignominious and miserable death, and we feel and reach out because of our negative view of such pain. But we walk with the benefit of hindsight and see that it makes sense and know that if it actually pleased Him to suffer then we must be pleased to accept His suffering, and be pleased to suffer with Him. We have to look beyond the pain, treating it as a means to an end, rather than trying to numb ourselves to it, or try to alleviate that pain at a greater cost.

Some pain is just worth suffering in its full intensity.

It proves that we have truly lived.