HOLY CROSS SUNDAY

14^th September 2014

“GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD”

Revd Andrew Bain

Readings:

Phil 2: 6-11 – Christ emptied himself, taking the form of a slave...

John 3: 13-17 – God so loved the world...

A number of years ago there was a great stushie about Mel Gibson’s film, “The Passion of the Christ”, which majored on the horror of the Cross, the crucifixion itself and the anguish and pain of it all. I have to confess I deliberately didn’t go to see it. Partly because I haven’t forgiven Mel Gibson for “Braveheart”(that isn’t a Referendum comment, by the way), but more seriously because his approach seemed both way too much and not remotely enough.

I say “too much” because showing us all that horror down to every gory detail misses the point, and because the meaning of the Cross in fact transcends all that – it belongs to everyone. If the Cross is only about the three hour anguish of the Man of Galilee, then frankly in the scales of human suffering – when you think of the anguish of families of hostages held by Islamic State under threat of beheading, and the sufferings of refugees now so many across the Middle East that they’ve stopped even telling us how many, and the Ebola virus claiming countless lives, well how much can we say about three hours on a Cross?

I once saw the Mum of a boy struggling with leukemia interviewed between the hymns on Songs of Praise and she just told it like it was and said, “Don’t talk to me about the Cross, I’ve been watching my son suffer for years.” So being overfocused on those three hours both insults people’s pain and it sells them desperately short.

For God so loved the world… And he loves the world so much that, like a true parent if you like, he can take our anger, our crying out at the sheer unfairness of things. Christopher Nolan, the Irish author who lived with cerebral palsy and died at the age of forty-three, describes a moment where the young disabled boy, Joseph, through whom he tells his own life story, has a moment of terrible despair and he rails against God in the crucified Christ.

A friend has taken him into Church. “What,” said Matthew, “Do you want to see the crucifix, Joseph?” He wheeled him over and there hanging up on the wall was a lifesize Christ crucified to a huge black cross. His pallid limp body sagged windswept and dead. Crowned with thorns, his grey face was streaked by caked blood, his wonderful eyes were turned vacantly upwards, his head fell backwards and his veins were taut in his throat. But Joseph was not seeing the sadness of the spectacle that day, his boy’s heart was broken and he knew who to blame. The bright angry eyes of the rebellious boy looked up at the great crucifix and swinging his left arm in a grand arc he made the two-finger sign at the dead Christ. He told God what he thought of him. He was furious still.

For Joseph this self-assertion before God is part of his spiritual journey, part of his growing up in faith, as it needs to be for all of us. Joseph loves the God he sometimes hates and that’s ok, and in the Eucharist he meets the crucified God in a special way, just as he is. One of Joseph’s problems is opening his mouth to receive the host when his uncontrolled reflexes keep his jaws jammed shut. “Once, when Joseph was in difficulty, the priest came up with a bold idea of his own – Hi Joseph, what were you doing in the Church yesterday? Were you riflin’ the poor box?

Joseph was so surprised by the accusation that his mouth fell open in astonishment. The priest immediately returned to prayer as he placed communion on the boy’s tongue. Such were Fr Flynn’s schemes, such his empathy that the boy became more and more relaxed over the years.

And so you see Joseph, no matter all the challenges he faces relaxing more and more into who he is and who he is with God. Nolan writes: “Communion served to join the silent boy with the silent God, and into his masked ear Joseph poured his mental whisperings, begging blessings to be showered on his faithful friends.”

Just this week I finished a book which is the most joyful stimulating response to the all atheism that’s been so popular recently. Francis Spufford writes with passion and nowhere more so than when he describes what’s happening on the Cross. “The doors of Jesus’ heart are wedged open wide, and in rushes the whole pestilential flood, the vile and roiling tide of human cruelties and failures and secrets. Let me take that from you, he is saying. Give that to me instead. Let me carry it. Let me be to blame instead. I am big enough. I am wide enough. I am not what you were told. I am not your king or your judge. I am the Father who longs for every last one of his children. I am the friend who will never leave you. I am the light behind the darkness. I am the shining your shame cannot extinguish. I am the ghost of love in the torture chamber. I am change and hope. I am the refining fire. I am the door where you thought there was only a wall. I am the earth that drinks up the bloodstain. I am gift without cost. I am. I am. I am. Before the foundations of the world, I am.”

I love this image of Jesus opening his heart universe wide to accept everything, for all of us for all time. All those things we know about ourselves but can scarcely even name to ourselves, our fears for a world of mind-numbing brutality, and even in this week our hopes and aspirations and anxieties for our own country’s future.

Francis Spufford makes the point. Our God isn’t born into some realm of timeless myth like the Gods of the Norse or the Romans or the Greeks. Our God took flesh in the reign of Caesar Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria, when everyone had to be registered to be taxed (not a referendum, but a census); and he died on a Cross when Pontius Pilate was Procurator of Judea. Our God comes in real time, in the time of nations and peoples, in the time of their hopes and their griefs. He comes in Joseph’s real time, the real time of a boy trapped in a body that won’t do what he wants. He comes in your real time and mine. He comes. And for you and for me, for Syria and Iraq, for Ukraine and Scotland, for all times and all places with one message ever the same: God so loves the world.