A Sarcifice of Praise 6 The Eternal Cross

Good Friday is a day of heaviness. The weight of a world's pain borne in the heart of God in Christ crucified, the very nature of crucifixion compelling the body to feel its own weight in proportion to the physical anguish of wounded limbs supporting a broken frame. It is inevitable that the passion of Christ should reverberate within the penitent devotion  of hearts bewildered by the agony of love.

Saint Exupery writes that 'sorrows are the vibrations of the soul that remind us we are alive'. And early in devotional verse Jesus was called the Man of Sorrows, absorbing into the infinite spaciousness of divine love the malignant consequences of a world's sin; and in his case those sorrows were linked at one and the same time to his death, and the gift of life it released. Elizabeth Jennings' poem while acknowledging the anguish of Christ crucified, faces up to the reality of sin as more than radical evil; sin is also the accumulation of small acts of selfishness, cruelty, indifference, neglect; it is the diligently learned skill of witholding acts and words that bless and care for and heal those who are carrying the heavy end of the cross in their lives. The weight of sin is made up not only of those occasional vast blocks of granite, but also of mountains of sand, that inumerable and unimaginable number of microscopic rocks that defies our best calculus. A bag of sand is as heavy as a lump of granite - but easier accumulated, perhaps representing the sheer quantity of our lost opportunities to bear the weight of someone else's struggle - and when that happens, says Jennings, Jesus is crucified again.

The Eternal Cross

He'll blossom on the cross in three weeks now,

The saviour of the world will die again.

He is the flower upon a hurting bough,

The crown of thorns and nails will give him pain.

But the worst one is how

.

We go on daily wounding him and he,

Although he's out of time, still feels the great

Dark of betrayal. He's nailed on a tree

Each time we fail him. Suffering won't abate

Until the liberty

.

This God-Man gave us is used only for

Kindness and gentleness. Our world is full

Of dying Christs - the starved, the sick, the poor.

God sleeps in cardboard boxes, has no meal.

We are his torturer

.

Each time we fail in generosity,

Abuse a child or will not give our love.

Christ lets us use our fatal liberty

Against himself. But now and then one move

Of selfless love sets free

.

The whole of mankind whom he saw at play

And work as he lay dying, when his side

Was pierced. That spear was how we fail to say

We love someone, but each time tears are dried

It's Resurrection Day.

(Elizabeth Jennings, from An Easter Sequence)

Comments

[Catriona]

Thank you for posting these reflections, they have been a wonderful resource as I have travelled the path of Holy Week this year.