On one of my regular walks we pass the Episcopal Church. The side of the building has this cross displayed. It faces the road, the car park, and towards the distant hills. Do those parking their cars notice it? What about the regular walkers going down to the village for their daily constitutional, does it ever occur to them to give it a passing thought? Do passing motorists glance over and see it? If not, then who is it for?
I photographed this mathematically precise cross on one of those late winter days of bright sunlight and blue skies. It was the shadow that made me look twice - it was evocative of lines that came to mind without searching through the memory files.
Whatever else Holy Saturday conveys of emotion, image, memory, devotion or whatever, it's the day when we face the reality of an empty cross, without the comfort of an empty tomb. I find the sharp angled plainness of this cross deeply disconcerting, which is as it should be. The cross is not a thing of beauty, and perhaps we are too quick to soften its lines, round off its angles, give it some colour, make it more aesthetically and therefore more emotionally acceptable.
But what can possibly make the cross acceptable, attractive even? All this week I have explored images of the cross, and tried to understand even the first fringes of truth knowing it would still be beyond our grasp. And yet. One of the paradoxes that goes to the heart of our faith is that there is, despite all that points to the contrary, a beauty and a cause for wonder in the cross, whether imaged in art and photograph, sung or played in music, read or prayed or written in word. There is a strange beauty in the brokenness, a glory in the tragedy, a truth that renders hopeful so much else in our lives that seems cause for despair, or at least indifference.
The words that came to mind as I took this photograph are these:
I take, O cross, thy shadow
for my abiding place:
I ask no other sunshine than
the sunshine of his face;
content to let the world go by,
to know no gain nor loss;
my sinful self my only shame,
my glory all the cross.
The hymn begins:
Beneath the cross of Jesus
I fain would take my stand,
the shadow of a mighty Rock
within a weary land...
Forgive the following personal reminiscence, but it helps explain much of what my life has been, and been about. Fifty five years ago today, exactly to the day, I enacted those first lines of the hymn. I can remember the place, the time and the circumstances in which as a young man of 16 years, I took my stand alongside Jesus, and beneath his cross. Yes, a classic evangelical conversion narrative, complete with a life already in trouble, potential squandered, and life chances already decreasing in a life going down the drain. But on April 16, 1967, in repentant faith and then wondering gratitude, I offered my life to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Ever since, beneath the cross of Jesus has been my abiding place.
All that has happened in my life since, I owe to what I now know was my response of faith to a love that came looking for me, love such as I never imagined. Throughout the subsequent years of Christian existence I have prayed and read, preached in churches and shared in conversations, written books and articles, about the love of God in Christ. These Holy Week blog posts are part of that same ministry of glad indebtedness 'beneath the cross of Jesus'.
On this Holy Saturday, 55 years on, looking again at this steel grey cross engineered with such precision, its shadow cast by sunlight, the remaining words of the hymn take on a deeply personal note of gratitude:
Upon the cross of Jesus
mine eye at times can see
the very dying form of One
who suffered there for me:
and from my stricken heart with tears
two wonders I confess,
the wonders of redeeming love
and my unworthiness.
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