This image evokes so many memories for me, and so provokes numerous thoughts and emotions. It never fails to touch that deep place where faith, hope and love abide.
I choose that older quaint word 'abide' quite deliberately. "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love." (John 15.9) In the background and foreground of those words is the cross, foreshadowed. "I take, O Cross, thy shadow for my abiding place..."
The photo is of the rose window in Crown Terrace Baptist Church. I remember nearly forty years ago asking one of the church members, a gifted carpenter, to make a plain cross as a focal point beneath that window. The combination of light and shadow, of word and image, creates a complex intersection which centres on the centre of the cross.
The text from the prologue of John's Gospel is relevant for both Advent and Easter. But especially in Holy Week, and with Good Friday approaching, those words surrounding the sunlight and shadow, vibrate with significance. "In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men." (John 1.4) Light comes through the cross; life comes through the dying of God's Son; the One who is Life and Light is God's gift to the world.
Looking deeply into the centre of this photo, where the window of light is circled by sacred text, and is supported by the shadowed cross, I found my mind rehearsing the verse of a Christmas carol which, like the text, easily translates from Advent to Easter:
Light and Life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings.
mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die
born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth,
Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the new born King.
The Cross is the necessary prelude to resurrection, and resurrection the required climax of God's triumphant love. Easter combines darkness and light, death and life, despair and hope, violence and peace, hate and love, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
Those simple spars of wood, joined and shaped, placed just so beneath the lights and under the source of sunlight, draw our wondering eyes, and tell a story. And often enough, as I sit somewhere in this church, and reflect on my own story, of light and darkness, of life and death, of hope and despair, of joy and sadness, the words of that text, encircling the window and crowning the cross, reaffirm what it is I believe.
Because the story of Jesus draws us in, and invites us to join our story with His. I think of this text, window and cross, as a special place where it's possible to be put together again, the mind's fugitive thoughts regathered, the heart's anxieties and regrets brought to the place where we are fully understood, and where the story of my life so far can pause, before continuing on.
Because of Holy Week and its penultimate act of crucifixion, followed by the ultimate event of resurrection, some anonymous follower of Jesus wrote words that explain the mystery and the miracle of Easter, and how the story of Jesus becomes our story:
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
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