May I speak in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Nigel Farage, the leader of the political party known as ‘Reform’ has described this country as ‘broken Britain’. Organisations not functioning properly, a weak economy and an increase in homelessness are examples of this breakdown.
Many people would agree with this dismal picture of where we are today. Recently, I was chatting over coffee with one such person, who was anxious about this situation. My instinctive reaction was to produce a sentence that I have found helpful in keeping hope alive. I said that ‘today’s rocks are tomorrow’s road’. In other words, when things break down out of the breakage comes a way forward that involves a restructuring of what has gone before. However bleak the landscape it is still the landscape upon which the new can be created and eventually flourish. New generations with new ideas can make this happen.
You may think that I am being wildly optimistic and that humanity with its never-ending wars will eventually be wiped out in a nuclear war, if it has not already been wiped out by catastrophic climate change. Understandable, but this does not square with the Christian story of destruction and renewal.
In today’s Gospel reading we are given the ultimate example of such destruction and renewal. In this reading, Jesus is taken to the hill outside ancient Jerusalem where he was crucified, also known as Golgotha, meaning “Place of the Skull”. The word ‘skull’ immediately suggests the words ‘skeleton’ and ‘death’. To quote from the book entitled ‘Dismas, the Penitent Thief’ by Mark Thomas Jones, this place was a ‘bleak, forbidding and rocky landscape, one that is desolate and devoid of hope’. Here, Jesus was crucified on the Cross, flanked by two criminals. The nails pierced his hands and feet, the crown of thorns pierced his head and he was left to die, as were the two criminals either side of him, a slow and agonizing death.
Here we see so much breakage; the rocks, the bodies broken on the Cross and the breakdown of the women who wept around Jesus. Many artists over the centuries have conveyed this grim scene. ‘Crucifixion’ by Thomas Eakins, painted in 1880, well depicts the barren landscape and desolation and the 1946 ‘Crucifixion’ by Russell Drysdale gives the bleak and hostile nature of the landscape, based on his experience of severe drought in Australia.
Yet, we as Christians know, do we not, that despite all these rocks, tomorrow’s road will be put before us. A glimpse of this promise is given to us in today’s reading when one of the criminals, Dismas, says; ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom’ and Jesus replies ‘Truly, I tell you today you will be with me in Paradise’. Here is an indication that out of all this extreme sorrow, God’s kingdom will come. As the Jerome Biblical commentary expresses it: ‘punishment is not God’s final word’. The death of Jesus on the Cross is not an ending but a death that saves us from our sins and offers us eternal salvation in the kingdom to come. As the Commentary on Luke by Woodward, Gooder and Pryce expresses it; ‘we are led by way of the Cross to an apprehension of God’s love. The love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things to the end’. That is why Jesus does not give in to the meanness and arrogance around him. In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, Paul gives a great summing up of all that has occurred. He writes that ‘God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins’. For Paul, Jesus is the image of the invisible God. All things were created through him and for him. In him God has reconciled to himself all things, earth and heaven, by making peace through the blood of the Cross.
This is our Christian hope of light following darkness and we can make it the motive for us to persevere when the rocks surround us, reminding ourselves that however bleak a situation we are in, God will never abandon his creation. He is working his purposes out and trusting in his love for us we can continue to seek ways to create a better world.
If we want a further affirmation of God’s loving care for us we can find it in the Old Testament. In the Book of Jeremiah, we learn that God says woe to shepherds who scatter his sheep. He will gather them and look after the remnant. In Psalm 46, God defends city and people. God, the Psalmist writes, is our refuge and strength. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear. Here we see that it is God who does the breaking when it comes to any threat being made against his sheep.
Returning to today’s world let us not despair but hold on to this promise of eternal life and do what we can to turn the dry wood of the Cross into a beautiful, life enhancing green.
AMEN