IT WAS HORRIBLE
Our real hell only began about 11 a.m. They started dropping 6¨ high explosive
shells into us. You could hear them
coming and they made a row when they hit anything. The 4th dropped plumb into one of
my guns and blew four people to pieces – I was covered in their blood and
pieces of their limbs. Some of them were
not quite dead, but horribly wounded and kept on talking and begging for water,
or to be shot. It was horrible. For three hours this went on.
So wrote a
soldier to his mother in September 1914, six weeks into WWI. So might a person write today who is caught
in the inferno of Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus or in any other hellish
place on earth. Calvary is not far from
us. “From the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth
hour” (Matt 27:45). Another hellish
three hours.
Good Friday
is the one day in the year when we remember the awful suffering many of our
brothers and sisters endure. In a real
sense they suffer “for us” as Jesus did.
The soldier above was actually my uncle and the mother my
grandmother. He was killed two years
later and the family wrote on his remembrance card, “No one can have greater
love than to lay down their life for their friends” (John 13:15). It is not
“them” who are suffering in Damascus; it is us.
But Good
Friday is not pointless, a waste, a disaster.
Jesus says “it was necessary” (Luke 24:26). There is no other way to break the grip of
evil other than to confront it and accept the price – even to the extent of
being broken by it and losing one’s life.
Good Friday and Easter Sunday are the two sides of the same coin; you
cannot have one without the other.
Somewhere, somehow, in the awfulness of human suffering there is the
seed of a new and joyful life. Evil is conquered. And that is also what we remember this day.
That cross we hang around our neck or place on our wall is not a sign of defeat
but of defeat transformed.
The Son of
God has done this. John is uncomfortable with Luke’s Simon of Cyrene. John says
Jesus carried his own cross. It is he,
the one from heaven, who alone has opened the way to the Father for us.
Good Friday 30 March 2018
Isaiah 52:13-53:12 Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9 John18:1-19:42
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