IT WAS HORRIBLE

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 4^th 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