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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with the Rev Dr Joel Edwards.

Good morning.

No depiction of the Cross comes close to describing Good Friday. Neither Salvador Dali’s Christ of St Johns, nor Coventry Cathedral’s Cross of Nails can take us there.

But the night when Jesus finished praying in Gethsemane and handed himself over to the press gang, history seized his frail body and pushed him inexorably toward the Cross.

The journey took him through the corridors of power, the desertion of his friends; spitting, a crown of thorns and ugly lacerations across his back. Then, the hurtful mantra of the Palm Sunday people, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ The uphill climb to the place of execution called Golgotha, where they nailed his body to planks of wood. And then, for a few short hours he pushed and pulled his way toward complete asphyxiation.

But the meaning of Good Friday goes deeper still.

It is the unimaginably excruciating infection of human sin and sinfulness which attached itself so deeply to him, that in the thoughts of the black theologian, James Cone, the Cross became everyone’s lynching tree as all human foolishness and frailty were sealed in his suffering. As the prophet Isaiah described it centuries earlier, ‘The Lord laid on him the sin of us all.’

As the crowd watched him fade away, they had no way of comprehending what the German theologian, Jürgen Moltmann could only describe as, The Crucified God.

About 3 o clock in the afternoon, under a dark sky, as the light was leaving his body, a final flickering thought remained: I will return.

Jesus
On this Good Friday
We remember what that we may never truly understand.
And we are forever grateful.

Amen.

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