Seeker

  For Good Friday this year and conscious of so much suffering in the world today, here's some words by Michael Mayne that I find helpful: "Only the Passion and death of Jesus can reconcile those two apparently irreconcilable truths: that God is in love with us, and that at some point in our lives we all experience suffering, pain and dereliction. Either God was not in Christ and the Cross is the ultimate symbol of all the meaninglessness that can destroy us, the absence of God, the triumph of the secular powers. Or God was in Christ and the Cross is the final word of a God who shares the pain and the dirt, the loneliness and the weakness, even the frightening sense of desolation and the death we may be called upon to experience ourselves. That was the audacious claim of the first Christians, that God is now reveraled as the one who pours himself out in love, a serving, foot-washing, crucified God, whose love cannot be altered or diminshed." Micheal Mayne, A Yea Lost and...

Today, Good Friday (or God's Friday) Christians reflect on the death of Jesus and its meaning. Here is how the Gospel of Luke describes the moment of Christ's death after hours of agonising suffering: "It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun's light failed, and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." Having said this, he breathed his last. When the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, "Certainly this man was innocent." And when all the crowds who had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts. But all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things." Luke 23: 44 - 49 On Good Friday Christians often reflect on the t...