Good Friday 2020

Good Friday 2020

This afternoon, as I sat in the garden with a cup of tea, taking a break from the kitchen, I heard a chainsaw somewhere in the neighbourhood. My thoughts turned to Jesus’ cross, and who might have made it, and the irony of a carpenter making a cross upon which another carpenter would die. I wondered how that might have felt.

My thoughts then turned to how those of us who create things feel about our creations. I have spent much of the day in the kitchen, making brownies, lemon cake, and banana bread, and then I helped my stepson make a steak pie for tea. The banana bread was the only disaster – I made it with every good intention but it has unfortunately ended up beyond edible and only fit for the birds. I have a sense of disappointment about that.  Despite that, I am happy that the other cakes turned out well and can be enjoyed. I am happy although I know that my creations will soon disappear.

Lots of us are creative, but I think there is a special kind of person who can make something knowing that it will be destroyed. I think back to July 2014 when my elder stepson spent hours lovingly crafting a wooden coffin for his father’s body, knowing that within days that beautiful creation would go up flames in the crematorium. I remember the grace and love with which he worked on that precious project.

And so my thoughts turned to God, sending his beloved Son to be our Messiah, knowing that the fulfilment of scripture would be the breaking of that precious body on the cross. For me, I know that my God would have felt enormous pain in that death, although God knew that the resurrection would come.

On this day, I feel sadness and pain at the way Jesus was treated, how shameful his death because humanity “knew him not” and for me, it is a day of regret and penitence; when I think about what my faith means to me and how I live [or fail to live] for Christ. But today I found some respite in realising that God knows about seasons and intentions: that God sent Jesus to be with us, for a season, and that Jesus had a purpose – to bring humanity back to God – and then his time would be done. To have a grasp of that, I can remember that other creations, though far less divine, might also just be for a season, and that we might hold on to them more lightly if we realised that.

Loss is devastating, and as a widow, I know that – I might be the OH’s wife now but I will always be the FH's widow. In this terrible pandemic, the global society is losing loved ones at an alarming rate, and the way that death is having to happen in the current circumstances is incredibly sad: those who die separated from their loved ones, and the families and friends unable to be with them yet desperate to share last words, last loving words, and the anguish that that causes will always be unanswerable. In this awful season, I draw some comfort from knowing that Jesus knew the pain of dying alone on that cross, and that God knows the pain of that separation too.

Lord Jesus, who knows our every pain, we pour out our regret today, our sadness and our repentance. Forgive us, for our sins as we remember your gift of yourself for us. Don’t let us hold on to things which are past, when you want us to give our energy to the future. Don’t let us live in the sadness of Good Friday and overlook the hope of the days yet to come. Amen.