Life & Work Magazine
Life & Work Magazine


3 mins

COMMENT

The healing cross

The Very Rev Albert Bogle reflects on the healing power of Lent.

LAST month in my article I focused on the Sanctuary First theme for February.

We looked at The Parable of Social Distancing – reflecting upon how our current ‘social distancing’ can be understood as a living parable describing how many of us have been socially distant from one another for years.

It has become the mantra of so many to consider our own needs first before others.

This kind of thinking has infiltrated politics and even into the thinking of the church as congregations and communities find themselves pitching their needs over and against one another during this period of change and consolidation.

As we move further into the period of Lent the death and resurrection of Jesus speaks to each one of us about our need to be socially reconciled to each other and of our need to be spiritually reconciled to God.

The story that is unfolding before our eyes as we read the gospel accounts and the Hebrew Scriptures is one that invites each of us into a relationship with God – one in which we recognise that he has become our sorrow bearer and in doing so has also reconciled the irreconcilable.

As the Apostle Paul wrote: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19) .

Notice this idea that we are being reconciled collectively. The Gospel is not just about ‘me’. It’s about ‘us’. There is no relationship that cannot be redeemed and mended. The power of the cross engages with every form of brokenness, deceit and shame.

Read again the invitation of the prophet Isaiah in Chapter 53. As you read it, ask the Holy Spirit to help you to look and see and understand something of the amazing mystery and love of God. Isaiah gives the reader permission to be surprised and even astounded at what is going to be encountered through the reading.

Don’t turn away from the rejection and sorrow. Allow yourself to be drawn into the heart and mind and soul of the suffering servant. Encounter him as a child growing up in an occupied land with no future.

Despised and rejected by so many. Thought to be mad by even his mother and brother as he starts out in his ministry. Follow him being betrayed and denied by his closest friends, crouched and forsaken, crucified and abandoned. How we want to turn our faces from such sorrow. In the words of Martin Luther, paraphrased, as we look at The Suffering Servant, God does not appear to be in this bleeding battered broken body.

Yet Luther doesn’t give up. He began to meditate on the cross of Christ and it came to him that the God who is crucified is hidden in the revelation of the cross.

Luther concludes that it is faith alone that reveals to us its meaning, even though it be against our will to consider, ‘the riddle of the hidden and crucified God’, spoken of in Isaiah 45:15.

So what is it that draws us to the cross of Christ? Like many before and since it often feels foolish to believe in a crucified saviour.

Surely it is the revelation that he has borne our shame and sorrow. This is not discovered by reason or logic. It is revealed.

He stands with us in our feelings of abandonment and angst. The cross of Christ allows us to explore our own weakness and helplessness and in doing so we encounter the glory hidden beneath the sorrows of life.

“As we move further into the period of Lent the death and resurrection of Jesus speaks to each one of us about our need to be socially reconciled to each other and of our need to be spiritually reconciled to God.

It is through this cross of shame we find ourselves being healed. We find the depth of our own pain and sorrow being healed through his wounds. We find ourselves reconciled to each other and reconciled to God. As Isaiah the prophet says, “Who would believe this?” And we respond. “We wouldn’t if we hadn’t seen it with our own eyes of faith and encountered it in the grace and mercy of a broken church being healed by a crucified Saviour”.

This article appears in the March 2021 Issue of Life and Work

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  COPIED
This article appears in the March 2021 Issue of Life and Work