I preached four addresses during the first hour and a half of the Three Hours. the readings were Judges 9.8-15, Genesis 28.10-17, Sirach 38.24-34, and Genesis 22.1-12.

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The thorns

In our churches, in works of art across the centuries, a series of images have been used that serve as shorthand for the events that we’ve been remembering during this week but especially today. They’re known as instruments of the passion or ‘Arma Christi’, the arms of Christ, arms as in the sense of symbols as in coat of arms. They’re the things, mostly inanimate objects but sometimes animals and people who in one way or another contributed to or were used in achieving Christ’s passion.

In our Harvard Chapel we have a wonderful example of what’s called a vexillum. A vexillum was a banner, a standard, carried by Roman legionnaires and is what’s referred to in the great hymn for Passiontide ‘Vexilla regis’ ‘The royal banners forward go’. In Christian use it’s the display of these symbols, the lance, the sponge on a stick, the crown of thorns, the proclamation nailed to the cross and the cross itself all arranged together.

It was made in the 1970’s when new furnishings for the Cathedral were being designed by George Pace the then Cathedral architect. As with all of Pace’s work it has the familiar stark, jagged edges, a simple, severe form and is made of his favoured materials of black wrought iron and limed oak. Well, this vexillum, crafted in metal is a sizeable piece of work. It was intended to be bolted to the back of the presidential chair so that during the Eucharist the tower space, where the liturgy is celebrated, would be dominated by the cross and the instruments of the passion.

It was a good idea but as with many ideas it needed just a little extra working through. The problem is that although the presidential chair is no lightweight thing in itself, the vexillum is heavier and it was discovered that whilst the president of the Eucharist was seated all was well but whenever the priest stood up, as we are wont to do during a service from time to time, the whole thing toppled over.

So the poor vexillum was sidelined to a wall but eventually found its way into the Harvard Chapel alongside the altar.

I know George Pace’s work isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but I love this particular piece. And I love it because it keeps in my mind the nature of the suffering of Christ and the way in which we, humankind, are so good at devising more and more dreadful ways of humiliating, torturing, defiling and ultimately killing each other. And I need to be reminded of just how mechanistic we can be about it because I could easily forget.

A few years ago I was on a city break in Poland and we were staying in Cracow. It was a lovely few days in the week between Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday. The main square in the centre of Cracow was filled with a special fair at which all manner of wonderful religious goods were on sale – things to decorate the home with on Palm Sunday, things to carry to church, and of course acres of wonderfully painted eggs, special Easter gifts and decorations. It was absolutely lovely.

But we took time out from the splendour of the fair to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau. I’d been a number of times to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the great holocaust memorial and museum there and I’d wept at what I’d seen and wept particularly in the children’s memorial with its sea of faces and constant background of the names of the victims being read out. I’d been to the holocaust exhibition down the road from here at the Imperial War Museum and been touched particularly by the recorded interviews with survivors that are played there – snatches of memories, things that can never be forgotten, things that can hardly be rendered into words.

But I was still unprepared for the experience of visiting those two camps and such familiar sights – the entrance gateway to Auschwitz and the railway entrance at Birkenau. I knew them before I saw them, but seeing them stunned me. These places, these killing places were reality, part of my reality.

Our visit finished near to the place where the trains entered Birkenau and our guide took us to some of the accommodation sheds that’ve been reconstructed. What was driven home to me during the visit was the extent to which this was the industrialisation of killing, that the very techniques that had made German industry so wonderful and so successful had been harnessed by the Nazis to create an efficient killing machine.

The sheds, our guide explained, where actually prefabricated stable blocks which were adapted for the purpose. They were readily available and easy to construct. And then she told me what I found most chilling of all – why I found it the most chilling I don’t know – I think it was because it was so calculated, so deliberate that I couldn’t believe it. She said that in order to increase capacity in the sheds the bunks were slanted, one towards the other, like a mountain range through the length of the shed. You can get a lot more people in the space if you build the bunks in that way. I looked at the reconstructed bunks and the photographs confirming it, all at this angle, to get more victims in. And my heart broke.

‘Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe.’ (John 19.1-2)

I suppose they were bored, I suppose that they just needed to entertain themselves. It was a difficult place to be a soldier; it was a difficult place to be the Governor. These people with their religious obsessions, their rules and regulations, their petty squabbles and their zealous fanatics were almost ungovernable. And why were they there – another piece of land when they already had control of so much.

They’d heard the accusations and they’d laughed amongst themselves. ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’ Pilate had asked the prisoner and his answer really told them nothing either way. But if you asked them he didn’t look like a king – thin, poor, weak – none of the things that would suggest he was a king – and if he was a king where was his army, where were his followers. And if he were their king why was the crowd so eager to dispatch him and save the life of a bandit. They’d seen kings and this was no king like they’d ever seen.

So they did what they wanted to do. So he thinks he’s a king well we’ll make him look like one – with a crown – but of thorns – and with a purple robe and a reed in his right hand and then they would bow the knee – a king!

The thorns were to hand and it couldn’t have been an easy job to twist them into a makeshift crown but they were determined to do it. There’s that most amazing painting that hangs in the National Gallery by Hieronymus Bosch entitled ‘The Crowning with Thorns’. Bosch has captured the moment just before the crown is forced onto Jesus’ head. Jesus looks at us the viewer with serenity. His face is pale and Bosch chooses to dress him in a white robe not a purple one as in the gospels. And he’s surrounded by four men, one on each corner of the picture – contemporary men to when the picture was painted, yet deeply grotesque in their ordinariness, and one holds the crown above Jesus’ head, captured in a moment before the cruel thorns are pressed into the flesh.

Investigations have shown that Bosch painted the men originally with much more evil, vicious looks on their faces. Now they look calm, enjoying what they’re doing, one almost smiling at the thought of what was going to happen. It’s much more powerful.

Our ability to humiliate, to injure, to attack and even kill our fellow human beings is unimaginably frightening and our constant ingenuity in finding more and more efficient ways of doing so causes us shame.

And Jesus stands there, passive, waiting for the worst to be done, and as he waits he represents in himself all those who will follow him to gallows and gas chambers and detention centres, on to barges to hold refugees, on planes destined for Rwanda, dressed in the garb that makes us feel better, the clothes of the victim, the garb of the oppressed, the crown of thorns for a king. And the fire comes out of the bramble, the fire of God’s all consuming love surmounted by a crown.

‘Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it as a burnt offering instead of his son.’

Jesus is the lamb caught in the thicket of thorns, the son offered up, to save us, who continue to humiliate and kill.

Lord Jesus, you faced the torment of barbaric punishment and mocking tongue: be with those who cry out in physical agony and emotional distress. You endured unbearable abuse: be with those who face torture and mockery in our world today. To you, Jesus, the King crowned with thorns, be honour and glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever. Amen.

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The ladder

Amongst the objects, the instruments of the passion, the ‘Arma Christi’ on the vexillum there’s a ladder, just an ordinary ladder, the sort of thing that I’d gingerly climb at home if I needed to reach higher than I normally can. It was part of the tools of those whose job it was to look after the place where the crucifixions took place. I don’t know who these people were, were they Roman soldiers on duty that day for this grisly task, were they slaves that had been captured somewhere else who were made to do the job that no one else wanted to do? Were they proud professionals who did this as their job, as their service to society?

One of the last and certainly most well known public hangmen in Britain, Albert Pierrepoint, was proud of the way in which he did his job on behalf of the nation. He felt that he’d nothing to be ashamed of – and I suppose why should he have been. It was legal, the due process of law had been followed and these men and women had been sentenced to death. As someone opposed to the death penalty wherever it’s practiced I can’t quite understand how someone could go to work and do the job of an executioner. But people manage to do the most amazing things.

In his book ‘The Reader’, Bernhard Schlink tells the story of Michael who falls in love with a woman who it turns out worked in a Nazi concentration camp sending women to their death in Auschwitz. In conversation with a man about the camp he’s told, ‘An executioner is not under orders. He’s doing his work, he doesn’t hate the people he executes, he’s not taking revenge on them, he’s not killing them because they’re in his way or threatening him, or attacking him. They’re a matter of such indifference to him that he can kill them as easily as not.’

In the film ‘The Green Mile’ we see through the horrors and the trauma of death row, through that indifference to the goodness that can manage to survive even in such a grizzly place.

So on that green hill far way – or rather not so green a hill, perhaps a quarry, perhaps a rubbish tip, certainly outside the walls, but not far from the walls on the roadside – there was a ladder waiting to be erected to aid those who had a job to do. It wasn’t to assist the condemned man – the more pain that could be inflicted, the more strain placed on the body, on the lungs and the heart at this stage, the faster the job would be done – it was there for the use of others.

The exact manner in which crucifixion took place is always debated. Certainly the images that we have in the Stations of the Cross, of Jesus dragging a fully formed cross behind him are completely wrong. What he would’ve been carrying across his shoulders was the cross beam that he would eventually be attached to. The vertical beam was probably always in position, awaiting the next victim. Or it may have been that the vertical beam was laid flat on the ground waiting for the cross member to be attached to it with the condemned person and the whole thing raised in one go.

However it was used, the ladder was there and it would certainly have come into use when the crucified man was dead. In order to get a dead weight down would take a lot of strength and a ladder would enable one of the executioners to get high enough to detach the corpse and using the winding sheet, lower it down to those below. Those of us who went to Oberammergau to see the delayed passion play this year will have seen that re-enacted in the most beautiful way, almost balletic in its gentleness.

Jacob had by stealth stolen his brother Esau’s blessing, his birthright and there was nothing that his father Isaac could do about it. Jacob was blessed and that was the end of the matter. Jacob though, eager to marry and armed with the blessing, leaves his home to find a wife and on his way to his mother’s relatives at some distance he stops when night falls and sleeps on the ground. It’s then that he has the dream of the ladder, the ladder that links heaven and earth, the ladder on which angels of God ascend and descend.

This ladder in many ways prefigures for us the ladder that we see lying at the foot of the cross waiting to be used. In many ways as well, it prefigures the cross itself. The cross is also a ladder linking earth with heaven, pointing from earth to heaven and raising Jesus to that intermediary point between the two.

In some reflections on the crucifixion, of course. Jesus is in no need of a ladder to get onto the cross. I love the way in which in every generation and in every society the cross is seen in a particular way. There’s a great Stanley Spencer painting called ‘The Crucifixion’. Like many of Spencer’s paintings the event is set in Cookham in Berkshire. It’s taking place in the High Street and there on either side of the cross are familiar buildings, red brick, tiles and clapper board. And everyone is in contemporary clothing including Our Lady who’s spread-eagled at the foot of the cross which is set into a huge pile of rubble.

The Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald is famous for the agony of the depiction of the crucifixion. Grunewald painted it at the time of the Peasant’s revolt when the world was expected to come to an end in 1500. The world from the perspective of the painter was in turmoil and coupled with this it had been commissioned by the Order of Saint Anthony who cared for the sick and especially those suffering from what was known as St Anthony’s Fire, a disease that caused horrific lesions and eruptions in the skin. Christ in his torments looks like one of those who would be looking at the picture. They saw themselves in him – his passion was their passion.

The Anglo-Saxons had their own agenda and for them it was the hero that they saw in Jesus. Here was a crucified saviour who would need no ladder to scale the cross. Here was a vigorous hero eager to embrace suffering in order to secure victory. And so in the wonderful poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’ we see depicted not in paint but in words a Christ for them.

This is the Rood, the Holy Cross, speaking

I saw then the Saviour of mankind
hasten with great zeal, as if he wanted to climb up on me.
There I did not dare, against the word of the Lord,
bow or break, when I saw the
corners of the earth tremble. I might have
felled all the enemies; even so, I stood fast.
He stripped himself then, young hero – that was God almighty –
strong and resolute; he ascended on the high gallows,
brave in the sight of many, when he wanted to ransom mankind.
I trembled when the warrior embraced me; even then I did not
dare to bow to earth,
fall to the corners of the earth, but I had to stand fast.
I was reared a cross. I raised up the powerful King, the Lord of heaven.

This is a much more active, dynamic way of seeing what happened and no ladder was required by a Christ like this.

But however it was achieved, Jesus was raised up above the earth for all to see, for all who gathered there, or passed by, those who hid in the shadows for fear of their own life, those who stood near the front to jeer and taunt and make his life hell, those who, still in fear, needed to be close, Mary, John and a few other brave women who looked up at him.

Not all the religious leaders were against Jesus. We know of three members of the Sanhedrin who were definitely supporters – Joseph of Arimathea who would give the tomb; Gamaliel who would argue on behalf of the early church; and of course Nicodemus. And it’s when at night, earlier in St John’s Gospel, that Nicodemus searches out Jesus to speak to him that we get a hint of the ladder and the cross.

Jesus says ‘No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’ (John 3.13-15)

The language of ascending and descending takes us back to that earlier ladder, the one that Jacob sees in his dreams but Jesus is also referring to another event, an event associated with the Exodus. You’ll remember the story of the plague of serpents that God sends to bite the people in the wilderness. To cure them Moses makes a bronze serpent and sets it on a pole and when anyone was bitten by a serpent they would look at the bronze serpent and live.

Jesus likens himself to that serpent on the pole who will save his people, who will cure them of their sickness and disease, who in dying will save them from death. And as Jesus says later in St Johns Gospel ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ (John 12.32)

Our incarnate God hangs in the space between earth and heaven raising our eyes to heaven, drawing heaven’s gaze to earth and on that ladder, that ladder of perfection our souls continue to climb. ‘Climb that gracious ladder O Christian soul, climb me’ says the Holy Rood ‘for this is the gate of heaven’.

And then the ladder is brought out again and men take down the body and hand it to his mother. She stands at the foot of the ladder where it is planted on the earth because to the earth she must return her heavenly son.

Lord Jesus, you were lifted high upon the cross that you might draw each one of us to you; be with those who cannot lift their eyes to look at you. Your body was racked with pain as they lifted you; be with those who are suffering terribly from incurable, untreatable pain. To you, Jesus, lifted between heaven and earth, be honour and glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever. Amen.

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The nails

For those who are familiar with the Stations of the Cross the eleventh station is perhaps the most painful to contemplate. As you’ll know, those fourteen traditional stations were first established along the route of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem from the Ecce Homo Convent which is built over the site of the Antonio Fortress where the trial of Jesus took place, right through to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre built by Constantine at the instruction of his mother Helena over the site where she discovered the true cross. Helena excavated on a hillside that had been outside of the city at the time of Christ and a place that was revered by the early Christians.

Modern pilgrims find it almost impossible to believe that there was ever a hill there. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre completely obliterates any sign of a hill, except that to get to the final series of stations you have to mount the foot-worn steps which take you to the site of Calvary where you keep the 11th and the 12th stations.

They’re next to one another on top of the remains of a rock in which there’s a rift, a crack, as though caused by the earthquake that St Matthew refers to in his gospel. This is Calvary and it’s here that you remember that Jesus was nailed to the cross, the eleventh station and that Jesus dies on the cross, the twelfth.

Interestingly, tradition has it that at the base of that fissure in the rock are the skull and the bones of Adam and that’s why on many icons of the crucifixion you’ll see that the foot of the cross is on a skull and cross bones. The story of humankind has come full circle as Jesus is nailed to the wood of the cross on which he’ll be raised for all to see, on the grave of the one who fell through the fruit of another tree.

I remember when ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ came out as a film. We went along to watch it and there was one bit that stayed with me and always has. At the crucifixion as Jesus is placed on the cross, Lloyd Webber’s music dies away and all you can hear are the hammer blows and the laughter, the hammer blows and the laughter as one by one the nails are driven home and Jesus, in agony, is fixed to the cross.

‘They pierced me with dark nails;
on me are the wounds visible,
the open wounds of malice’

says the Holy Cross, the Holy Rood in the Anglo Saxon poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’ from which I quoted earlier. The nails pierce the body and they pierce the wood, the open wounds of malice.

We’re thinking about the instruments of the passion, those objects and sometimes people we find on the vexillum, the collection of things we associate with the passion – the lance, the ladder, the dice, the sponge on a reed, the crown of thorns – and amongst them will be some nails. Traditionally there are three, one for either hand, or more properly for each wrist and one to go through both of the feet. But scholars suggest that it’s more likely that there would be four nails, one not through both feet together as on a standard crucifix but through each of the ankles. But three or four, there would’ve been nails.

As we began thinking about these things on Palm Sunday I said that none of these things is inherently bad, just as none of us is inherently bad. The reading from Ecclesiasticus, the book of Sirach as it’s sometimes called, celebrates many things and amongst them celebrates the work of the Smith. ‘He sets his heart on finishing his handiwork’ says the writer without any value judgement. And of course, there can be none. We need the nails the Smith produces to build our homes, to build our implements of the field, to hold together the everyday objects that we require to live. He has fashioned his nails in good faith not thinking that they will hold God to a cross.

He fashions the head of a lance in good faith, it might go to a farmer to protect his sheep from the wolves, it might go to a hunter to get a supply of fresh meat for his family. He fashions the lance not thinking that it will spear the side of Christ.

It’s what we do with everything that creates the problem. I was listening to a programme about the Austrian physicist Lisa Meitner who was one of those closely bound up with the research into the splitting of the atom. Meitner, a pacifist, was of course horrified when her peaceful studies were then used for a terrible end when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan to end the war in the Pacific. Like the Smith she had stood back to admire her handiwork only to discover that it was used to kill her brothers and sisters. We cannot blame the nails but those who wield the hammers that drive them home.

The nails, however, can become a powerful symbol in their own right. At the heart of Coventry Cathedral stands a cross, made of three nails, taken from the devastation of the Cathedral following the night that it was bombed. The medieval nails that had held the roof together now hold together to make a cross – and we have a copy of it here.

But instead of it representing the bitterness of war, the horror of destruction, the nails plucked from the rubble represent the very opposite, reconciliation, peace, a new beginning, hope, all of those things that churches like this one, part of that great Community of the Cross of Nails, stand for and pray for.

The nails are reimagined, and they become even more powerful in their repurposed life.

I was asked to take my favourite book to a school assembly in our Cathedral Primary School so I took Oscar Wilde’s short stories ‘A House of Pomegranates’ a book that I’ve always returned to again and again. And the story that I highlighted for the children was that of the Selfish Giant. You’ll remember the story – the giant has a beautiful garden but he’s too selfish to allow the local children to play in it and so the flowers stop blooming and the birds never visit and winter never leaves his garden. Then one day he finds a small child crying, he has no one to play with. The giant for once moved, places him in the tree and the local children return and so does spring and growth and life but the little boy never returns. Then one winter’s day the giant wakes up and looks out and sees a marvellous light. In the midst of the snow a tree is full of blossom and there is the little boy he had loved.

The story continues

Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, ‘Who hath dared to wound thee?’ For on the palms of the child’s hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet. ‘Who hath dared to wound thee?’ cried the Giant; ‘tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him.’ ‘Nay!’ answered the child; ‘but these are the wounds of Love.’
‘Who art thou?’ said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child. And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, ‘You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.’
And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.

Wilde, whether he knew it or not, picked up on a verse from the prophet Zechariah ‘I received these [wounds]in the house of my friends’.

The nails harshly hammered home make marks that reveal the love of God to us. ‘How much do I love you’ says God? Jesus shows us his hands and side. ‘My Lord and my God’ we say with Thomas. Now we know how much God loves us. We make the nails, he bears the wounds and we live in his love.

Lord Jesus, you bled in pain as the nails were driven into your flesh: transform through the mystery of your love the pain of those who suffer. You bear on your body the marks of your love; may we always know the depth of your love for us. To you, Jesus, nailed to the cross, be honour and glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever. Amen.

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The wood

‘Ecce lignum crucis’ ‘Behold the wood of the cross on which hung the saviour of the world’ will be sung shortly, ‘Come, let us worship’. And the cross will be shown to us. And we’ll look and we’ll see the wood and we’ll look and we’ll see Jesus, crucified man, crucified God.

Not that we’re claiming that this is the true cross, but this is the wood and on wood was hung Jesus, the Saviour of the World.

There are some things in Anglican circles that sort the sheep from the goats. One of them is incense, another is the Hail Mary and another is the veneration of the cross. Perhaps it’s just too much for our English sceptical nature that we should approach the cross and kneel before it, even less that we should kiss it. It can make us feel uncomfortable.

The greatest trade in relics of course focused on the cross on which Jesus died. St Helena was supposed to have found it and from there the story developed as the cross was taken and chopped up and distributed so that by the time of the Reformation Calvin said in this Treatise on Relics about the true cross

“There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen. In some places there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poitiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.”

Of course, there was wood, there was a tree, felled, sawn, used, to make a cross. On the outskirts of west Jerusalem, just close to where the Knesset now stands, is a fortress like monastery. It’s the Monastery of the Cross, now Greek, once Armenian. But at its heart is the most magnificent spot.

The whole complex is built around a small, but now silver adorned hole, where a tree once grew. It was the tree that was felled to make the cross. I walked from there on my own, having knelt beside the hole and then travelled the few miles that wood would have travelled, from the forest to the place of execution, where the tree was once more raised, a noble tree, now a throne, for a king.

Who knows whether that was the place where the tree was felled. But what I do know is that that the little pilgrimage I made was wonderful and that in the 4th century when Egeria, a Spanish nun on a three year pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was in the Holy Sepulchre on Good Friday she did what we’ll be doing in just a few moments. She writes that after the bishop hasd exposed the cross to the eyes of the congregation ‘all the people pass by one by one, all bowing themselves, they touch the Cross and the title, first with their foreheads and then with their eyes; then they kiss the Cross and pass through, but none lays his hand upon it to touch it.’

For me the Liturgy of Good Friday is one of the most important and to preside at it one of the greatest privileges that a priest has. To stand there as people come forward to pray before the cross to venerate it in their own way, in their own time, is simply wonderful and moving and profound.

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

wrote Issac Watts.

We were unable to stand under the cross with Mary, we were unable to stand there alongside John, we were not there, but we are here and in this place and on this day the wood is the wood of the cross and we can be there with the Lord, we can be there recognising what God has done for you, for me, for us.

I simply cannot understand the gracious and magnificent love of God for fallen humanity; I cannot come to terms with the magnitude and generosity of love that finds its perfect expression on the wood of the cross. I cannot comprehend how much God loves me, how much he loves us, who simply do not deserve it.

God’s commitment to humanity seems to know no bounds; accepting human nature in the incarnation, living a patient hidden life in the carpenter’s shop until the time was right; calling, teaching, healing and making through signs and wonders, through transfiguration, the reality of God among us known. And then with his face turned to Jerusalem making his way towards the inevitable.

We’ve witnessed the adulation of the crowds as people in the branches of the trees pulled them down to make for him a triumphal carpet; we’ve seen the love of his followers for him as oil was poured and at the supper table he was prepared for burial; we saw a kiss so different from his mother’s, the sign of betrayal that brought the troops; we were washed by the servant king who taught us how to love and to serve, and the journey has brought us here where a crown of thorns is placed on him in mockery, where a ladder raises him on high, where nails secure him to the wood of the cross. And all this we’ve seen because God loves us so much, ‘that he gave his only son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’ as St John so clearly, so profoundly puts it.

This is the simple staggering truth that God became man for this moment, to save you, to save me, to die for you, to die for me, to embrace this tree, this wood so that we might embrace eternal life. The fruit of the tree in the garden had brought us condemnation, now the fruit of this tree on this barren, blasted hillside, will bring us life.

Come let us worship.

Lord Jesus, you died on the cross for us and for our salvation: give courage to the dying, comfort to the bereaved, peace to the departed. In death you entered into the darkest place of all: bring us out of our darkness to the light of your glorious presence. To you, Jesus, your lifeless body hanging on the tree of shame, be honour and glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever. Amen.