Good Friday Meditation

Dr Stumpy Greenisland sent me his Good Friday Mediatation,

which is published here with his permission.

Looking God in the Eye

Steve sat down opposite me in the cafe and opened up like a book. He wasn’t a chap who I knew all that well, and apart from anything else I hadn’t seen him in maybe twelve years. I’d asked him how his wife was – you know how you do. But his wife was dead; she died 10 years ago. Cancer. By the time the diagnosis was given it was too late. It was already through her body like a wildfire and in six months she was dead. He watched her age twenty years in two months, and by the end all that was left was an exhausted corpse. Now all he has are old pictures, and the colour, he says with a blackened laugh, is beginning to fade on them. But the memory of her death is as vivid as ever; I could see the tears well up in his eyes. In my naivety it hadn’t occurred to me that a death could leave a wound that might never heal – or that might split open again, fleshy and red, at a moments notice. I felt like I fumbled my way through the cup of coffee – tried to listen and not say anything stupid- and then he had to go; pick his daughter up from a music lesson.

I wandered into a bookshop and, as is my wont, browsed the theology section, and a huge anger rose up inside me – all these books – but none of them could explain why Steve’s wife had to die is so much pain, and why Steve was left trying to hold the bits of his life together like shards of broken pottery. And how many other people there must be out there carrying sorrow around like a lead weight for years and most people don’t even notice. Why Lord? What is the point?

However, unlike Job, I live after the incarnation. No answer can be made small enough to fit in my tiny mind – but God in Christ has fitted Himself into His creation as a man. I get no answer to my question on suffering, but in Jesus I see the God who suffers with us and for us.

“The cross”, says Martin Luther, “is the measure of all things”. It gives us the measure of God’s love, the measure of God’s humility, and the measure of our fallen-ness. God’s enthronement here on earth is naked and bloodied, nailed to a cross. Probably not high and lifted up as much religious art has pictured him, but rather with legs bent, and feet nailed a few inches from the ground. You could have gone up and looked him in the eye, or spat in his face. Christian – behold your God.

God – the maker of stars, the giver of life, the Judge of all time and space became one of us, was treated as a fool and died as a nobody. And this he did for two reasons. Firstly, and pre-eminently, he died to save us from our sin. In the cross, God’s justice and mercy meet as he takes the punishment that the morality built into his creation, and the sheer holiness that is his character, demands.

But there is also another reason, and that is to identify with us, so that we might know that our God is the God who suffers in, and for, and with his creation. So that when Steve meets the Lord, as his wife has done already, and speaks with him as a man to a man, he will know that God understands the sorrow of his life, not because he is omnipotent and all knowing, but because he made himself nothing, was made in human likeness, humbled himself, and became obedient to death – even death on a cross. He suffered like us.

I sometimes wonder whether if, even in heaven, we’ll ever be able to understand why certain things happened to us, or to those we love. Will all our questions be answered? My guess is that they won’t, because we are merely immortal, not infinite. But God will wipe the tears from Steve’s eyes, and from his wife’s, and there will be peace.

Dr Stumpy Greenisland.