Love’s as hard as nails,
Love is nails: 

Blunt, thick, hammered through 

The medial nerves of One 

Who, having made us, knew 

The thing He had done,
Seeing (what all that is)
Our cross, and His. 
 (C S Lewis)

St Mark’s Jesus is silent on the cross. All the way through the long and appalling hours he says nothing. That is, until the terrible cry of dereliction near the end,
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
All my life I have found this portrayal of Jesus hugely comforting because Jesus dies, as many people do die, feeling forsaken by God and yet, at the same time, crying out to God. It is comforting because it is real and true within human experience and the author of the Gospel does not evade it. But most of all it is because God in Jesus on the cross has not shirked the final terror and horror of human life; the feeling that finally one has been abandoned by God. How many people over the centuries must have felt that?
There is a famous story that rabbis in Auschwitz once decided to put God on trial – and found him guilty. The Nobel Laureate writer, Elie Wiesel was there. He said, “It happened at night; there were just three people. At the end of the trial, they used the word chayav, rather than ‘guilty’. It means ‘He owes us something’.”
Then they went to pray.
These rabbis, living in a manmade hell, having found God guilty did not turn away from Him; did not say, “I can no longer believe in God.” Just like Jesus on the cross they kept communication open even though what they were going through was inexplicable in terms of what they had understood God to be.
What was it for Jesus to lose his sense of connection with God? We cannot know fully but part of it must have been to lose his sense of identity. For someone who was “One with the Father” there was no Jesus without the Father, and for Christians there is no me without the relationship with God. I am only a person in relationship with others and I never knew who I was until I knew myself in relationship with Jesus. Losing a sense of identity happens to all human beings at one time or another in their life, usually after a big change, and it can be a terrible experience. Who am I now? What has my life been about? Has it all been wasted?
On the cross everything Jesus had was stripped away, and that of course was the point of this horrific form of execution. You are nothing, no one, it was intended to say. Crucified here on a rubbish dump, naked physically, your stress and emotions, your distraught mental state revealed to the world. You are nothing. No wonder Jesus identified himself with Psalm 22.
But I am a worm and not human:
Scorned by others and despised by the people.

This week, every week in the news, we hear of people living through terrible ordeals, their own crucifixions. Where is God, we cry, in all this? The answer is, he is there on the cross, in the midst of the chaos, despair and dereliction, a God who cannot escape, who does not want to escape, the cry of his people. The God, Who, having made us, knew the thing he had done – the God who owes us something, and who has never shirked paying the price.

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36: 26)

Many of us look at ourselves and feel that our hearts have grown cold: we do not see ourselves as kind or compassionate and sometimes we feel that we are less loving than we once were.   Quite often we feel that although we have been committed to our Church over long years our faith has grown dull. We may know much more than we did but we do not feel that love has grown alongside the knowledge. God is there but distant and we have grown cold.

Life hurts and the wounds multiply as the years pass. We look out at a world in pain and we feel helpless. We look at ourselves sometimes and feel pretty helpless, too – as the collect says, Oh, Lord, you know that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.

I have on the prayer desk in my office a large stone heart. It is heavy and cold. It symbolises my heart of stone which I wish to become a heart of flesh. But how is it to become this? The first thing I have to do is to take it into my hands. As I hold it in my warm hands of flesh the stone becomes warm. Our hearts have to be held by the Incarnate Christ. At this special time of Passiontide we need again to approach not some vague, abstract God ‘out there’ but the man, Jesus, who became flesh for us to be with us; the one God sent, because he loved the world so much. This human being who goes for us, touches us as no other can do.

In our gospel for Passion Sunday we read of the Greeks who came to the disciple, Philip, because they wanted to see Jesus. We are reminded of the first chapter of John’s gospel where the two disciples of John the Baptist, one of whom is Andrew, follow Jesus. He asks,

What are you looking for?

They answer, Rabbi, where are you staying?

And he answers them, Come and see.

In our deepest selves most of us who call ourselves Christian long to see Jesus; not through an intermediary, not second-hand, but for ourselves. We long to see Jesus. We know that if we see him for ourselves our hearts will burn within us as did the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. We know we will feel his love and that our love will be enflamed in response. But wonderful as this experience might be we need to be alert to what we are actually asking for. Are we asking to love God through Jesus simply for what we get out of it? If we want our hearts of stone to be turned into hearts of flesh, we have to realise that along with that comes exposure to pain, shame, humiliation, rejection and deep, deep sorrow. As John 12: 26 says, Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Our hearts became stone for self-protection. Now in this Passiontide we are reminded of what it costs to receive a new heart. Jesus asked his disciples if they were willing to drink the cup he drank, and they, not understanding, said they were willing. Are we?

Every morning at Launde Abbey we, like so many Christians, intercede for the world in all its suffering and for individuals who are sick in body, mind or spirit or bereaved. Sometimes it all seems so dreary and repetitive, so hopeless. As we pray we are reminded of suffering we would sooner turn from – other peoples’ pain and grief, and so often, our own selfish response. It is not at all a comfortable place to be but the call is to remain in that sort of prayer, however, hopeless it sometimes feels.

What was it like for Jesus on the cross, to hang there shamed and humiliated, scoffed at and in terrible agony for a world that did not seem to want, let alone understand what he had tried to give them? Can we see him there? Can we stay with him throughout the next 12 days? Can we look with the eyes of our heart and mind at Jesus, flesh of our flesh, and see his loving response to all who come in need and his commitment to his friends, to the very end. Held by another our hearts are warmed, flesh holding flesh. Held by Jesus, our God made flesh for our sakes, we are warmed more deeply than any other human being can warm us. If we are willing to suffer the cost of opening our hearts to the way God loves, our hearts will become hearts of flesh instead of the hearts of stone.

Mary and Martha are alive and well and both living inside all of us!

It is an interesting observation that if you ever do a workshop with people about Mary and Martha, most will say that they are more Martha than Mary.  And they will admit it as if they are somehow failures for being like that.  But the truth is we need to be both these people.  Martha is the hands and feet of Christ, the active Christian.  Mary is the contemplative, sitting at the feet of Jesus and learning from him what actions to take.

So we need to be both Mary and Martha to be fully rounded Christians – but not necessarily both at the same time!  In the story of Jesus’ visit to the home of the two women (Luke 10: 38-42) we know that Martha was banging around in the background, whilst Jesus was talking to Mary.  Martha was determined to make her presence and her irritation known.  She made it impossible for Jesus and Mary simply to be quiet together.

Only lately have I realised that Martha is alive and kicking often when I want to pray.  Part of my mind behaves exactly like her.  As soon as the Mary in me tries to settle down to listen to God, Martha starts muttering about all we have to do.  What about that email?  What about that visit you promised to make?  What about the phone call to a bereaved friend?  What about the ‘to do’ list?  Then there is the voice of accusation about all the things I have failed to do, and a rising sense of anxiety as I begin to feel, I must make up for lost time now; I haven’t got time for prayer!  Of course, the Martha in me longs to settle down with Jesus, too, but she is “worried and upset by many things” and can’t help but nag Mary and complain to Jesus.

What can we do about the noise of Martha when we are trying to listen to God?  To have both Mary and Martha in us at the time of prayer is perfectly normal and to have both sitting quietly at Jesus’ feet is ideal – the contemplative needs to be active and the active contemplative.  Some days Martha is very quiet.  But some days she makes such a racket that Mary cannot hear herself think.  It doesn’t matter how long you have prayed or even how disciplined you are about your practice, this is the experience of most of us. But I have found that if I imagine simply sitting at the feet of Jesus and looking at him, and allowing him to gaze at me, my thoughts and emotions are calmed.  Sometimes I simply share with him the thing that is most bothering Martha and then I just wait.  In the silence filled and the pause the anxiety subsides and Martha no longer dominates the conversation.

“Who do you say I am?”

This question in Mark 8:29 (and also in Matthew and Luke) is a pivotal moment in the gospels but also a pivotal moment in the journey of every Christian, not just once but over and over again.  Jesus asks this question of his disciples having taken them on a kind of retreat to Caesarea Philippi, away from the demanding crowds and workload.  Challenged at last to articulate who this man, Jesus, is whom they are following, Peter makes the great leap in discernment and says, “You are the Messiah.”

I vividly remember the first time I was challenged with the question, “Who do you think Jesus is?”  It was as if Jesus was asking me directly, “Who do you say I am?”  I had been going to church for quite some time and would have called myself a believer, but I had never been directly confronted in such a personal, direct and unembellished way with the question of who it was that I was following.  It was a turning point for me as it has been for so many people.  I named Jesus as my Saviour, God’s Son.  It was a step into deeper faith and commitment.

In the story as we know, Peter recognises Jesus as the Messiah but a few moments later is arguing with Jesus because Peter’s idea of Messiah and Jesus’ are quite different.  This is one of the reasons, according to scholars, as to why Mark’s Jesus is always telling people whom he has healed not to tell anyone.  Mark’s “messianic secret” as this is called, is a reflection of Jesus’ desire not to be misunderstood.  Jesus’ Messiah was to be the saviour of all people by going the way of the cross.  The Jews had their own interpretation of what the Messiah would be like: powerful, a wonder worker and healer, and the one who would drive out the Romans and re-establish the glory of the days of King David.  Peter argues with Jesus as he begins to teach his disciples the hard lessons to come of the Passion, because Jesus doesn’t fit in with his idea, the commonly held idea, of what the Messiah would be.

“Who do you say I am?”

The reason we have to keep asking ourselves that question as we journey through our Christian lives is that we, like Peter and the other disciples, have images of God that we have to shed and outgrow, over and over again.  We also have to imbue deeply, take into ourselves (shades of body / bread and blood / wine here) the profound meaning of the love expressed on the cross.  Our journey in faith leads to “metanoia,” the Greek word for a complete change of mind, a make-over, so to speak, of our whole vision of the world.   Hopefully, across a lifetime we undergo a paradigm shift from a self-centred and imprisoned view of the world to a God-centred vision, which sets us free and brings fulfilment and peace.  This journey cannot be hurried: it has to unfurl in its own time and each stage of our earthly lives gives food for thought and nourishment.  But it can be a journey that we refuse to take.  Peter, in the end, did not.

If Jesus asks you the question today what will you answer?  How does it differ in thought and feeling from times past?  What difference does it make now?

“Who do you say I am?