Meditations for Good Friday
on
Words from the Cross
&
the Lord’s Prayer
THE LORD’S PRAYER AND
THE WORDS FROM THE CROSS
Introduction to the Seven Words
Welcome to this period of meditations on the Words our Lord spoke from the cross.
A three-hour period of simply keeping watch, reflecting on his suffering as he hung on the cross, has been a tradition followed by the Church since ancient days. The first written reference to such a service dates back to the fourth century, recorded by a Spanish nun Egeria who experienced it in Jerusalem on a pilgrimage. They are still greatly popular on Good Friday, around the world, very often concentrating on the Seven Words of Jesus on the Cross. We grew up as small children in that tradition.
When I first spent some time spent time preparing for this meditation, two thoughts struck me: the first was that so much of Jesus’ life and mission are echoed in the Words from the Cross; and secondly, in the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, he is gathering together all his concerns for the world and his mission.
So today we are attempting to pray the Lord’s Prayer, meditating on what his mission might have meant to him as he hung on the cross, responding to his circumstances through the Seven Words from the Cross.
In each session, we’ll spend about half the time in prayer and silence.
Our Father who art in Heaven
Let us start at the very beginning- a very good place to start, as we know! ‘Our Father who art in Heaven’. This phrase could be a kind of mission statement from Jesus and it encapsulates the mystery of the incarnation.
At Christmas we remember that heaven is come down to earth and earth is raised to heaven. The meeting of heaven and earth is a powerful message also at Easter and Ascension. The Father in Heaven sends his Son down to earth, so that humanity need no longer feel alienated or even distant from God, but can approach Him directly. And as Christ died on the cross, we are told that the veil in temple curtaining off the holy of holies, was torn in half. Highly symbolical. God curtained away from us, in the holy of holies, but is with us in our ordinary lives.
He came so that we may be enabled to call God ‘Abba’, Father, Dad.
It is not only in this prayer that he talks to people about ‘your father in heaven’, of course. The gospels are full of references to this. For example, consider the Sermon on the Mount: love your enemies and pray for your persecutors; only so can you be children of your Heavenly Father. Your good deeds must be secret and your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. Your father knows what your needs are before you ask him. It was so natural for Jesus to talk to God, his Father.
The first and the last of the words from the cross begin with Father. Father, forgive them for they know not what they do and Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.
We shouldn’t lose sight of the first little word either: Our father. To me it is probably the most significant point of Jesus’ teaching – God is our father and therefore we are all brothers and sisters, made in his own image, each precious to him; and there is no room within this family for hatred, injustice, cruelty, racism …
In our meditation, perhaps we could ponder on what our Father in Heaven was doing allowing his son to be crucified like a thug or a thief, stripped of all dignity, outside the city wall. And where we stand in relation to that cross.
We might like to meditate on
How Jesus would have felt on the cross about his Father
What we mean when we pray ‘Our Father’
“I believe in God, Father Almighty”; God who is in Heaven – invisible;
Lord, increase our faith, that feeling towards you as children, we may trust where we cannot see, and hope where all seems doubtful, ever looking to you as our Father that orders all things well, and patiently doing the work you have given us to do; according to the word of your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.
I have linked these three prayers together because there seems to be an implicit connection here. When we do God’s will, we are helping to build his kingdom here on earth and bringing glory to his name. Actually there is a grammatical connection here too: they are not separate sentences, as the clauses are linked by commas or semicolons, not full stops.
Jesus went into Jerusalem knowing that ‘his hour’ had come. The last supper had a finality about it, and he gave his farewell messages to the disciples in the upper room. And yet, when he withdrew into the garden of Gethsemane, he prays in anguish that if possible this cup should be removed from him; but then, ‘not my will, but thine be done’. He is actually calling out to his Abba. It is quite common in the Middle and Far East to call out for one’s mother or father at times of minor or major trouble.
When Jesus cries out citing the 22nd psalm, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me, God was so intimate to Jesus that he could easily have been shouting, Abba, why have you abandoned me? In Matthew’s gospel, that is the last of Jesus’ recorded words: having gone through that darkness of the soul, he dies knowing that he has done his Father’s will.
What about the Kingdom of God? the phrase the Kingdom of God is often interpreted in many ways to fit the theological agenda of those interpreting it. But non-controversially we could say that we need to remind ourselves constantly that the Kingdom of God is not limited by time or space. Jesus said, ‘the kingdom of God is around you’. But that was not just for then. We could think of all the Kingdom sayings – the man who sold everything he had to purchase the precious pearl; like a mustard seed; like a treasure buried in the field; like yeast that leavens dough …
There is a danger with this part of the Lord’s Prayer that we can behave like passive spectators. After all, even grammatically we use the passive: thy will be done, but not specifying by whom; hallowed be thy name, but by whom; thy kingdom come, but how? To look at the cross is to realise that we are not meant to be passive and to remind ourselves of that over-familiar saying of St Teresa of Avila, that Christ has no body on earth than ours, no hands but ours …
Dag Hammerskjöld put it more starkly: “If you fail, it is God who, through your betrayal of him will fail mankind. You imagine that you can bear the responsibility to God; can you bear it for him?” There is a challenge for us to meditate on as we ask God that his kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven!
We might like to meditate on
The temptations of Jesus and the values of the Kingdom
What we mean by the Kingdom of God
Who will make God’s Kingdom come on Earth
Christ now has no body on earth but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours; to the world, yours are the eyes through which to look at Christ’s compassion (Teresa of Avila.) Lord, make us ever mindful of this our calling to be your body on earth. Amen.
Give us this day our daily bread
Bread features often in the gospels. This is hardly surprising. In subsistence economies, food is a major preoccupation for most people, and most importantly the staple food which in the Middle East would have been bread of some sort. In fact, if Jesus had been born in the Far East, we probably would have lost out on a fair bit of religious imagery – breaking of bread, sharing one bread etc. It is the subject of one of the temptations in the wilderness, it is the subject of parables and miracles and, on the cross, his body is being broken for us like bread.
It is interesting that our physical needs are not forgotten in the Lord’s Prayer. Right in the middle of the prayer, we ask for our daily bread – and drink and shelter and emotional and spiritual needs. God is not indifferent to these and the human beings that we are, physical and spiritual, are created for his glory; and supplying our needs is simply part of the fullness of life God wishes for us. The wedding at Cana is an instance where Jesus shows his awareness of social sensitivities and concern for how ordinary people live and feel. After all, wine is not an essential in life and if the host had miscalculated, does it really warrant a miracle?
From the cross Jesus tells his mother that his beloved disciple is henceforth her son and tells the disciple that she is his mother. Mary had followed her son to Golgotha, to witness the cruel death he had to endure. The ordinary human relations not forgotten at this point.
In fact, even basic foods are a powerful reminder of the complexities of the food chain – even in scenarios such as the ‘Good Life’. Jesus acknowledges this in his cry from the cross, “I thirst”. In an address given last year, Archbishop Rowan linked this to Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, with Jesus saying, “Give me a drink of water”. In both narratives, Jesus is displaying vulnerability: Jesus, the Jewish man says to the Samaritan woman, I have need of you; Jesus the victim on the cross exclaims (To the soldiers? To anyone who would hear?) I am thirsty.
The story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman is very much a story of true communication beginning when Jesus acknowledges his need of her. Eventually he goes on to say, ‘If you knew who was asking you for water, you would ask him’. Here is God’s Son asking for our help and our generosity, weary and thirsty. The evangelist is asking us to realise the intensity of divine love – bringing God from heaven to Earth with an urgency comparable to the thirst of a desperate, parched person. So as we stand before the love of God, seen in Jesus on the cross, we see that love and that gift waiting to be given to us in human others, even enemies. We too open our hands and say, ‘give me a drink of water’ and we recognise that we are drawn into communion with the suffering, thirsty, crucified Jesus.
Finally, a thought for us who really do not have to worry about our daily bread. While we may not be hungry, the world is, in the literal sense; one in seven people in the world are malnourished and that is billions of people. God yearns for health and fullness of life for all of us. So when we ask for our daily bread, we are asking for the necessities of life for all of humanity – for food and drink, for the comfort and security of family life, the joy of friendships and community life. Indirectly we are taking responsibility to share with God his concern – for the refugees, the marginalized, the weak and the oppressed.
We might like to meditate on
The meaning of ‘daily bread’ that we ask for
Our interdependence and how we receive our ‘daily bread’
What we mean by ‘our’ daily bread
Almighty God and Father, you have so ordered our life that we are dependent on one another; prosper those engaged in commerce and industry that they may rightly use your gifts in the service of others; through Jesus Christ. Amen.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us
This to me has been the most frightening petition in the Lord’s Prayer since my childhood. It is no easier to pray this as an adult, I find. Why can’t I just say ‘Forgive us our trespasses’ full stop? We know only too well that we keep failing in our Christian lives, and need forgiveness – why do we have to implore God to limit his forgiveness to a level that we humans achieve?
I have not found the answer to the question. It may be just that our Lord wanted to emphasize that we need to forgive those who offend us - unconditionally. Remember the parable of the master who wrote off the debts of a servant who then promptly went to the man who owed him money and demanded immediate repayment. In his teachings Jesus had been quite explicit about the standard of forgiveness expected of us: “How many times should we forgive a brother who offends against us – seven times?” Seventy times seven! When you go to make a sacrifice at the altar, he said, if you remember that your brother has offended against you, leave the sacrifice and make it up with your brother and then return to the altar. Note: If your brother has offended against you, not just if you have offended against your brother! All pretty clear and definite stuff!
In our Creeds, which we say week by week, people often find virgin birth and bodily resurrection difficult concepts and difficult to believe, but Rowan Williams once said that forgiveness is just as difficult a concept. Who can forgive? Is it the victim? In that case, how can God forgive? We are left with the thought that God through Jesus became the victim. That is what we remember as we stand at the foot of the cross, looking at Jesus crucified, bearing all our sins.
Put another way, we are invited to see forgiveness as an attribute of God, illustrated of course in the parable of the Prodigal Son – the proper name for which ought to be the Parable of the Forgiving Father! Jesus challenges us often to be like the Father, be like him, Christ-like. When we pray Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’ he is challenging us and inviting us to enter into the nature of the Father.
How can we live with this judgement that we will only be forgiven as we have forgiven? Two thoughts: One of the words from the Cross may show us the answer: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Last year we meditated on whom Jesus meant by ‘they’ in that prayer – the Roman soldiers or the Jews and speculated on the reasons why the saying appears only in Luke’s gospel. The same Luke, of course wrote the Acts of the Apostles, and we recall Stephen’s prayer at his martyrdom, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ In both cases, it is the unconditional forgiveness of God that Jesus and Stephen prayed for.
We could have considered the thief crucified with Jesus and whose sins were apparently forgiven at the time of death, but we’ll reflect on him in the next section about the time of trial. After all, temptation, sin and judgement are all very closely linked.
We might like to meditate on
what forgiveness means
the cost of forgiving for us
the cost to God of our sins and his forgiveness
Lord Jesus Christ, who for us endured the horror of deep darkness, teach us by the depth of your agony the viles of our sins, and so bind us to yourself in bonds of gratitude and love, that we may be united with you in your perfect sacrifice, our Saviour, our Lord and our God. Amen.
Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil
One of the criminals who were hanged, railed at him, saying ‘Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!’ But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ And he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power.’ And he said to him, ‘Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’
When Common Worship was going through its approval in General Synod, there was a revision of the Lord’s Prayer also and quite some debate on whether deliver us from evil or do not bring us to the time of trial should be the second part of this sentence. In the end, deliver us from evil was approved. Nevertheless, it was clear that we were here praying about temptation and succumbing to it and the judgement that follows. Our Lord was pretty forthright about judgement, of course. ‘What you did to the least of these my brethren …’, the parable of the sheep and the goats, the parable of the talents given to the servants, the metaphor of the branch that bears no fruit … are all stark warnings about judgement.
At one level this seems a futile petition. We are surrounded by temptation wherever we are and hardly need any leading. Even withdrawing into a desert and leading a monastic life doesn’t remove temptation from our lives. It seems to me that if the previous sentence was talking about God’s forgiveness, this is rather more about resisting temptation, but also about repentance and calling on God’s mercy at the time of judgement. This is why to me there is a link here to the judgement offered to the thief – he recognised his own past misdeeds and even though he has no time left for a new way of life away from his past in the sense of true repentance, he asks for Jesus to remember him kindly. And Jesus does.
Dr Rowan Williams is a devoted member of The World Community for Christian Meditation. In his book on the wisdom of the desert fathers, called Silence and Honey Cakes, he records a story. A brother asked one of the fathers, ‘Are you defiled by having wicked thoughts?’ There was a discussion abut this, some saying ‘yes’ and others ‘no’… A very experienced old man said to him, ‘What is required of each person is regulated according to their capacity.’
Dr Williams explains how a temptation that might seem trivial to you could be crushing to another; an obsession that haunts you night and day may be incomprehensible to someone else. We hear about a monk who complained that Abba Arsenius was not renowned for physical asceticism; the monk dealing with the complaint asked him what he had done before becoming a monk. He had worked as a shepherd, sleeping on the ground, eating sparse meals of gruel. Arsenius had been tutor to the imperial family and slept between sheets of silk. In other words the simplicity of desert life represented no great change for the young monk, but a different world for Arsenius.
I finish with another quotation from Silence and Honeycakes: ‘There are no standard forms of holiness, no holiness that is impersonal. It is axiomatic that each person brings something different to the enterprise of desert life. Sin is always sin, but people live with different degrees of pressure and temptation.’
In the sure belief that God knows our innermost selves – the pressures on us and our capacities – we pray “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us … ”
We might like to meditate on
the petitions in the Litany with the response ‘Good Lord, deliver us.’
other sins and temptations we wrestle with
our judgement of other people’s temptations
Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; neither take thou vengeance of our sins; spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood and be not angry with us for ever.
Spare us, good Lord.
For thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory for ever and ever.
What does the word ‘kingdom’ conjure up for us nowadays when we are committed to the virtues of democracy?
And what about power? It is another word that has an ambiguous meaning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, goes a quotation; all negative. But despite that, we note that it is an attribute of God. So many of our prayers begin with the invocation ‘Almighty God’ calling to mind the incorruptible power of God. Moreover, ‘empowerment’ is seen as good, and we acknowledge it to be necessary for our creative life.
In fact, we are powerful rather than powerless in the overall scheme of things. We have the power to control so much of our lives. If we are really honest, I suggest every one of us here will admit we wouldn’t have it any other way – that is why most of us secretly fear old age, isn’t it?
In our spiritual life, it is one of those paradoxical cases. Remember the prayer which starts, O God … whom to serve is perfect freedom – that it is by being obedient to God that we are empowered in our Christian lives.
In Jesus’ day, crosses were a daily sight – the punishment for those who challenged the occupying power. A cross was a place where power (of the Roman empire) and powerlessness (of ordinary people) met dramatically. The coalescence of power and powerlessness is even more dramatic at Jesus’ Cross – the power of the God who chooses powerlessness; emptying himself, laying aside his power, so that he can become human, stand and suffer alongside the most vulnerable.
Again, paradoxically, in that process he manifests his power not just to those who stood around him in that time and place – remember the centurion who says ‘Truly this was a son f God’ – but to us, centuries later and far away from Golgotha.
So to ‘Glory’: it is a word we use almost without thinking in our services so often – especially glory to the Trinity. I always think that we could do worse than live for the Glory of God. Just as we use ‘what would Jesus have done’ as a criterion when we are puzzled, we could ask ‘am I doing this for the Glory of God’. A ‘life lived for the Glory of God’ - what a lovely epitaph it would be!
As I said in my introduction, it was just a thought that occurred to me that Jesus’ ministry was closely linked to the prayer that he taught us. In this sentence, which is almost doxological, there is a sense that this was the raison d’être for his life. He started this prayer to his Father – hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done as it is in heaven. And here is the kernel. His life was lived in order to bring God’s kingdom to earth; he did it in perfect obedience to his Father’s will (or power). Now he can say ‘It is finished’ – not simply in the sense of death, but as fulfilment and achievement of the goal. And now he can commend his soul to his Father: acknowledging that his life was lived for the glory of the Father: a life lived so that we too can call God ‘Our Father’ and claim our inheritance of God’s Kingdom, without a veil curtaining off the Holy of Holies.
It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice said, ‘Father, into your hand I commit my spirit!’ And having said this he breathed his last. Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God.
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.
We might like to meditate on
the Kingdom and the ‘King of the Jews’ on the cross
Power and vulnerability meeting on the cross
Glory and humiliation of death on the cross
Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified; mercifully grant us that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen
Comments