We are living in a Good Friday world. This is not a comfortable fact. This is not something we want to admit. This is the vast chasm of screaming brokenness that we spend our lives teetering desperately away from. Dreams. Health. Career. Success. Family. Living your best life. We brandish these things like weapons, like armour against the fact that we are mortal and, as one of my friends puts it, ‘the world is on fire’. 

Sure, we realise that bad things do happen, but they happen, mostly, to ‘other people’ – those poor souls out there who are living in Gaza, or the Ukraine, or central Africa. We, in the developed world, are able to generally live our lives insulated from the cries of the desperate and the dying. We craft a delusional bubble of immortality and immunity and we work hard to protect it for as long as we can. 

There are a few things that scare us – car crashes, terrorist attacks, and cancer – the only conceivable tragedies that could touch us in our insulated lives, but we console ourselves that this won’t happen to us. It’s very unlikely. And we plan to start actually going to the gym.

And yet, despite our illusion, we are being eaten away slowly from the inside. Our buried brokenness rises up slowly, encroaching on us like the very cancer we seek to avoid. But we don’t want to realise how far we are from reality, how far we are from seeing our vulnerability, our desperation, our need for a saviour. 

This is the case, even, for those who call themselves ‘Christians’ – at least it was for me. I was happy to be a Christian insofar as it meant getting a ticket to heaven and maybe even following most of the rules, but was I interested in taking up my cross to follow Jesus to death and resurrection? If I’m honest, not at all. 

It’s actually kind of crazy hard-core; the ravaging brokenness of the reality of this world, the utter desperation in which we find ourselves, the intense passion of our Saviour – and what he asks of us in return. It feels too big. Too much. Too scary. Like I thought life was a Rom Com and I’ve woken up in ‘Lord of the Rings’. How can I possibly take part in this adventure? 

In church this morning, I slipped off my reeboks and knelt on the hard carpet between the rows of seats. It was all I could do – to offer my body, to open my hands. The weightiness of the presence was in the room and I was desperate to be close, to breath him in. As I knelt there, I was transported to the foot of the cross. One of the women who knew and loved Jesus, weeping, as her Lord was splayed helpless across wooden beams and broken in front of her. Pain. Anger. Confusion. Despair. Jesus – you were supposed to save me! You were supposed to stop the cancer from ever occurring in my body. You were supposed to heal the bowel tumour before my last colonoscopy! There is so much you were supposed to do! And there you are – silenced and broken, apparently impotent and shackled, yourself overwhelmed by the pain of this world. I do not understand. And yet, you are still my Lord. 

Somehow, I manage to lift my eyes from the ground to the cross above me. For an infinitesimal and unexpected moment, his face turns and his eyes lock with mine. 

And He sees me.