There is a story about some boys who were playing around outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. They eventually became rather bored until one of them thought up a great wheeze. He suggested that they compile a list of all the most despicable sins they could think of and then one of them could go into the Church and confess them to the priest.  You can imagine what fun they had dreaming up the sins and eventually they had a list of horrendous things. Their bravado left them when it was time for one of them to be chosen.  Eventually the bravest (or perhaps the most stupid) grabbed the list and marched into the Cathedral. The others followed him, and lurked in the shadows, giggling and sniggering as their mate,  marched into the confessional and began to recite his dreadful list. 

When he had finished, the priest sighed and said, “You see the big Crucifix over the altar. I want you to go and kneel in front of it and say: “Jesus, I know you died for me, and I don’t give a damn. And then come back here and ask me for God’s absolution.”  It’s a true story and the man who made it public went on to become Archbishop of Paris and I like it  because it shows the power of the Cross to save and transform human life.

I read a different story earlier this week from a book by Samuel Wells – Power & Passion.  He tells of a soldier who had been in Vietnam and who was describing his experience at a meeting. He was harangued by an old woman who suggested that Vietnam had been an half-baked war whereas the real war was World War II.  At first the veteran ignored her but as she persisted he finally shouted ‘Have you ever had to kill anyone?” When she said ‘No’ he asked her what right she had to tell him anything. After a long silence somebody asked him whether the fact that he had to kill someone was the worst experience of the war. Well yes, he replied, that was half of it. After further silence, someone asked, ‘and what was the other half?’ ‘The other half was that when we got home, nobody understood.’

Sam Wells went on to say that if we asked our heavenly Father what was the worst part of the Cross he might pause for a long time before answering – the sacrifice of my only Son – that was half of it.’ and if we waited in a terrible silence and finally found the courage to ask, ‘What was the other half?” he would say “The other half was that 2,000 years later, nobody understands.”

We might immediately protest that it isn’t true – that we do understand – that’s why we are walking this Holy Week journey. We can also say that the Archbishop of Paris in my story also understood and his realisation that Jesus died for him changed his life. Countless people have looked at the Cross and discovered through it the Salvation God desires so much for us. That is our understanding – our faith.

We know something about WHY God did what he did but what perhaps we don’t fully understand what he really went through to do it.  Of course, we understand the suffering of the Cross – the suffering of Christ. Our hymns, prayers, liturgies and even popular culture, like Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion  all lead us to this understanding. We are even able to draw parallels between Christ’s suffering and the suffering some of us experience in life, through illness, bereavement, loss. When we are up against it we can find solace in the Cross and our suffering can be eased a little by contemplating the suffering of Christ.

I remember vividly a time when life was at its rawest and I was close to despair. I visited York Minster, not long after its disastrous fire and there, in one of the transepts was a sculpture by Fenwick Lawson. He carved unusual pieces from fallen trees and the one in York Minster was particularly striking.  It was of the Pietà , that moment when the dead Christ is laid in the arms of Mary his mother.  It was carved from a knarled and twisted piece of wood and this gave it a starkness which conveyed, far more vividly than  Michelangelo's rather sugary Pietà, the suffering of that moment.  What made it even more striking is that it had suffered in the Minster fire and was burnt and singed.  The suffering of Christ (and of Mary) was incredibly visible as a result and it  spoke to how I felt and somehow there was an easing as a result.

But how can I move from that to understanding what Jesus went through on the Cross? or what His Father went through as he watched his Son suffer and die. The nearest I can come to is in Genesis in the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, his Son because God asked it of him as a test of faith.  Now we know that, though Abraham prepared the fire and the wood and therefore showed his obedience to God, at the last moment God relented and Isaac was not, in fact sacrificed. But what was Abraham going through?

Somebody said to me recently that this was a dreadful story and showed how cruel God was to demand that of Abraham.  Well, it was quite a dramatic test of Abraham’s faith and he was not found wanting though you might have expected him to make a little more protest.  In the end God did not ask of Abraham the ultimate sacrifice and presumably never intended the ending to be other than it was.  However, he was not so easy on Himself and in the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ we see that he was prepared to go that much further than he asked of Abraham.

And we have to ask ourselves – why did God allow His Son to die – to be the ultimate sacrifice he was prepared to pay to show the human race how deeply he loves us.  Was there not some other way?  Could he not, as with Abraham, find a last minute replacement – some ram caught in a thicket – some substitute for His Son?

Well, obviously, the answer to that is ‘No’ and the reason  is because it could never be part of the Divine Plan to ask of others what He could not ask of Himself.  God is not capable of acting selfishly nor of getting us to do what he could not do himself.  The Power of the Cross is that God had to take upon Himself, in Jesus Christ, the way of Love that destroys all that is not love in the world, even in the Church, and in our own lives.

In Gethsemane, which as I said last night, was the real trial of Jesus, the deeply human struggle of Jesus with the Will of His Father was the heart of the Passion and when Jesus passed from struggle to agreement it was a freely given ‘Yes’ to his Father, made all the more authentic because it had been a real struggle. All that was human in Jesus fought against what he knew would be a cruel and tortured death but in the end there was the willingness to do what had to happen because Love had to triumph, even though that Love was to cost God everything.

We who for the most part give love that is conditional may find it hard to grasp that from God we really do get unconditional love – freely given and at absolute cost to himself.  What happened on Calvary was not because men willed it – not the Roman Governor, not the Jewish Religious Leaders, not the fickle crowd – it happened because it is a consequence of a commitment from God to love us unconditionally and who through that love seeks to draw us into his loving heart. 

It’s very hard for us to accept that which is why we say that the Cross is an atonement for sin, a vicarious suffering by Jesus on our behalf, a sacrifice which will somehow turn away the wrath of God who seeks vengeance on our disobedience.  So much in the theology of the Cross is couched in language which offers Jesus as the substitute sacrificial Lamb who somehow placates an angry God and turns his heart away from harming us.

It is a short step from that to the kind of theology found in Victorian hymns matched by the hell-fire preaching of its day that it is all our fault that God died, though we also quite enjoy blaming the Jews too and the anti-Semitism found in every age, including our own, is part of that - made even more insidious when we remember the Holocaust which in the measure of its suffering knows no equal.  We are always seeking to lay the guilt on someone.

One of the reasons I like the Hymn We sing the praise of him who died  is because of the line  

The cross! it takes our guilt away.

Yet so often in the Church’s meditation on the Cross we do just the opposite. I shall never forget a Good Friday address in which the preacher shouted (in suitably broken emotional voice) ‘see what you have done to Jesus!’  I crawled away from that Good Friday thoroughly convinced that I had all but driven in the nails and for a long time I couldn’t look at a Crucifix because of my own shame in putting him there. But then I had a wonderful experience and it came on the day when I had decided to make a Sacramental Confession of my sins for the first time.

I had prepared my list of sins as instructed and I knelt in the Chapel of the Cowley Fathers in Westminster, very nervous and afraid.  Had my legs not turned to jelly, I would have run from the place.  It was then that I looked up at the painted Crucifix above the altar and I know it sounds fanciful but I felt that Jesus was addressing me and that he was saying 'I love you and I am happy to have died on the Cross so that you will know the power of my love in your life'.

There I was, in training for the priesthood, discovering for the first time the truth of that hymn – The Cross! it takes my guilt away.  When Father Campbell pronounced God’s forgiveness over me I knew the liberation that repentance brings when it meets with the loving God who wants to show me (and you) the Victory of Love over all that is not Love and to share with me its redeeming power to transform and transfigure our lives. 

Perhaps then, in that moment, more than ever I understood three words from our Lord on the Cross – It is finished!  not as a cry of resignation that  the ordeal was over but as a cry of Triumph that is better translated as It is accomplished. The Victory of God’s love on the Cross was final.  And like the boy who became Archbishop of Paris I saw that this Victory has a deep personal significance for me. When I knelt in that little chapel after my Confession I looked with new eyes on a glorified, victorious Christ who, in the words of a nun I was later to meet – Mary Mother Clare – stood (and stands) at that point of intersection where the love of God and the tensions and sufferings we inflict on each other meet and are held to the healing power of God.

That’s a very hard place to stand but it is where Christ is to be found and it is the healing love he pours from the Cross which is the Power and Victory of the cross.  This is what He accomplished when He and his Father decided on the most radical way possible of reaching out to our hearts.  Understand that and you will understand something very significant about the Cross and when you do, God will never say that we do not understand what He did on Calvary because its power reaches out still and is found in transfigured lives.

So, a question:

In what way does the Victory of the Cross – the Victory of Love – change the way you look at yourself, at others, and at God?