This year's Archbishop of Canterbury of Lent book is Looking Through the Cross by Graham Tomlin.
Using the introduction and chapters one and three, I put together this short summary/reflection on its argument (much of the phrasing is Tomlin's):
We see all the time,
but rarely do we take time to look,
to give someone, or something, our attention;
to gaze more intently,
to take in fully what is before us.
Today, and throughout Lent,
I want to encourage us to look,
to look at the cross;
and to look through the cross.
To look through the cross
is to see it as a window,
a means of framing the world in a new way,
a means of viewing God in a clearer way,
a means of observing ourselves in a different light.
How does life look when seen through the lens of the cross?
What would it mean to see the cross as the interpretative key for looking at the world?
Look at the cross.
Look at the cross
and see it as Rome’s means of public humiliation.
The cross was designed to make an example of those Rome feared
in the most painful way possible.
To wear a cross, to hold a cross
is to wear or hold a means of execution,
a piece of technology designed to kill a human being
slowly and painfully.
The cross of Jesus was not perched on a ‘green hill far away’
but in a desolate place,
visible from the city as a deterrent to others;
a place that reeked of death,
a place of wretchedness, despair and defeat.
Crucifixion was the death reserved for failures,
the beaten,
those who had sought to challenge the power of Rome
and lost.
Look at the cross.
For the apostle Paul says
His message is about the cross.
He preaches Christ crucified.
The foolishness of the cross
he says
is the place where God’s wisdom is decisively revealed.
The Christian gospel,
it’s ‘good news’,
is centred on the crucifixion and humiliation
of Jesus.
Whatever our ideas of what God should be like,
the cross invites us to throw them all away,
and begin again.
If you want to know the wisdom of God:
don’t look at a sunset,
or a mother holding a new-born child;
don’t pay attention to the philosophers,
or the movie-makers,
instead look at Jesus on the cross,
there God and his wisdom is revealed.
If the cross challenges our notions of wisdom
and our ideas of God,
the cross also says something about power.
We are surrounded by images of power:
power in the form
of those who control economies and armies,
or those who can demand high salaries
or those who make laws
or those who run media organisations,
deciding the messages we hear
We know what power looks like.
Look at the cross.
For the apostle Paul says
His message is about the cross.
He preaches Christ crucified.
The foolishness of the cross
he says
is the place where God’s power is decisively revealed.
It’s hard to imagine a less powerful figure than someone nailed to a cross.
Not only does he have no economic, social or political power,
he cannot even move.
He is utterly powerless to do anything – literally nailed down.
God’s power is revealed at the very point where it seems weakest.
For the cross shows God’s commitment to love where it is not deserved.
Whilst before Pilate, Jesus appears powerless,
but the voluntary submission of God in Christ to a gruesome, violent death
on behalf of a human race that had turned away from him in arrogance,
is an astonishing act of self-giving, of love.
Whilst the world is in love with power,
the cross shows the power in love.
This is how we know what love is,
says the First Letter of John,
Jesus Christ laid down his life for us (3.16).
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