Good Friday

A Cross in the Heart of God

Six addresses preached by Revd Dr Sam Wells

‘There was a cross in the heart of God before there was one planted on the green hill in Jerusalem.
And now that the cross of wood has been taken down, the one in the heart of God abides,
and it will remain so long as there is one sinful soul for whom to suffer.’[1]

1. Covenant

I believe that the longing to be with us in Jesus was the reason God created the world. But this longing was always going to carry immense risk, and that the fundamental choice God made was to say, ‘I am going to carry the consequences of that risk and I am not going to expect humanity to shoulder a burden it cannot bear.’ In other words however much we have refused God’s invitation to be with us it has always remained an invitation and not an imposition, and the cost of restoration and reconciliation is something that God has borne, not us. Since that has been so from the very beginning I believe it’s appropriate to say that there has been a cross in the heart of God since the foundation of the world, and there will be forever, even after the last tear has been wiped away from the last eye. The cross was one event at one particular time; but it demonstrated what has always been true, that God will never give up on us, however much we may fail to desire or deserve it. And because it has always been so, I want to spend these addresses exploring what we might call the cross in the Old Testament. I’m not talking about prophecies, but about ways in which the Old Testament shows us the meaning and character of the cross. The place to begin is with Noah.

The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’ But Noah found favour in the sight of the Lord.

In the six hundred and first year, the waters were dried up from the earth. Then God said to Noah, ‘Go out of the ark. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.’

The Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind. Then God said to Noah, ‘I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood. This is the sign of the covenant: I have set my bow in the clouds, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.’ (Genesis 6-9, abridged)

The thing we fear above anything else is destruction. If we can get our heads round it, we fear the Big Crunch, the opposite of the Big Bang, through which one day the centrifugal expansion of the universe will cease and a centripetal implosion of the universe will begin and all will be sucked back into the vortex and disappear. More tangibly we fear a giant meteor that could obliterate the earth at one go. More urgently we fear climate change could alter the ecology of the planet and make life unsustainable, we fear a nuclear war in which two deranged world leaders provoke global megadeath. But each of these nightmares is but a larger version of our daily harrowing anticipation of our own destruction in death.

The story of Noah is about destruction. The rain fell for 40 days and the waters swelled for 150 days. God ‘blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air.’ We’re given a reason for this destruction: ‘The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.’ So it sounds like this is simply a case of judgement: God made the world good, it turned out evil, so God destroyed it. End of.

But it turns out there’s more to it than that. The real drama of the Noah story doesn’t lie in the flood, the ark, the animals, the two-by-two, the raven and the dove. The real drama lies in the heart of God. Here is a parent with a wayward child. We all know the heavy thud of the words, ‘I’m not angry – I’m disappointed.’ The Lord, we’re told, was very sorry, and was grieved. Or, in our language, was devastated. Think about that word for a moment: this is a story about devastation; initially devastation wrought upon the earth – but more profoundly, devastation wrought upon God’s heart. This is a story about a face-off between the human heart (corrupt, complicit, carnal) and God’s heart (wretched, dejected, sad). God’s power is quickly displayed, but God’s love ultimately prevails.

Out of this story emerges a series of crucial details that characterise the whole of the Bible and continue to shape our faith today. There’s no question that creation in general and humanity in particular, though God-breathed and beautiful, is nonetheless flawed, fragile and often feckless. There’s no naïveté or wishful thinking in this story. But see what surfaces nonetheless. God says, ‘I’m going to be with you anyway.’ God makes a covenant with a people that have shown themselves to be unworthy and ungrateful. The whole of creation depended on God’s desire to be with us; but the astonishing thing is that God continues to desire to be with us even when in innumerable ways we’ve shown little or no desire to reciprocate.

To confirm this amazing desire, God makes a covenant. And what does that covenant say? ‘I will never again destroy every living creature as I have done.’ That’s a huge promise. Never say never. But God does say never. Destruction is ruled out as a tactic, however bad humanity gets. That means God has to find another way. And this is the dynamic that unlocks the whole Bible. Destruction isn’t an option. Israel and God are locked into a relationship where termination isn’t available. They have to find a way to be with one another. Will God regret that promise? We shall see. To demonstrate what it means, God sets a bow in the clouds. We know what that bow is: no children’s Noah’s Ark set is complete without a rainbow. But a bow is no idle thing: it’s not something with which you play a cello. It’s a weapon of war: a bow that accompanies an arrow. God has put that weapon away, in heaven. God’s sword and shield have been laid down; God ain’t going to study war, or floods, or destruction any more. Every time we see a rainbow we’re looking at God’s promise never to destroy us again. We won’t be devastated: but God will.

And out of this intense and dramatic face-off between the corrupt heart of humankind and the grieving heart of God comes a new humanity. Noah, a person who truly walks with God, who walks through the water of death and destruction and enters the new covenant of life and preservation. Noah, who finds God’s favour, and from whom comes a new strand of human possibility, which we might even call resurrection.

All these dimensions arise from the Noah story. And that’s why this story is the place to begin our understanding of what’s taking place between God, humanity and creation as Christ hangs on the cross. Because every single one of these dimensions of Noah are present in Christ. Christ is God being with us even when we turn out to be the worst that bad can be. In his passion we see a catalogue of duplicity, denial, betrayal, conspiracy and destruction as grotesque as anything that could have evoked God’s disappointment in the days of the ark. Christ is the embodiment and renewal of the covenant God first made with Noah. Christ is the logical and perhaps inevitable result of God giving up on any idea of destroying the wayward creation – after a whole Old Testament of to-ing and fro-ing between God and Israel, finally there arises one who is utterly Israel and utterly God, who experiences in his own body the destruction God has promised never again to wreak on the earth and who offers in his body the new covenant God makes with humankind. Christ is the rainbow in the clouds, the result of God abjuring the weapons of war – and just as when we see the rainbow we recall God’s promise, so when we see the cross we behold the fulfilment of that promise at no cost to us and maximum cost to God. And Christ is the new humanity that comes on the other side of the flood, for in his resurrection he becomes the firstborn of all creation, the new human being in whom through baptism all people can find life and after whose death there will never again be any cause to doubt God’s faithfulness or favour.

Above all, Christ on the cross shows us that, for all our anxiety about the destruction of creation and our own death, the real drama of the story takes place in the heart of God. How can God let this happen? How can God emerge without breaking a promise not to end the story because it’s turning out so badly? How can God suffer so terribly? How can God love us so much and forgive us so deeply and be faithful to us so enduringly that Christ can hang there with such grief and sadness and pain?

Fifty miles north of Berlin lies the site of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where 130,000 women were interned during the Holocaust, of whom 50,000 died. When the camp was liberated a piece of wrapping paper was found near the body of a dead child. On that wrapping paper was the following prayer:

O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will but also those of evil will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted upon us; remember the fruits we have borne thanks to this suffering – our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this; and when they come to the judgement, let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness. Amen.

Without context, this prayer makes no sense at all. But to know that this was written on a piece of wrapping paper found near the body of a dead child during the Holocaust makes these some of the greatest words ever prayed. May we find consolation in this — that men and women are capable of much love amidst much hate; that men and women are capable of much mercy and forgiveness amidst an ocean of cynicism and doubt.

Here was the greatest self-inflicted flood the world has seen since the ark. Here was a tide of destruction to exceed any tsunami of evil. And yet here in the midst of it was one tiny Noah, one person of extraordinary dignity and grace, determined to put her bow in the heavens and repay evil with good. Here was a person who suffered in her own body the destruction inflicted on her whole world. Here was a person who somehow discovered God was with her even though all around her were wondering where God was to be found. Here was a woman who truly said, never again, and showed a way to turn hatred into mercy and cruelty into beauty. Here was Jesus, on the cross in twentieth-century Germany. Here was the heart of God, not hidden, irrelevant and far away, but present, broken, and bleeding. Here was the story of Noah, indeed the whole Bible, in one woman. What wondrous love is this, oh my soul, oh my soul. What wondrous love is this, oh my soul.

2. Test

What does it mean for God to provide? The Old Testament is all about God providing. God provides creation and human life in Adam and Eve, new life for Noah after the flood, food amid famine under Joseph, a parting of the Red Sea through Moses, manna in the wilderness, the Law on Sinai, and a new king, Cyrus, who finally sent the Jews home from Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem. The ram in the Abraham and Isaac story stands in for all these signal moments of God’s provision.

For the early church, there’s one word for what God provides: Jesus. Through Jesus God provides teaching, healing, food, example, prophecy, hope. Most of all, Jesus provides his own body to be the ram that saves all of our bodies. Jesus is the embodiment of God’s saving provision: the reason why we trust God.

God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.’ So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt-offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.’ Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together.

Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘Father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ He said, ‘The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?’ Abraham said, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son.’ So the two of them walked on together. When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son.

But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’ And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt-offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place ‘The Lord will provide’; as it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.’ (Genesis 22: 1-14)

The story of Abraham and Isaac is an interweaving of two kinds of horror. One is very personal. Abraham carries the fire and the knife. Isaac his son carries the wood for the burnt offering. They walked together for a long time. I wonder what they spoke about. I wonder what Abraham said to Sarah before he set out. And I wonder what he was planning on saying when he returned home alone. Abraham built an altar and laid the wood. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. I wonder whether he had to use force. I wonder whether Isaac meekly accepted his fate. Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. I wonder at what point Isaac realised what was about to happen, and what he thought of his father then. That’s the first horror. This is about killing your child with fire and knife. The second level of horror is this. Genesis 12 is the beginning of a story. God calls Abraham, Abraham responds. This is going to be a great nation. There’s one small problem: Abraham has no descendants. So God provides: old Sarah laughs, but Abraham names the child Isaac, ‘he laughs.’ On this child lies the destiny of the world. This child is the bearer of the promise. And now God says, ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love, and offer him as a burnt-offering.’ No one’s laughing now. The story’s over almost as soon as it’s begun. ‘Your only son’: there’s no future if Abraham does what God commands. This is the second horror: God’s story with Israel has come to an end before it’s hardly begun.

In the summer of 2015 at the age of 35 my friend and former colleague Kate was told she had stage four colon cancer.[2] All she could think of to say was, ‘But I have a son.’ Her friends, family and complete strangers all crowded in with counsel. She divided them into three kinds: minimisers, teachers and solvers. Minimisers insist it’s not so bad. Kate’s sister was on a plane and told her seatmate about the diagnosis. ‘Then, as [Kate’s sister] wondered when she had signed up to be a contestant in the calamity Olympics, the stranger explained that [Kate’s] cancer was vastly preferable to life during the Iranian revolution.’ Teachers ‘focus on how this experience is supposed to be an education.’ One even wished it would be for her a ‘Job experience’ – as if she needs any further suffering than she already has. Solvers are disappointed that she’s not saving herself. As Kate puts it, ‘There’s always a nutritional supplement, Bible verse or mental process I have not adequately tried. “Keep smiling! Your attitude determines your destiny!” said a stranger … in an email, having heard my news somewhere, and I was immediately worn out by the tyranny of prescriptive joy.’

Minimisers, teachers and solvers can quickly get to work on the Abraham and Isaac story. But it’s no good. The twin horrors of the story remain.

I want to look for a moment more closely at the structure of the story for a clue to what’s really at the heart of it, even deeper than layers of horror. The story hangs on three key moments that each have the same shape (and are arranged in three paragraphs in your booklet). At the start God calls, ‘Abraham.’ Abraham responds, ‘Here I am.’ God commands: ‘Take.’ At the end the angel calls, ‘Abraham.’ Abraham responds, ‘Here I am.’ The angel relaxes the command: ‘Do not lay your hand.’ In between Isaac calls, ‘Father.’ Abraham responds in the exact same words, ‘Here I am.’ Isaac asks, ‘Where is the lamb?’ But this time, at the centre of the story, Abraham breaks the pattern of the other two interchanges, and answers the question: ‘God will provide.’[3]

God will provide. These are the central words in the story. But at the point they are uttered, they seem like they flatly contradict all evidence. Are Abraham’s words the statement of the greatest duplicity and cowardice, the refusal to tell Isaac the truth until the very last moment? Or are they the words of the greatest faith, that, even seconds before the terrible sacrifice, Abraham still believed God would find an alternative outcome? The story doesn’t tell us.

The story sets in motion two strands in the Old Testament narrative. One is the theme of the lamb. The lamb represents God’s mercy. On the night before Israel escapes from slavery in Egypt, the blood of the lamb is smeared on the doorposts so the angel of the Lord knows to pass over the Israelites when it smites the Egyptians. The other is the theme of the son. Israel is God’s son, God’s only son, the bearer of God’s blessing to the world from generation to generation. In the story of Abraham and Isaac, God’s mercy in the form of the lamb intervenes to preserve God’s blessing in the form of the son.

But in Jesus the story retains the same shape yet has a different outcome. Again it is set over three days. Again we have a son carrying the wood of sacrifice to a hill of execution. Again we have a son humbly proceeding in the face of horror while only partly comprehending what the father truly has in mind. But this time the lamb of mercy and the son of blessing converge into one. The words ‘God will provide’ have a very different resonance.

But see how the story of Mount Calvary both repeats and develops the story of Mount Moriah. In the Mount Moriah story, God discovers something God didn’t already know: that Abraham, and therefore Israel, will, at the moment of truth, suspend all its doubt, rationality, independence, and dearly held commitments, and place its destiny entirely in God’s hands. When Jesus says in Gethsemane, ‘Yet not what I will, but what you will,’ this story is being repeated: Jesus, and therefore Israel, does, at the moment of truth, suspend all its doubt, rationality, independence, and dearly held commitments, and place its destiny entirely in God’s hands. But that’s not the whole of what’s going on at Mount Calvary. There’s something more. Humanity discovers something it didn’t already know about God: that at the moment of truth, God’s sovereignty, dignity, majesty and power will be suspended and God’s life will be placed entirely in human hands. If Mount Moriah is where God tested humanity, Mount Calvary is where humanity tested God. And on Mount Calvary we see God’s true colours. God provided: and what did God provide? A lamb, yes, a son, yes. But in the end, God provided God.

After Mount Moriah, God knew humanity would in the end be faithful, whatever it cost. After Mount Calvary, humanity knew God would be faithful, whatever it cost. Jesus said, ‘Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’ In Abraham and Jesus, humanity loses its life and finds it. In Jesus, the Holy Trinity loses its life for our sake and finds it.

But why is it necessary to go to such excruciating lengths to prove such things? Why is it essential so drastically to put one another to the test? What I believe is happening on Mount Moriah is that God is seeking to find out why Abraham has trusted and obeyed. God is saying, ‘Did you respond because of the promise of your descendants becoming a great nation? Did you follow because you wanted security and success and sons and celebrity? In other words, am I in the end a vehicle for you, a means to an end, a ladder you can kick away when I’ve provided the things you can’t get for yourself? Or will you be true to me even if all these things are snatched away?’ By putting Isaac in jeopardy, God threatens to take away every promise made to Abraham. Abraham has to choose between life, love, longevity, lineage, land and God. And Abraham chooses God.

In Jesus God is asking the same question but in an even more cosmic way. ‘Are you following me because I offer you forgiveness for your past and freedom for your future? Are you believing because faith gives you confidence, reassurance, inspiration, companionship, wisdom and insight? Or will you be true to me even if I am hungry, naked, despised, powerless, cursed, alone? But in Jesus the same question is turned around and directed to God. ‘Will you be with humanity if it is faithful, obedient, devoted, pious and adoring? Or will you be with humanity even if it denies, betrays, flees, despises, executes, derides and tortures? Jesus is us choosing between God’s benefits and God, and choosing God. Jesus is also God choosing between ideal humanity and the real thing, and choosing the real thing.

In Abraham humanity says to God, ‘There is nothing more important than you. I will give up my whole world to be with you.’ In Jesus, God says to humanity, ‘There is nothing more important than you. I will give up everything to be with you.’

For all her scathing remarks about those who can’t see her condition truthfully, my friend Kate has found companions who recognise the horror. ‘Some people,’ she says, ‘give you their heartbreak like a gift. One time ‘my favourite nurse sat down next to me at the cancer clinic and said softly: “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I lost a baby.”’ Kate goes on, ‘The way she said “baby,” with the lightest touch, made me understand. She had nurtured a spark of life in her body and held that child in her arms, and somewhere along the way she had been forced to bury that piece of herself in the ground.’

The cross of Jesus isn’t for minimising, lesson-finding, or solving. Like Kate’s condition, it’s all consuming, bewildering, indescribable. But the story of Abraham and Isaac, like the nurse’s soft intervention, helps us understand. God says, ‘There is nothing more important than you;’ that we might say so too.

3. Passover

The crucifixion of Jesus took place at Passover. The early Christians came to see that as central to its meaning. For them, it summed up the church’s relationship with Israel. Passover links together the three great themes of the Old Testament: God is the liberator who sets Israel free, a freedom represented by the parting of the Red Sea; God sets Israel free for a reason: God says, ‘You are to be my friends,’ and this friendship is represented by the covenant made with Moses on Mount Sinai; and this setting-free-for-friendship God is none other than the creator God, the maker of heaven and earth, who established the whole creation for this central purpose. So Passover is about the creator, the liberator and the sanctifier. On the night before he died Jesus identified himself closely with the Passover. By saying, ‘This is my body,’ Jesus was announcing, ‘Everything the Passover means, I mean.’ Jesus is God passing over our sins and setting us free.

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats. You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the passover of the Lord. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals; on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgements: I am the Lord. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. (Exodus 12: 1-13, abridged)

Imagine the scene in Jerusalem in the days following Palm Sunday. 250,000 lambs clustering into gateways, bursting down tight passageways, pouring into close barns and shelters. Each lamb was set to furnish one Passover meal. At least ten people were required for each meal. Which means around 2 million people teeming through the holy places and cheap hotels of Jerusalem, squabbling over tent space on the Mount of Olives, and all searching for bread, water, and ingredients for the great meal.

Imagine, if you can bear it, the scene in the Temple. Every single householder brings his lamb and kills it with his own hands, yet doesn’t strangle it. Two long lines of priests receive the blood of each slaughtered lamb in a cup, then pass it up the line till it’s splashed on the altar, and flows out down pipes into the River Kedron, which turns into a red moving sludge. The lamb is hung, skinned and opened, then carried home and carefully roasted. Think of the smell, the noise, the chaos. All this is contained in Mark’s simple words ‘they prepared the Passover meal.’

And then move from the pandemonium of the Temple to the relative quiet of the upper room. The upper room was the guest-chamber, constructed either permanently or temporarily on the flat roof of a house. The guest-room that Jesus had booked was a large one, big enough for the 13 people who would share supper together. It was by no means the first meal the 13 had shared together, for there were a number of other meals at which Jesus revealed different aspects of his character and saving purpose.

And in the centre of the circle on the table would have been the four ceremonial cups of wine, the brick-shaped concoction of fruits, nuts and vinegar representing the bricks the Hebrews made in Egypt, the bitter herbs representing slavery, the unleavened bread, representing their hasty departure, and the lamb itself, whose blood sprinkled on the doorposts delivered the Hebrews from the angel of death.

The host blesses the first cup and all drink. Then comes the bitter herbs, which are blessed and eaten. Then the bread, the dried fruit and the lamb are brought in. The second cup is poured, and the story of the Israel’s exodus from Egypt and crossing of the Red Sea is told. The second cup is drunk and the bread is broken. The host blesses the bread mixed with herbs and fruit and eats it along with some of the lamb, saying, ‘This is the body of the Passover’. All feast. Then they drink the third cup and say some psalms before drinking the fourth cup.

At least, this is what is supposed to happen. But on this occasion, the host is Jesus. After the second cup Jesus takes the bread, offers the thanksgiving, breaks it and distributes it. And instead of saying ‘This is the body of the Passover’ he says ‘This is my body.’ And when the time comes to take the third cup Jesus says ‘This is my blood.’ And he adds, ‘I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.’

When Jesus says, ‘The broken bread is my broken body; the poured wine is my shed blood,’ he’s inviting us to see the crucifixion and the Eucharist as the same thing. The taking of the bread and wine is a prefigurement and a portrayal of the cross. We’ve just heard Abraham striding up the mountain with his son Isaac, and Isaac saying ‘Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?’ We’ve heard Abraham reply, in words of multiple resonance and irony, ‘God will provide the lamb for the sacrifice, my son.’ You can imagine the disciples saying, ‘Here are the bitter herbs and the dried fruit, but where is the Passover lamb?’ None of the gospels explicitly mentions the lamb. Why? Because you can almost hear Jesus saying, ‘God will provide the lamb for the sacrifice, my beloved children’. The Eucharist celebrates that God did provide for Abraham, and does provide for us. And what God provides is, of course, Jesus – the Lamb of God: Jesus, the sacrificial lamb whose death is the end of sacrifice, who died that the Kedron River and every other river the world over no longer be a red moving sludge. These are the moments we place at the centre of our Christian faith: the body broken so that we may be united with God, the blood poured so that no blood might ever be poured again. The Eucharist is the cross of Christ.

But when Jesus said ‘This is my body,’ he wasn’t just referring to his crucified body. He was also referring to his resurrected body. People often discuss whether and in what form Jesus really rose from the dead – whether his resurrection body was broadly the same or completely different from the body that was crucified. But the transformation in Jesus’ body does not begin on Holy Saturday: it begins when Jesus says, ‘This is my body.’ My body is people making and renewing friendship with God and one another. My body is people learning to want the things God gives us in plenty, and discovering that God gives them everything they need. My body is people voluntarily facing the cost of discipleship and pouring out love on the way of the cross. And all these parts of my body centre on one definitive moment, the resurrection of my body on Easter Day. Glory, life eternal, the everlasting presence of God and our finding our true home in the life of the Trinity: these are all ways of rendering permanent the joy of the resurrection of Jesus’ body. And that lasting joy is most frequently portrayed as a banquet, a constant sharing of the bread of everyday life and the wine of eternal life. That banquet is a constant moment of worship, of companionship, and of sharing food. It’s what we call heaven. The Eucharist is resurrection: a moment of heaven on earth.

So when he said ‘This is my body’ Jesus depicted the significance of the cross and anticipated the heaven his resurrection would bring. But we must never forget the circumstances in which he said these words. He was being betrayed by one disciple, about to be denied by another, and deserted by the rest. All around was the chaos of a religious festival and the stench of the slaughtered lambs. This was no sentimental piety, no tasteful, cosy and comfortable evening in with friends. And so we shouldn’t expect our Eucharists to be cosy and comfortable, tasteful and sentimental. If our country is in turmoil, our community in distress, our personal life in tatters and international politics in disgrace, we may share the Eucharist in good company, for such was the situation on the day Christ’s body was broken.

So next time you come to the Eucharist one Sunday, and later that day you speak to a friend and they say, ‘How was church this morning?’, you may reply, ‘Oh, it brought me face to face with the cross of Christ; it made me free for friendship with God and others; and it was a prefigurement of heaven on earth: otherwise, nothing special, I suppose.’ And all of this is is contained in the moment Jesus took bread, and said, ‘This is my body.’

4. Atonement

Perhaps the most catastrophic day in the story the Old Testament tells came in 585 BC, when the Babylonians captured Jerusalem. Thereafter the people of Judah, the southern kingdom that had survived the fall of the north 140 years previously, awaited one of two fates. Some were destroyed, either by death or by their culture and identity being eradicated in the decades that followed; others went into exile in Babylon, a thousand miles away. Those who sought to make sense of what had happened largely concluded that it was God’s judgement on the sin of a people who, after the covenant with David and the building of the Temple under Solomon, had spent the subsequent 400 years straying from God’s ways. And just as the book of Leviticus speaks of two goats, one of which was slaughtered and the other sent away into the wilderness, so it’s hard not to see echoes in the two fates of Judah, some destroyed and some sent away to Babylon. These, it seems, are the two ways God deals with sin.

The Lord said to Moses: ‘Your brother Aaron shall take from the congregation of the people of Israel two male goats for a sin-offering, and one ram for a burnt-offering. Aaron shall offer the bull as a sin-offering for himself, and shall make atonement for himself and for his house. He shall take the two goats and set them before the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting; and Aaron shall cast lots on the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel. Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord, and offer it as a sin-offering; but the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, so that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel.

He shall slaughter the goat of the sin-offering that is for the people and bring its blood inside the curtain, and sprinkle it upon the mercy-seat and before the mercy-seat. Then he shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness. (Leviticus 16: 2, 6-9, 15, 21-22)

Leviticus 16 speaks in uncompromising terms about the elaborate methods by which God ordains and Israel conducts the regular process of making atonement for sin. The heart of the ritual is the slaying of an animal on whose head is taken to rest all the sins of the people. By the ungrudging yielding of its first-fruits and through obedient faithfulness to God’s instructions, Israel is cleansed of its iniquities and God remembers its sin no more.

But tucked into this comprehensive prescription for redemption lies a fascinating alternative model. One goat gets the slit-throat and burnt-carcass treatment. But the other goat has hands laid upon it, as if in a parody of blessing, and is sent out into the wilderness to become what we have come to call a scapegoat – an ‘escape’ goat. The goat escapes death, and we escape judgement.

Now there’s much confusion about this scapegoat. A host of psychologists, philosophers and anthropologists see the origin of culture and religion in the infectious escalation of desire, caused by the fact that we don’t create our own desires, we instead learn to long for what everyone else longs for. This escalation leads to tension, because not everyone can acquire the desired things, and that tension leads to conflict. This conflict results in a conflagration of competition and violence. How does such violence end? This is where the scapegoat comes in. Over and again it seems the founding myth of many cultures involve a perceived outsider being identified, like a witch, as the source of all evil, and that outsider consequently being put to death by the community. The war of all against all is transformed into the unity of all against one. The cathartic death of this victim dissipates the desire, assuages the crisis and thus restores peace. That ensuing peace vindicates and sacralises the whole process. Thus Oedipus transgresses natural law by sleeping with his mother and killing his father; once he is blinded and expelled, peace returns to Thebes. Romulus and Remus found Rome, but Remus transgresses by jumping over the furrow that marked where the walls would be built, so he has to die and peace returns.

For these thinkers this story of mimetic violence and scapegoating is false. The Bible challenges this conventional way of making peace through identifying, isolating and punishing a victim, because in the Christian story the victim, Jesus, is innocent. Thus the death of Jesus both exposes and discredits the whole notion of victimisation. Interestingly the founder of this school of thought, René Girard, first established his theory of mimetic desire and violence and then became a Christian when he realised how the Bible story runs so profoundly counter to it.

But I’m not sure this tradition reads the Leviticus instructions for the two goats very closely. What it seems to miss is that in Leviticus the scapegoat is a form of mercy. The scapegoat isn’t a victim, in a conventional way. It’s certainly not the focus of cathartic violence. It isn’t slaughtered. It’s let go, albeit into the wilderness. But, as Israel eventually returned from exile in Babylon, so too can the goat in due time return from the wilderness. In other words the scapegoat is originally a form of mercy as much as judgement.

The perfect example of this is the story of Joseph, mostly famous for his technicolor dreamcoat. The ten brothers turn on him out of envy, insecurity and hatred, and intend to kill him, but instead sell him to some Ishmaelites heading towards Egypt, and interestingly kill a goat and present its blood on the dreamcoat to give Jacob the impression that Joseph has been killed in the wilderness.

All of which is telling us Jesus is not just the sacrificial goat who is slaughtered, and whose blood constitutes our atonement. Jesus is also the other goat, the scapegoat, the one who is sent away into the wilderness and who identifies with all who are cast out by their own people because those people believe they will be made pure by rejecting one of their number. When Jesus says the words, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’, he’s indicating that he’s been cast out not just by the Romans, not just by the Jerusalem authorities, not just by the crowds, not just by the disciples, but also by the Father. What makes Jesus a scapegoat is not so much that he’s the sacrificial victim – that’s what the first goat represents – but more that he’s ostracised, humiliated, deserted, and ultimately, utterly, cosmically alone.

The question then is whether Jesus fulfils the Old Testament by replacing one elaborate, legal, ritual and apparently unfair form of atonement with another, or whether Jesus transcends these complex and troubling forms of justice by something beyond justice.

I got close to an answer to this question a few months ago. I was in my office when the phone rang. The voice said, simply, ‘Sam.’ And instantly I was transported back in time. A familiar voice, with a strong regional accent; just one word was instantly recognisable after decades without contact. He was a firefighter. He started coming to church about the time I began in the parish. He was in my first adult confirmation class. I sat down intently.

‘I heard you on the radio this morning and thought I’d leave a message – I never expected you to pick up the phone,’ said my long-lost parishioner. We caught up for fifteen minutes until I felt I should be doing something else. Ten minutes later the phone rang. It was him again. ‘I was so surprised you picked up I forgot what I really meant to say. I have a confession to make.’ I paused. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m in the business. Take your time.’ He didn’t seem too daunted, for a man about to bare his soul. ‘Do you remember your first Easter at St Luke’s?’ What a wonderful question. It was 1992. I was overjoyed to be in the thick of parish life. But what did he mean? ‘Two weeks before Easter at the Sunday service you gave each one of us three nails. You said, ‘Put these somewhere where you’ll be close to them every day. And on Easter morning, bring them back with you and put them in the font and celebrate what those nails really mean.’

By the time he’d finished I was thinking, ‘Hmmm, I used to do that kind of thing. I’ve almost forgotten.’ But I said, ‘How ’bout that. Tell me about your confession.’ He said, ‘The truth is, I never brought the nails back.’ This is the point where, if it’s a face to face conversation, you look over your glasses and say nothing and just make an encouraging nod to indicate you’re really listening. But on the phone you can’t do that, so I said, ‘Go on.’

‘When I took the nails home,’ he said, ‘I knew what I wanted to do. The next day, I took them to the fire station. I picked up my firefighter’s overalls and I sewed each one of them into its own pocket across my chest. And then I gave each one of them a name. ‘The first one, the largest one, I called Faith. The second one, the rusty one, I called Courage. And the third one, the twisted, almost broken one, I called Hope. And from then on, for the next 20 years, every time the bell went and we jumped down the chute into the fire tender to go out on a job, I would put my hand on my chest. My hand would cover the pocket with the first nail, and I would say, ‘Be close to me, I need you with me.’ I would move across to the second nail, and would say, ‘Give me the strength to do what I need to do today.’ And then I’d find the third, twisted, smaller nail, and I’d say, ‘Help me make it thorough to live another day. I kept those three nails in my overalls until six years ago when I retired. And when I heard your voice on the radio I thought it was time to tell you why I never brought them back that Easter Day.’

I was silent about as long as you can be silent on the phone without making your companion nervous. I was in awe.

As I look back on that conversation I think about what the nails mean and what the two goats mean. The first goat is saying, if there’s something wrong, find the source of the problem or at least the symbolic focus of the problem and destroy it. The second goat is saying, extract the venom of the problem and saddle it on some kind of a vehicle and send that vehicle away as far as you can, out of sight and out of mind. But my firefighter parishioner perceived that neither of these are finally the way God addresses what’s wrong. In Jesus God dons the overalls of our flesh. Though we are tough and sharp as nails, Jesus painstakingly sews us into God’s heart. God doesn’t deal with sin and death by achieving solutions at arm’s length. Instead we are taken into God’s heart, broken, twisted and rusty as we are.

5. Servant

Isaiah marks the turning point in the Old Testament. Up to this point Israel sees God as the one who, with faithful adherence to the covenant, will bring blessings now and forever. Sin and iniquity will be punished. But in the central chapters of Isaiah, especially Isaiah 53, Israel comes to understand that God embodies this covenant so deeply that sin and evil damage not just Israel but also God. God can suffer. And that suffering arises from love. God is in the end not judge, but lover. And God will go to any lengths to restore that love.

My servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and shall be very high. Many were astonished at him—so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance. He shall startle many nations; for that which had not been told them they shall see.

Who has believed what we have heard?

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him or desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.

Surely he has borne our infirmities. Yet we accounted him struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.  By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. They made his grave with the wicked although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. Through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. Out of his anguish he shall see light and knowledge.

The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. (Isaiah 52:13-53:12 abridged)

After nearly 53 years on earth and 27 years of ministry I’ve come to the conclusion that there are broadly three ways to live. The first is to seek with all one’s heart and strength to avoid pain, discomfort, hardship, disease and disappointment and to maximise pleasure, security, longevity and distraction. The second is to jettison ease and fulfilment and to seek to enhance the benefit, well-being and flourishing of others. The third is to set aside the anxiety of mortality, the superficial esteem of others and the panacea of distraction and look deeply and unflinchingly into the mystery of existence, refusing to glance away when what you see is uninviting or unpalatable.

It’s no exaggeration to say that for Christians Isaiah 53 is the most significant passage in the whole of the Old Testament. It’s almost impossible to comprehend Jesus’ passion without reading it through the magnifying glass of this chapter of Isaiah. There are two conventional ways to read Isaiah 53. The first is to say the prophet had no notion of a saviour figure like Jesus and was almost certainly referring to an idealised Israel emerging out of its period of exile in Babylon in a renewed mission to be God’s servant. The second is to say every aspect of Jesus’ passion exactly fulfilled this remarkable prophecy and anyone who can’t see that is wilfully obtuse. Both of these approaches seem to miss the almost certain fact that Jesus knew these words well and they were written on his heart from childhood. When you grasp that, you realise the passion narratives in the gospels were written by people who had come to understand that Jesus went to Jerusalem consciously obeying a call to embody these words.

But people still tend to read Isaiah 53 in the light of which of the three ways to live they’ve adopted. For those for who life is about achieving comfort and security, Isaiah 53 is a puzzle made up of poetic words and allusive references. The clue to the puzzle is to perceive that the servant is Jesus, that he underwent great hardship and cruelty, and that the result was the forgiveness of sin and life with God forever. I believe all of that is in the chapter but I don’t think Isaiah’s words are like a code we simply decipher and thus gain salvation now and forever, because that treats Jesus’ passion like a get out of jail card in a Monopoly game. For those who believe in serving others, Isaiah 53 is an illustration of what we already know, that we should put others’ needs before our own and to make a better world requires noble sacrifice, selfless dedication and a very thick skin. But that makes Isaiah 53 not much more than an ancient and glorified version of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If.’

For me Isaiah 53 needs to be read in a desire to look deeply and unflinchingly into the mystery of existence. That means letting go of an urge to make it all fit some kind of formula of salvation or illustrate some kind of virtuous moral behaviour. The chapter comes in seven sections, and, like some other celebrated passages of Old Testament poetry, they form a chiasmus, with the first section mirroring the last, the second mirroring the sixth, the third the fifth, and the fourth section being thus highlighted as the one in the middle, the point of the arrow. What the whole poem is saying is, this is the heart of existence – this is the nature of God’s character. And if you want to perceive the mystery of all things, you need to align yourself with the heart of God and the true nature of all things. So let’s look at what it says.

The beginning and end of the poem, sections 1 and 7, gather together three apparently contradictory things: this is about a person who is disfigured, despised and rejected; whose story is almost universally misunderstood; and yet who is finally vindicated and whose truth prevails over all other truth. That’s the intriguing mystery into which this poem invites us.

The next parts, sections 2 and 6, deepen that sense of confusion and misunderstanding. They acknowledge that no one can believe this story. They affirm paradoxical convictions – that though this person is close to God, God nonetheless consents to this person being crushed with pain; that though this seems so troubling, nonetheless the Lord’s will shall emerge from it; and that the person themselves will emerge with wisdom and insight.

The next dimension, sections 3 and 5, intensify the sense of alienation and violence directed at the person. Here are some of the most resonant words of the passion: despised, rejected, a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb led to the slaughter, like a sheep silent before its shearers;  he was cut off from the land of the living. They made his grave with the wicked. It was a perversion of justice.

All of this sets up and exalts the central assertions of section 4. He has borne our infirmities, was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; by his bruises we are healed. We like sheep have gone astray and turned to our own way. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. In other words, everyone thought he was suffering for what he’d done wrong. But it turns out he was suffering for what others had done wrong. His suffering brings them to restoration. God has worked through this and blessed it all. The presence of God, the experience of suffering, and the incomprehension of those watching are all wrapped with one another. This is the mystery at the heart of existence. This is the mystery of Good Friday.

If we stay with this mystery through and beyond its unpalatable dimensions, this is what it’s telling us. There can be a profound dignity in the rejected. When we’re rejected we can find a deeper identity that the simple desire to belong and be accepted. There can be real truth in pain. When we’re in pain it’s not always simply a quick fix to take the pain away: that pain may be showing us something about fragility, connectedness, patience, endurance. Injustice is wrong, but there can be some times when we must find ways to carry grief, punishment, constraint that is not our fault or of our own making. Being despised is humiliating and wounding, but there is also sometimes wisdom and grace in saying nothing and relying on example and demeanour. Suffering is all-consuming and defeating, but it can yet yield wisdom and recognition. These are things that people who’ve gone to the heart of it all know, these are things that are found deep in the heart of God; but seem absurd to those for whom life is about comfort and security alone. Good Friday isn’t a magic trick by which Jesus used the special formula to produce the genie of salvation out of the bottle of sin and death. It’s the day on which Jesus went into the cloud of unknowing and the tunnel of despair and the chamber of agony to show that God being with us is the heart of it all.

The 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge tells the true story of the Seventh Day Adventist Desmond Doss. In childhood Desmond almost kills his younger brother. He also almost shoots his drunken father, who threatens his mother with a gun. These experiences make him a pacifist. Nonetheless he enrols in the US army after Pearl Harbor. He’s a mystery to his fellow soldiers, because he trains well but won’t handle a gun. He’s beaten and tortured by his colleagues who try to make him leave or change his mind. The authorities also humiliate him, trying and failing to get him thrown out on psychiatric grounds.

In spring 1945 Desmond’s unit is deployed to the Battle of Okinawa, and ordered to ascend and secure the massive edifice of Hacksaw Ridge. As a medical orderly, Desmond enters the heat of battle, and under heavy fire he finds and rescues one wounded soldier after another. When the Japanese counter attack, the American forces are driven off the cliff. Only Desmond is left, and by courage strength and subterfuge he time and again returns to haul the wounded to the cliff edge where they are stretched down the massive descent to safety. Finally he saves the commanding officer who tried at boot camp to get him court martialled. When all the stretchers are counted, this mysterious figure, despised, rejected and abused, this man who was oppressed and afflicted but never opened his mouth, this person from whom others hid their faces and held of no account had saved no fewer than 75 soldiers, carrying every single one out of the mire of conflict and under the hail of gunfire and sending them down a 300-foot escarpment by rope and pulley.

Hacksaw Ridge could simply be a hero tale of rescue and glory. But that wouldn’t do justice to who Desmond Doss was. It could be an inspiring story of laying down your life for others, but again it’s more subtle than that. Desmond Doss entered the mystery of God by refusing to take up arms yet at the same time putting himself on the front line of conflict. Like the servant of Isaiah 53 he faced total incomprehension, violent hostility, virulent ostracism, and yet a profound sense of God’s call and blessing. And like Isaiah’s servant, he was vindicated, and all the things everyone previously thought to be true and wise and certain were unravelled, and he brought friend and stranger, enemy and despiser into the mystery of the living God.

6. Sacrifice

The book of Esther is set in the fifth century BC, among Jews in Susa, the capital of the Persian Empire, which ruled a vast territory, including the land of Israel. The Jew Esther has become queen, but her cousin Mordechai has antagonised the prime minister Haman so much that Haman has contrived to pass a decree that all the Jews in the Empire will be exterminated in a few months’ time. The only way to stop this is for Esther to petition the king to pass a contrary law – but this can only be done at great risk, because no one, even the queen, may speak to the king except at his request. By placing her life in such danger, and thus saving her entire people, Esther comes closer than anyone in the Old Testament to representing Christ. Here Mordechai persuades Esther to take up her cross.

Then Esther spoke to Hathach and gave him a message for Mordecai, saying, ‘All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law—all alike are to be put to death. Only if the king holds out the golden sceptre to someone, may that person live. I myself have not been called to come in to the king for thirty days.’ When they told Mordecai what Esther had said, Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, ‘Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.’ Then Esther said in reply to Mordecai, ‘Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will also fast as you do. After that I will go to the king, though it is against the law; and if I perish, I perish.’ (Esther 4: 10-16)

The British novelist Melvyn Bragg grew up on the north-west coast of Cumbria. His novel A Soldier’s Return tells the story of Sam, a lieutenant in the British army in Burma during the Far Eastern campaign of the Second World War. There are two settings for the novel. The first is a Cumbrian market town in the mid-1940s, where Sam tries with great difficulty to settle back into the rhythms of work and family life. The second is Burma two or three years earlier, to which Sam’s mind and the narrative of the novel frequently return in flashbacks – flashbacks that explain why settling back into mundane provincial life is such a challenge.

Sam tries to deal with his inner turmoil by writing letters to the families of his soldiers who lost their lives during the fighting in Burma. Because his regiment all came from Cumbria, Sam has the opportunity to go and visit some of the families. On one occasion Sam visits Mr and Mrs Bell, whose son Ian had been a member of Sam’s company. Sam sits down at their house to an inevitably awkward tea, and begins to explain to Mr and Mrs Bell how Ian had been a terrific soldier. Sam goes on to say that Ian talked a great deal about his family, that he’d deeply cared about them and had missed them terribly. Sam says a lot of kind things about Ian – that he was courageous, that everyone liked him, that he was always eager to give others a helping hand. Then the time comes for Sam to talk about the way Ian died. Sam goes over again the things he’d expressed when he first wrote to Mr and Mrs Bell. A sniper had taken Ian out: his death was sudden and instantaneous, in the midst of combat. Ian hadn’t felt anything – he’d been killed in a flash. Silence hangs in the room until Mrs Bell takes herself back to the kitchen. The two men stay in silence as they finished their tea. There isn’t anything to say.

Finally Mr Bell takes the initiative, and, putting on a hat and a jacket, gestures to Sam it’s time to get some fresh air. Sam wheels his bike beside Mr Bell as they make their way through the village. Then Mr Bell starts to make a path toward the sea across the sand dunes, and Sam pushes his bike with more difficulty up a hill. Once they reach the top of the hill Mr Bell sets his face toward Scotland, and Sam stands beside him, the bike in between them. They share a moment to light a cigarette. Mr Bell talks about his time in the First World War, in the medical corps. He makes it clear he didn’t believe in killing; but he wasn’t scared. His role was to bring back from no-man’s land the charred remains of the bodies the battle left behind. Time and again he’d witnessed a horrifying sight: looking over and again into what was left of a face, he’d become accustomed to throwing up.

All of which is a preliminary to what Mr Bell says next. It’s clear he understands that Sam’s story is an attempt to be kind. He says straightforwardly to Sam that he wants to know what really happened to his son Ian. But he doesn’t turn round to look at Sam as he speaks. Sam isn’t ready for Mr Bell’s piercing honesty. Through the swirling wind, and speaking to the back of Mr Bell, Sam begins telling a different story. It had been a good day. They’d been in an open patch of land in Burma, in a forest clearing. As he talks Sam has the image in his mind as vivid as the beach below. There’d been no danger. The Japanese were a long way off. The company was spending the time taking stock and the soldiers were mending their gear. Ian was one of the tidy ones. Sam recalls being a yard away from him. There were plenty of men close by and strewn all over the clearing, tending to their equipment. It was a rare relaxed few days when the enemy wasn’t breathing down their throats.

Sam hadn’t forgotten a single detail. He saw Ian with a smile and a fag poking out of his mouth, and a dreamy, happy look on his face, completely self-contained – but still sharp enough to realise his lieutentant wanted a cigarette and generous enough to throw him a packet, before resuming his cleaning regime. And then the moment came. Ian was cleaning a grenade. No one would ever understand why. It’s hard for Sam to put this into words. All the moisture drains from his mouth as he’s speaking. Ian had taken out the pin of the grenade before he’d pulled out the fuse. Why he’d done it, what he imagined he was doing, would forever remain a mystery. There was only one outcome. Five seconds later the grenade would explode.

Just as Mr Bell can never forget the faces of those he retrieved from no man’s land in the Great War, Sam can never forget the look on Ian’s face at that moment. Both men knew straightaway that there was no escape. Surrounded as he was for a hundred yards in each direction by his fellow soldiers, there was nowhere that Ian could throw the grenade without causing carnage. Ian looked open-eyed and open-mouthed, and then, to Sam’s astonishment, Ian’s face had broken into a gentle, sweet smile. He started to speak; but all of a sudden he doubled over and smothered the grenade with his body, taking into himself the whole force of the explosion. Yet he lived for a further two hours. He didn’t scream, but from time to time he simply whimpered, ‘Sorry!’ How could you step aside from such a sound and such a sight?

With hesitation and careful silences Sam tells Mr Bell the whole story. Mr Bell buckles as if he’d been struck, and leans forward in a convulsion as it were to be sick. Then he steadies himself, and announces he won’t be telling Ian’s mother, since she’s only just managing with what she knows. Sam realises the conversation is at an end. He pushes his bike towards the road. When he looks behind him, Mr Bell is stood to attention, ready to face whatever ensues.[4]

Each of the three men in this story knew intimately about sacrifice. The first, Ian, never came back from the war. The second, Sam, did come back but had lost everything. The novel is really about Sam. It’s about what happens when you’ve lost your stomach and your heart but you begin trying to live again. The third character, Mr Bell, stayed in England but his life without his son would never be the same again. So one never came back; one came back but lost everything; one stayed but would never be the same. Each knew all about sacrifice.

I want to suggest to you that the story of Ian, Sam and Mr Bell can be read as a story about God, about the cross, and as a modern-day Esther story. When Ian looks around the camp and realises that there’s nowhere he can throw the grenade, he shows us the face of Christ. Within the ghastly carnage and destruction of war, we catch this glimpse of what and who Jesus is. Jesus is the one who lays down his life so that all may live. Ian experiences in his own body the price of human folly and failure. Why does the pin come out of the grenade? We don’t really know. Why does humanity find itself at enmity with itself and at enmity with God? We don’t really know. Almost every explanation really comes down to a description of the symptoms. But that the grenade is ticking away, that what we have set loose stands to do untold damage to us and to all creation – that’s undeniable: that we know very well. And here is Ian, here is Christ, bent double over the force that threatens to obliterate us, laying down his life that we might be saved. That’s what Esther does. She takes upon herself the full weight of what it means to save the entire Jewish people. Esther is the closest the Old Testament gets to a portrayal of Jesus.

And in Sam we see God the comforter just as strongly represented. Sam is the one who as the commanding officer represented a kind of parent to Ian. Now, back in Cumbria, he represents Ian to Ian’s parents. And uncannily Mr and Mrs Bell see Ian in Sam, and Sam sees Ian in Mr and Mrs Bell. Sam makes his parents present to Ian and makes Ian present to his parents. Sam is the bearer of two stories: the story that Ian died as part of a war that was finally won – the story he tells to Mrs Bell; and the story that Ian died through stupidity and carelessness and folly and in the end through an act of courageous sacrifice that can only evoke awe and astonishment – the story Sam tells to Mr Bell. Sam gives us a picture of the Holy Spirit – the comforter, the one who makes Christ present, the one who offers the face of Christ to the Father and the face of the Father to Christ, the one who breathes into life the story of salvation.

And in Mr Bell we see what it means to lose your only son. In Mr Bell we see what it means to carry in your heart two stories about what your son’s death means. The first story is a story of glory, a story in which Ian’s death is part of a great achievement, in this case victory in Burma, success in the Far East campaign, peace in our time. The second story is one of folly, no enemy anywhere near, a happy lazy sunny afternoon, a careless lapse in attention, and a breathtaking moment of agonising courage. In Mr Bell we see God the Father, whose only Son dies on the cross through a mixture of God’s indescribable love and our unspeakable folly. These two profound truths remain in the Father’s heart for ever.

Many of us want to tell an angry story about the world and our lives, rather like the story Mr Bell tells about the First World War – a story of mismanaged resources, of unjust relations where hundreds of poor people die to sustain the lifestyle of their richer compatriots, a story of brutality and cruelty and fear. Others of us want to tell a more idealised story of our lives, rather like the story Sam tells Mrs Bell about Ian, a story of inevitable setbacks on the rolling march to freedom, truth and glory. But the figure we most need to reckon with on Good Friday is not Mr Bell or Sam. It’s Ian. The pin is out of the grenade. Whether through perversity or ignorance, we are sinners. The pin is out of the grenade, like it or not. We have two options. One is to put as much distance as we can between ourselves and the grenade, whoever else the grenade might damage or destroy. But that wasn’t Ian’s way. Ian’s way was to take the destruction in his own body and in doing so to save the life of others. Ian’s way was to lose his life to gain it, to let his grain of wheat fall so it might bear much fruit. Ian is a modern-day Esther – and a twentieth-century Christ.

Ian shows us the only way to redeem the horror of the worst violence the world can generate. He turns his whole body into the shape it needs to be to make his companions’ life possible. He makes the worst horror into something beautiful. This is how he imitates Christ: by shaping his body so as to give us life. This is how he models the life of the church: a body shaped to bring life to others. This is what the church asks of us: to shape our abundant resources to give life to the world. What Mordecai says to Esther he may be saying to all of us: perhaps we have been sent, right here, right now, for just such a time as this.

Faith means dealing with Mrs Bell’s fantasy with compassion and patience, recognising Mr Bell’s half-truth with humility and integrity, and aspiring to Sam’s faltering honesty with courage and hope. It’s not always at every moment about the searing honesty of the final conversation between Sam and Mr Bell. But in the arms of the heartbroken Father, in the grace of the sacrificial Son, and in the fellowship of the comforting Spirit, we face the death of such conversations, knowing that true resurrection cannot be found any other way.

[1] Charles Allen Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life (Boston: Mifflin and Co, 1906) 232, quoted in D.M. Baillie, God was in Christ: An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986) 194.

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/opinion/sunday/cancer-what-to-say.html

[3] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta: John Knox 1982) 186-7.

[4] Melvyn Bragg, A Soldier’s Return (New York: Arcade 2003) 114-117