What the Crucifixion means to me

While I constantly remind myself that Jesus died on an executioners cross between two thieves and not on a beautiful crucifix between two candles, I do not find it at all helpful to wallow in the pathology of the event. I realise that people do that to counter the continuing theory that He did not really die, because the foundation of their faith rest wholly on His resurrection.

My faith is not like that, it depends on personal experience of His availability NOW. Certainly He died, therefore he arose and went to heaven and the Holy Spirit was released. But that is to go beyond the present brief.

I have thought about the various theories of the need for Christ's death and find the simple idea of God requiring it, as a substitution for our punishment, abhorrent. Nevertheless as a scientist previously engaged in developing computer programs for the modelling of the flow of heat in Nuclear Reactors, I am happy with the general idea of "models" which are not dissimilar from parables. Our equations came nowhere near close to what Mother Nature (she too is a parable) seemed to accomplish with ease in our reactors, but we were able to predict satisfactory results. And we had a variety of models from the simplistic which were adequate for some purposes, to the much more complicated and difficult, necessary for other situations. So when I sing There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin, (From There is a Green hill.... which was written as as children's hymn not a theological treatise), I do so recognising that here is a simple model which contains some truth but certainly not all of it.

Never mind the theories, what I am totally convinced of, emotionally rather than theoretically, is that the Cross represents the absolute crux (interesting word) of God's interaction with His people. The central pivotal yet timeless point (words fail me) when (not at one point in history but somehow forever) God stretched out His hand and heaven and earth met. The tearing of the Temple Curtain is a wonderful symbol of what I am struggling to say. Struggling, so like Jesus I turn to a story, a true one, although like His parables it does not have a happy ever after meaning.

I have a friend who I visited when he was in prison and wrote to regularly. He came to a point where his thoughts about his various crimes overwhelmed him. At that time he was attending mass in the prison chapel so I suggested to him that he imagined putting all his sins crimes etc. into a big red bag (deliberately not a black one) and, at mass, placing it at the foot of the Chapel Cross. He did as I suggested and that night dreamt that Jesus came to that cross and took the bag away. I wish I could say that thereafter he became a Christian and changed his life. Not so, but at least those particular sins really are gone. And miracles happen in God's good time.

The Cross remains a continuing miracle in the sense that He continues to work through it and to it we can return whenever we wish or require and indeed do so at Holy Communion. The words of consecration: Jesus, on the night He was betrayed, took bread.... are to me "electric" meaning: involving the direct intervention of God into the Sacrament.. And Good Friday is more important than Easter Sunday.