Good Friday

Cross

Embracing our most fearful, returning again to our anguish,
the Gentle One shines so bright with patient love
to make the darkness a mirror:
in love, entering our wound,
Christ escapes our doom;
reduced to nothing, becomes infinite;
God going into our pain,
healing coming out of it;
our shadow pierced by light;
our worst, and our highest possibility,
God's leastness, and greatness;
the cruelest of us, the kindest of God;
our most senseless
met by God's most incomprehensible;
in our farthest abandonment
God's most intimate presence;
the death of our death
writhing in the crucible of love;
the power of our evil to build empire
and the world-destroying power of grace
to make another.
God's weakness, God's might,
our confession, our hope.

The darkest paradox
is that we who draw near to the awfulness
might be made more kind;
that in the face of death
we might be given enough life to say,
Jesus, we are sorry for what we have done to you.
By your grace, undo us.

Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light

Photo by Alicia Quan on Unsplash