Holy Week Tears – Day 5, Friday

It is Good Friday, welcome to Day 5 of Holy Week Tears

If you are journeying with us this week, you will know that today is Day 5 of our Holy Week Tears reflections and that we are creating a visual focal point as we move through this Holy Week. Take your tear drop shape and place it next to Monday’s Palm Cross, Tuesday’s Bread, Wednesday’s Silver coins Maundy Thursday’s soap and towel and on it place some spiky bits of bramble or hawthorn (if your garden has them) or some nails, a cocktail stick, anything sharp and maybe if you have it a bit of purple cloth or paper.

A quiet thought:

Reflect on your spiky prickly things, what they feel like. Reflect on your bit of purple, rich and regal, what images does it evoke for you?

We add our spiky things to represent the crown of thorns placed upon Jesus’ head at the crucifixion and the purple cloth represents the robe that was put on Jesus. Purple for royalty, Jesus was King of the Jews and still we refer to Jesus as King of Kings, Lord of Lords. Read the story of Good Friday in Mark 15. The images today are of pain, anguish, desolation, death, of desertion, sadness, bewilderment, confusion, hopes dashed, fears raised, engulfing darkness, grief and more….these are the images of Good Friday.

Let’s listen to a Good Friday Hymn:

When I survey the wonderous cross (StF 287)

Come and see (StF 270)

Chris Tomlin ‘At the cross’

Casting Crowns ‘Blessed Redeemer’

 

Those words will be etched in many of our minds from Good Friday’s in years gone by…but what about these words of Brian Wren StF 273

   1      Here hangs a man discarded,
           a scarecrow hoisted high,
           a nonsense pointing nowhere
           to all who hurry by.

   2      Can such a clown of sorrows
           still bring a useful word,
           when faith and love seem phantoms
           and every hope absurd?

   3      Yet here is help and comfort
           for lives by comfort bound,
           when drums of dazzling progress
           give strangely hollow sound:

   4      Life, emptied of all meaning,
           drained out in bleak distress,
           can share in broken silence
           our deepest emptiness:

   5      And love that freely entered
           the pit of life’s despair,
           can name our hidden darkness
           and suffer with us there.

   6      Christ, in our darkness risen,
           help all who long for light
           to hold the hand of promise
           till faith receives its sight.

A closing prayer:

Blessed God, our hearts feel broken as we reflect on the events of Good Friday and we try to feel your pain.

We imagine the fear and anger and all the emotions of the day and somehow this year of all years, they resonate deeply with us.

Blessed God, we know you share the pain and anguish of the day with us. In Jesus, you suffered and you died for us; now in Jesus we pray for your protection, your love, your gentleness and we pray in this in between time for a vision of a brighter future, of life enriched and in all its fullness.

Amen