Holy Week and Easter Services 2023
Palm Sunday 2nd April 9am Traditional Eucharist with Choir. Peace Hall 10:30am Contemporary Eucharist with Sunday School (starting with morning... read more
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?
My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?
Matthew 27: 46; Mark 15:34
Christianity doesn’t explain suffering.
It shows you what to do with it.
-Von Hugel-
Opening Meditation
That awful spine-chilling cry!
helpless and wracked with pain,
even Christ felt
utterly alone,
forsaken,
abandoned.
reaching rock bottom,
can anything be worse than feeling God is blind,
deaf,
heartless
or dead?
Yet
‘God was in Christ’
and Christ’s agony
in that specific moment of time
has become timeless;
become part of the very being of God.
‘God was in Christ’,
and so God knows
what it is to despair
and bids us to trust
and go on trusting;
bids us to hold on
and keep holding on,
though it be
only by our fingertips.
Help us, father, when things are at their worst,
to hold on to the truth that in Christ
you are in the situation with us.
Whisper to us again that firm ground lies beyond the quagmire;
light beyond the darkness;
and rejoicing beyond the despair. Amen
To consider…
Closing meditation
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Lord Jesus, by your cry of desperate honesty,
Rid us of superficial faith
Which is afraid of the dark.
Not so that we might be justified pessimists,
But so that we might discover profound joy,
Give us, when we need it, the courage to doubt, to rage, to question, to rail against heaven until we know we are heard.
We do not ask for easy answers to hard times;
There are many who can offer these.
We ask for a sense of your solidarity,
That will be enough to let us know that we do not walk or cry alone;
That will enable us to go through the dark
And find light again in the morning.
Amen.
To think about:
In a Country Church
To one kneeling down, no words came,
only the winds song, saddening the lips
of the grave saints, rigid in glass,
or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
bats, not angels, in the high roof.
Was he baulked by silence? He kneeled long,
and saw love in a dark crown
of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
golden with the fruit of a man’s body
-RS Thomas-