Over my left shoulder, is an image that was once a source of some controversy in this church.
Apparently, there was a danger of “popery” or idolatry to be discerned in this pathetic image, of a man broken,
and bleeding, and beyond all earthly help.
I knew the donor, but not the controversy.
Lyn and I had journeyed with this gifted young man through some hard parts of a troubled life,
many years ago. We remember him still with gratitude and affection. He was direct, and honest, and confronting. And we valued all of that in him.
But he was a hard case, and he troubled others, too, in his - finally - very dysfunctional life. So, when he offered the Crucifix to this
community, he was actually offering very much more than a piece of debatable High Church imagery.
Whether he was conscious of it or not, he was, in this extraordinary gift, placing on permanent display the agony of his own virtual crucifixion.
What a terrible gift it was, then.
However, the fact that it made it to this prominent location is, to me, an important sign of hope.
This community of Christ received, and honoured, a life and not just an artfully shaped piece of timber.
In my study, I have - and treasure - another crucifix. Today, you will find it in the Chapel of this church. It, too, has a history.
Nearly forty years ago, I was working for the Brotherhood of St Laurence in Fitzroy. One morning, I was called to the front desk. I scurried
downstairs to be confronted by a rather harassed receptionist, and a lean and scruffy middle-aged man.
The story was that the man had a Crucifix for sale. Given the location and the appearance of the man, together with a bit of my own
local experience, I immediately became wary.
I was even more careful when the man pulled out of a sack, a beautifully carved piece of timber. A long and lean figure suspended on a plain cross.
There was only one blemish on the piece, where the artist appeared to have cut too deeply into the chest of the Christ.
Immediately, I was interested in what was being offered. Principally, I confess, because of its beauty as a work of religious art.
But I was still wary. The vendor had alcohol on his breath, and it was early in the day. I interrogated him a little, to establish
some provenance for the piece. He told me an unlikely story, and I asked him to wait whilst I made a few enquiries.
I rang his avowed place of employment, as well as the Police, to see if there was a report of such an object being stolen.
There was not, and so I went back to the man and asked him what he wanted for the crucifix. He astounded me by asking only a couple of dollars.
And here I was caught.
I knew that he was actually asking for the price of a drink, up the road at the Rob Roy Pub. But I just couldn’t let the sculpture go.
So, I offered him $20 - the price of ten drinks - and he went away delighted, no doubt to make an early start on another predictable and damaging day.
Obviously, there is much to be made of the moral dilemma I faced, and the way in which I handled it. I certainly contributed nothing to his restoration.
What a burden that lovely crucifix now carries, out of the lives of two people who bargained over it and, each in their own way, were dragged on to that cross itself.
That anonymous, doomed, broken and bedraggled man, re-presented to me every day, as my glance passes over the image of Christ set on my desk. And the would-be priest,
struggling with the pain of another, and yet adding to it.
There was another Crucifix. A startling work of art that Lyn and I chanced upon, and continue to wonder at, as we recollect a trip to Italy made many years ago.
Laid on its back, neglected, in a corner of a cloister of a famous church in Ravenna, was an almost life-sized bronze sculpture of a part-naked young woman, crucified.
We had never seen such a thing before. At a time when the debate over the Ordination of women to the priesthood was at its height, the image was especially confronting.
It remains so, in our minds. And it is just as relevant. The obvious pain of crucifixion echoed in the hard journeys of many women.
It should be obvious that to talk of idolatry or “popery” when we are confronted by a Crucifix, is to trivialize both the Passion of Christ,
and the pain of all those whose life burdens he bears.
This afternoon we are invited to look through the image which is the focus of our most obvious attention.
The Crucifix is an Icon of the love of God, earthed in the pain of all who suffer. And Christ foremost amongst them.
The Liturgy of this day is replete with sights, and sounds and movements that are designed, very carefully, to draw us to the
Cross of Christ in heart and mind. But all of these things count for little more than a pathetic entertainment for the religious
dilettante, unless they find a disturbing resonance in the pain of the world. God’s world. The world in which the Creator
experienced the pain and despair of the created.
The ground I am entering at this time, and which I invite you to inhabit also, is the dark earth that a lonely prisoner treads
far from his home and this place. He is a person of whom we all know, but one with no voice of his own for us to hear.
A young man suffering an incomprehensible lack of ordinary justice, effectively abandoned by his fellow citizens and their appointed representatives.
Forced to find another country to care for him. Perhaps a weak and foolish young man, caught up in matters that he can barely understand.
His youthful years ebbing away in what is always, for all of us, a small and precious lifetime.
I am, of course, alluding to David Hicks.
Well! Is this to be a sour note in a lovely and moving Liturgy? I rather hope so!
Like the wormwood and the gall put to the mouth of the crucified Christ, so we may need that taste in the mouth that literally brings us to our senses. The same senses which enable us to enter into the pain of another.
To be fearful - but glad - that, from earliest times we have been called, with Paul, to proclaim Christ crucified, the hope of all the oppressed, the one “by whose wounds we are healed”.
In an article by Jane Still, in the most recent edition of The Melbourne Anglican, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in expressing his deep concern for the “legal anomaly” that is represented by the Guantanamo Bay prison camp,
reminded us that “the prisoners were not people who had been found guilty, and they did not have the kind of legal access we would normally assume to be proper”.
It was reported that the Archbishop of York had earlier “condemned the lack of access to prisoners by the Red Cross or Red Crescent, as required by the Geneva Convention,
and the inability for prisoners even to be interviewed by the United Nations Human Rights group.”
We all know these things, we have heard them expressed, in one way or another, in every form of the media, for years.
And over all those years, a young man has been growing older, his hope and vitality seeping away in the face of a huge
and unjust resolve on the part of his captors. And we, as a nation, are complicit. We, as a Christian community are deeply challenged.
This day, and our keeping of it as special in the yearly round of our devotions, calls us first to enter deeply into the suffering of another.
To ascend the Cross and feel the pain of the victim. To rejoice at the fact that Jesus offers hope even in the face of abandonment,
and to ensure that Black Friday is transformed into Good Friday. Not so much by our religious sentiment as by our Christian action.
The great Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, once wrote:” What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do,
not what I am to know, except insofar as a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself,
to see what God really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”
This Celebration of Good Friday re-presents the truth of that reflection, resolved in the action of Jesus.
So then, what is the idea for which we can live and die? What are we to do?
Perhaps the conversion of our hearts - if that is needed - will begin in a commitment to take upon ourselves the Cross
that Jesus offers to those that would follow Him.
Then our prayer for that young man, and for his captors, will be informed by the pain and bewilderment of others,
and not so much by our own fear and prejudice.
It will be a start, and it will make a difference.
Irina Ratushinskaya, a prisoner of conscience, when released from a Russian prison in 1986 wrote these words which I have shared
with you before, and with which I will end:
“Believe me, it was often thus: In solitary cells, on winter nights, a sudden sense of of joy and warmth, and a resounding note of love.
And then, unsleeping, I would know, a-huddle by an icy wall, someone is thinking of me now, petitioning the Lord for me."
