there is a green hill

 

Good Friday.

There are two hills in my parish on which a large cross is processed and erected every Good Friday.

The hills are formed of (what is locally known as) Magnesian Limestone. They date from the Permian Period, some 275 million years ago, a period that saw three or four massive extinctions concluding with the one known as the Great Dying. Of course, the continents and seas were different then, to how our world looks now.

I understand this cognitively; but when I climb the Tunstall Hills today I do not understand myself to have any part in their distant past, or distant future, only in their present.

Between 3.00 p.m. on Good Friday and sometime before dawn on the following Sunday, we who confess dependence in God proclaim that, in Jesus, God is dead.

Not that God has experienced death and so is able to identify with our experience of death. We confess that God is dead.

God will not stay dead, for death simply is not strong enough to hold God captive. Nonetheless we proclaim not that God died once upon a time, some two thousand years ago, but that God is dead.

We confess this because faith is not a cognitive belief, such as my understanding of the hill from where I can stand at the foot of a cross and look down on St Nicholas church; faith is experiential. As we walk through the Triduum of the evening of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and the early hours of Easter Sunday, we are drawn into those events.

And, being drawn into them, they shape us in particular ways, in union with God, in and with and through Jesus.

Do not rush through these hours. Do not rush to proclaim, He is risen!

Do not push away the God who would draw us into his death, for there is no other way to be drawn into his Life.