Into Your Hands....

Good Friday services are the solemnest of the solemn, a veil of sadness behind which joy resides.

We are invited to put ourselves in Jesus' shoes and to walk the steps to the cross. Can we do what he did? Forgive those who know not what they do? Offer a word of comfort to someone who is in an extreme a situation as we may be?

In any comparison of "magnitude of suffering" we will come up short. We cannot fill Christ's shoes. We can only begin to imagine the suffering he underwent. So why then do we make the Lenten journey every year?

One of the reasons I do is so that can make another attempt to just put myself in the shoes of someone else. To try to live a life with more compassion for others than I did the year before. To give up a little more of the "Me" that gets in the way.

Whole sermons could be written about the meanings in Salvador Dali's painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), but one aspect of the painting that has always spoken to me is that Jesus is represented as the 3-Dimensional human facet of the 4th dimensional being God. That Jesus was the only way we, as humans, could begin to see and experience something as profound as the limitless and unknowable God.

On the hypercube cross, in the death of his 3-D human self, Jesus became 4-D life for others/everyone/me. So -- in my own limited way, can I give up a little more of my 3-D"me" to become a more dimensional spirit? To become hands, heart and mind through which God can continue to work in the world? Is that the solemn joy behind the veil?

Let it be so.

Amen.

Paul Sannerud