At the foot of the cross
Standing there, do we continually cry the petitions of psalm 143?
‘Hear my prayer… the
enemy has pursued me, crushing my life to the ground’.
‘Answer me quickly, O
LORD; my spirit fails.’
‘Do not hide your
face from me, or I shall be like those who go down to the Pit’.
And he cries out:
‘into your hands O Lord, I commend my Spirit’; ‘It is finished’.
Friends come.
They stretch out
their hands to hold lifeless limbs.
Preserve my life?
Bring me out of
trouble?
Destroy my
adversaries?
Are these hopes of
the psalmist now crushed forever?
In psalm 22 we hear
that ‘to him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him
shall bow all who go to the dust, and I shall live for him’.
Friends tend him;
they bring spices and linen clothes; they lower him into the cold and darkness
of a tomb.
‘Now there was a
garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new
tomb in which no one had ever been laid.’
‘And so, because it
was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus
there.’
‘Posterity will serve
him; future generations will be told about the Lord…’
Can we continue with
the psalmist, reaching the end of psalm 22?
We are those future
generations: proclaiming ‘his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that
he has done it’.
The
substance of this ‘it’ is deliverance from sin and death.
All the cries and
voices of supplication are heard: this death destroys death.
Yes, the distress is
real; the grief of disciples who’d fled and the women who’d watched and the men
who’d buried is real.
As psalm 31 puts it:
‘be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away
from
grief; my soul and body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years
with sighing; my strength fails because of my misery, and my bones waste away’.
© Julie Gittoes 2016
