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    Hanging by a Thread
    Hanging by a Thread
    Hanging by a Thread
    Ebook61 pages56 minutes

    Hanging by a Thread

    By Samuel Wells

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    About this ebook

    Sam Wells reflects on the challenges to our understanding of Christ's crucifixion that arise today. Discussing six biblical stories, he affirms that, in the face of these challenges, the cross has an enduring power to shape how we live.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCanterbury Press
    Release dateDec 6, 2016
    ISBN9781848259096
    Hanging by a Thread
    Author

    Samuel Wells

    Samuel Wells is Vicar of St Martin in the Fields, London and a renowned public theologian. He is well-known for his broadcasting and writing, and is the author of more than thirty books.

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      Book preview

      Hanging by a Thread - Samuel Wells

      For Karl

      Contents

      Title

      Dedication

      Introduction

      1  Story

      2  Trust

      3  Life

      4  Purpose

      5  Power

      6  Love

      7  Story

      Copyright

      Introduction

      There was a time when the cross was an answer. For the early Church the cross explained why there needed to be a Church at all: Israel had rejected Jesus the Messiah, and the Roman Empire had killed him – so a new institution, neither chosen people nor worldwide superpower, arose to worship the crucified Lord. For Christendom (the many centuries in which Church and state asked the same questions and reached the same conclusions) the cross explained how God in Christ had dealt with eternal matters, leaving us to deal with earthly ones. For the time of the West’s expanding empires, the cross explained why the benighted ones would one day thank us for our invasions so much: for we knew the grace of God, utterly portrayed in the crucified Jesus, and they did not.

      Today the cross is no longer an answer. Today the cross is a question. It’s a question about God, about existence and about us. In the days when the cross was an answer we didn’t need to pay attention because we already knew the answer. The answer was that Christianity confirmed everything we already believed about existence. Now that the cross is a question we fear to pay attention because we find the question so frightening and we’re terrified to face it because we are afraid it may not have an answer. And our faith will be hanging by a thread.

      Some years ago, when I served at Duke University Chapel in North Carolina, I used to share in the service of Tenebrae. I found it one of the most memorable services of the year. At around 7.30 p.m. on the evening of Good Friday there would be a single reading, followed by a sermon; then, interspersed with Passiontide hymns, there would follow a series of readings, and, after each reading, one of seven huge candles placed on the altar would be snuffed out. Finally the congregation of around 1,300 would listen, in darkness and silence, as the tower bell tolled 39 times. That silence was louder than any music or words.

      The question that exercised those preparing for the service was, what should happen after the great silence? The tradition had been that a candle would be brought forward slowly from the back of the chapel, more than 50 rows back, a journey taking a minute or so, and that the person bearing the candle would light a small candle that was placed to one side of the altar, at a lower level. It was a beautiful and compelling moment. The symbolism was unmistakeable: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it’ (John 1.5). From this flame, the whole world would shine in glory. God’s love had been snuffed out, but you can’t snuff out the nature and destiny of all things. Humbly, quietly, but relentlessly, it would reassert itself.

      The trouble was, it was an action befitting a Saturday night Easter Vigil rather than a Friday night Tenebrae. It seemed to me to represent a profound reluctance to stay with the unresolved, tragic and terrifying experience of Good Friday evening. In subsequent years various endings were tried; but in the end it was decided that there could be no conclusion: the bell should toll, there should be silence; and, after a solemn interlude, there should be sufficient side-aisle lights lit to enable those who wished to do so to leave in safety.

      This liturgical question goes right to the heart of the theology of Good Friday. Was the cross an agonizing, horrifying but ultimately successful and triumphant enterprise, in which a limitlessly-loving and inexpressibly-gracious saviour secured our eternal salvation by assuaging the rasping hunger of death and satisfying the just demands of recompense for sin? Or was it, rather, the tragic, cruel and ugly epitome of the world’s failure to embrace the utter goodness of God embodied in Christ, an ending so shameful, so isolated, so apparently final, that it exposes the Church’s deepest, yet invariably suppressed, fears about the absence, defeat or non-existence of God? If it was the former, the solemn entry of a candle is an appropriate and tender sign of completion, celebration and first-fruits of redemption. If it was the latter, the candle is a sign of our denial of the cost, risk and full horror of the cross, a hasty and perhaps shallow attempt to turn tragedy into comedy, to resist pathos and rush to a happy ending.

      If Christian understanding of the cross errs on one

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