Haiku of the Passion

Gethsemane. Night.

The struggle. Will he retreat,

or accept his path?

Who are you seeking?

He asked the mob. I am he;

let these others go.

When those in power

control the courts, the verdict

is never in doubt.

Do you follow him?

How shall I answer? Am I

brave enough for “Yes!”

So you are a king?

Yes; but not the kind of king

that Pilate expects.

He hangs, suspended,

arms stretched out; at one with us

and all who suffer.

Order is reversed.

Through weakness, strength; through death, life;

fear gives way to love.

© Ken Rookes 2023

Silence

Haiku for washing one’s hands

He gave no answer

when the governor asked him

about the charges.

They called for his death;

Pilate knew his innocence.

Let’s not make trouble.

The sorrow, the pain,

the cruelty; sacrificed

for expedience.

We still silence them;

prophets with their awkward words.

They keep coming back.

Who do we call for;

taking man or giving man?

Choose between the two.

Are you still there God?

Why have you abandoned me?

Nothing but silence.

Will Elijah come?

Will anyone rescue him?

But nobody comes.

His voice cries again.

Anguished and forsaken

the king breathes his last.

© Ken Rookes 2020

Indifference

(a poem written by Studdert Kennedy - a chaplain in the 1st world war, - but the sentiment feels appropriate to me when i think of Australia's attitude towards asylum seekers.) 

Indifference, by GA Studdert Kennedy 

When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree, 
They drove great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary; 
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep, 
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap. 

When Jesus came to Birmingham, they simply passed Him by. 
They would not hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die; 
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain, 
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain. 

Still Jesus cried, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do,’ 
And still it rained the winter rain that drenched Him through and through; 
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see, 
And Jesus crouched against a wall, and cried for Calvary. 

by GA Studdert Kennedy
 

AND A GOOD FRIDAY WAS HAD BY ALL

  You man there keep those women back
  and God Almighty he laid down
  on the crossed timber and old Silenus
  my offsider looked at me as if to say
  nice work for soldiers, your mind's not your own
  once you sign that dotted line Ave Caesar
  and all that malarkey Imperator Rex

  well this Nazarene
  didn't make it any easier
  really - not like the ones
  who kick up a fuss so you can 
  do your block and take it out on them
            Silenus
  held the spike steady and I let fly
  with the sledge-hammer, not looking
  on the downswing trying hard not to hear
  over the women's wailing the bones give way
  the iron shocking the dumb wood.

  Orders is orders, I said after it was over
  nothing personal you understand - we had a 
  drill-sergeant once thought he was God but he wasn't 
  a patch on you

  then we hauled on the ropes
  and he rose in the hot air
  like a diver just leaving the springboard, arms spread
  so it seemed
  over the whole damned creation
  over the big men who must have had it in for him
  and the curious ones who'll anything if it's free
  with only the usual women caring anywhere
  and a blind man in tears.

Bruce Dawe

Crucifixion Haiku

Watching from afar

as our friend is put to death;

please don't condemn us.

© Ken Rookes 2016

The agony of Good Friday

Rev Dr Wes Campbell has done a new Easter journey triptych and has given me permission to post his paintings and share on our site. 
This is the central panel portraying the agony of the cross. 
Please feel free to use with acknowledgement.

It is finished

A stone to seal an entrance,

asserting the boundary between the living

and the dead.

Linen cloths to bind a corpse,

cold lips hidden within coarse fabric;

no longer can they speak their words of love.

A hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes

to weigh a body down,

to keep it from floating off

into mythical certitude;

or uncertainty, if you prefer.

On Friday, with the setting of the sun,

light is overcome by the darkness

as a man is laid in his tomb.

Death's accoutrements

determinedly underline the tears,

the despair,

and the apparent finality:

it is finished.

© Ken Rookes. 2015

WE BELIEVE

God is present in the tomb of our waiting, creating the costly miracles of the victory of good, of love, of grace, of the restoration of all things.

In the centre of our waiting the seeds of our salvation are announced in small signs, in small kindnesses, in humble courage, in lives of fragile hope, in faithfulness.

God is not defeated. Life is more powerful than death. This we believe. From this will we live.

Rev Dorothy McCrae McMahon

Good Friday sermon

The Good Friday readings are about pain, not just Jesus’ pain. If the cross is about anything it is about the whole experience of creation’s suffering and about God entering into that suffering.

It is to me also about the silence of God, about, the death of God. If we fully enter into the experience of the disciples and followers of Jesus at this time we will find bewilderment, confusion and grief. Psalm 22 is a psalm about a person has been utterly cut off from God and the human community, yet who in the end, achieves some sense of peace. It has echoes to Jesus’ cry from the cross and in Gethsemane. He is feeling so bad that he no longer defines himself as human but rather as a worm. After having complained to God that God is not be found, the thought of the psalmist turns to the history of god’s people and the promises of God and in them he finds some hope and future, despite what he feels in the present.

          Psalm 22 gives expression to the unutterable despair felt by one whom circumstances have cast completely adrift from all the reference points in life and from all other persons who lend joy and hope. There is no glimmer of divine grace, except for that which memory can borrow from the past. God is gone, and God’s only presence is a distant flame.

          This is where I believe Good Friday calls us to sit. In the absence of God. It is where the disciples were. all that they believed and held dear was shattered. We usually undertake Good Friday with a real sense of the closeness of Easter and of hope and resurrection. In other words we don’t really give credibility to the crucifixion and to our pain.

For myself I am reflecting on the darkness of the cross this year. I am really conscious of the World situation.We are faced with macro dark issues like global warming but i am also deeply affected by the darkness in the kidnapping of more than 100 schoolgirls by armed militants in Nigeria. On Good Friday we are asked to put ourselves in the position of really facing the darkness as if we did not know the Easter Sunday was to come. Not to do so is to deny the reality of sorrow and pain in our world. We all live in it. We all know it in one form or another, and we all have, or have had a space in our lives when we knew at a gut level the reality of the crucifixion, without a sense of the coming resurrection. It is in this space that the disciples and followers of Jesus were in on Good Friday and Saturday. Can we allow ourselves to enter that same still sorrow and trust that it will be fruitful.

I have a peach tree in our yard that I have been giving up on for years. It has been dying back almost continually. Every year there seems more dead branches. If you looked at the tree even at the height of summer, you would see a grey gnarled old trunk with a sprout of green at a few points near the top. But in the strange way that nature works it is one of the most fruitful trees in my garden. To quote Charles Elliot … “ A spirituality that refuses to acknowledge the winter of the heart, the great sorrowfulness of human experience, is not only refusing to take seriously the life that people actually lead; it is in danger of encouraging too much leaf and too little fruit. … It is therefore important to be in touch with our sorrows, to recognise them, to honour them even. … they are the necessary period of die-back, perhaps the continuing process of die-back, which is a precondition of fruitfulness”

Rev Gordon Bannon

Good Friday shame

 

On the first Good Friday,
so named some years later by people of faith;
the darkness was faced and defied;
and, in the days following, banished.
Well, not quite.
But a candle glimmer was ignited,
a hopeful something that later torrents of blackness
have never quite extinguished.
Otherwise women and men of faith
could never have survived.
Not the shame of religious wars,
inquisitions,
holocaust,
diverse conquests and killing fields,
or clerical abuse of children.
And certainly not the off-shore detention camps
where human suffering and despair
are made the wretched by-product
of the vile and fearful politics
practised by some
for whom Good Friday pretends to be a sacred day.
And still women and men of faith survive
to maintain their outrageous claim:
that the darkness has somehow been diminished,
at least a little.

© Ken Rookes 2014

God and grief

“Lord, I believe, but help thou my unbelief, because I still do not want to die. I believe Jesus has power to raise the dead, only I do not want him practicing on me. I want a God who will cut my losses and cushion my failures, a God who will grant me a life free from pain. I want a God who will rescue me from death, who will delete it from the human experience and find another way to operate.

What I, what all of us, have instead is a God who resurrects us from the dead, putting an end to it by working through it instead of around it--creating life in the midst of grief, creating love in the midst of loss, creating faith in the midst of despair--resurrecting us from our big and little deaths, showing us by his own example that the only road to Easter morning runs smack through Good Friday.”

 Barbara Brown Taylor

a poem for Good Friday

To the God of the Godless

When I had tired of the wars around me

Longing for forgetfulness, the softness of arms and breasts,

I could not close my ears to the thunder of the living.

But tonight history has ceased to cry out within me.

My white flag of truce is hoisted, my arms are thrown to the ground,

My back is turned to the cannon and here I surrender.

The hunger of generations is nothing now? Nothing.

The brotherhood of heroes? The knowledge of vast constellations?

I have rejected my vision and renounced prophecy.

Love is the final quality, love and not courage.

Not the love of the Gentiles, the crucified love of disciples,

But the love of my love; it has silenced a thousand poems.

I have sought peace in war, serenity in struggle, pity in hatred.

I shall search no longer, the lights are turned down.

Only faintly, faintly, I still hear the marching step of the unborn,

Feet, feet, moving, moving.

‑ DAVID MARTIN

God gives a candle

From The Fleeing Atalanta

God gives a candle

To his children afraid of the dark

How can you die, it says

When this between you lives forever

The candle is hard to maintain

Superfluous in the light

Nearly all prefer to blow it out

But they find with night's onset

It is not so easily rekindled

Jeer if you like at my obsession with love

When dying swine, you will all reach up

Desperate trotters for the same pearl

DAVID FOSTER ‑

sitting in the Pain

The readings of Good Friday are about pain, not just Jesus’ pain. If the cross is about anything it is about the whole experience of creation’s suffering and about God entering into that suffering.

It is to me also about the silence of God, about, the death of God. If we fully enter into the experience of the disciples and followers of Jesus at this time we will find bewilderment, confusion and grief. Psalm 22 is a psalm about a person has been utterly cut off from God and the human community, yet who in the end, achieves some sense of peace. It has echoes to Jesus’ cry from the cross and in gethsemane. He is feeling so bad that he no longer defines himself as human but rather as a worm. After having complained to God that God is not be found, the thought of the psalmist turns to the history of god’s people and the promises of God and in them he finds some hope and future, despite what he feels in the present.

          Psalm 22 gives expression to the unutterable despair felt by one whom circumstances have cast completely adrift from all the reference points in life and from all other persons who lend joy and hope. There is no glimmer of divine grace, except for that which memory can borrow from the past. God is gone, and God’s only presence is a distant flame.

          This is where I believe Good Friday calls us to sit. In the absence of God. It is where the disciples were. all that they believed and held dear was shattered. We usually undertake Good Friday with a real sense of the closeness of Easter and of hope and resurrection. In other words we don’t really give credibility to the crucifixion and to our pain. 

The meaning of the cross

"What if we see on this cross not a transaction with an offended mountain god, but a revelation at a moment of time of the love which is eternally in the heart of God, lived out in the long trek of Jesus? What if we smile at our failed and compromised images of paid penalties, sacrificial blood, ransoms, and punishments, all of which reflected some truth but also distorted it, and see in this historical moment a climax of lived love and lived hate, of the gods of religion and the God of compassion, of the political suppression of change and the unwillingness to recant on care? Then he died for us, against us, within us, before us - in a moment frozen in time for all time. And perhaps, then, we begin to know. "

William Loader
http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/mountain.htm

To the God of the Godless

When I had tired of the wars around me

Longing for forgetfulness, the softness of arms and breasts,

I could not close my ears to the thunder of the living.

But tonight history has ceased to cry out within me.

My white flag of truce is hoisted, my arms are thrown to the ground,

My back is turned to the cannon and here I surrender.

The hunger of generations is nothing now? Nothing.

The brotherhood of heroes? The knowledge of vast constellations?

I have rejected my vision and renounced prophecy.

Love is the final quality, love and not courage.

Not the love of the Gentiles, the crucified love of disciples,

But the love of my love; it has silenced a thousand poems.

I have sought peace in war, serenity in struggle, pity in hatred.

I shall search no longer, the lights are turned down.

Only faintly, faintly, I still hear the marching step of the unborn,

Feet, feet, moving, moving.

‑ DAVID MARTIN

From The Fleeing Atalanta

God gives a candle

To his children afraid of the dark

How can you die, it says

When this between you lives forever

The candle is hard to maintain

Superfluous in the light

Nearly all prefer to blow it out

But they find with night's onset

It is not so easily rekindled

Jeer if you like at my obsession with love

When dying swine, you will all reach up

Desperate trotters for the same pearl

DAVID FOSTER ‑

Golgotha

‑ ANDREW LANSDOWN

Finally, one arrives at the place

Of the skull because there is nowhere Else to go. And there before the face Of bone one pauses in despair.

The culmination of all evil

Is displayed before one's eyes:

Man's heart conspired with the devil And cared little for disguise.

Yet if, at the sight of the Cross,

a light is struck on the rough of the brain

and the mind conceives all bar this is vain,

There comes a voice that reassures:

Thus is the seed of tenderness sown

 in the cleft of the heart of stone.

My lovely distant god ...

My God, my God, he cried, If he is quoted right .... Somehow that moan is comforting To us, alone at night, Who tremble, daring dawn, That He, so wise and strong, Should weep and ask for aid. Somehow, my lovely distant god, It makes me less afraid. Miriam Kessler