More from N.T. Wright’s wonderful little book Christians at the Cross. Here’s what he suggests as the practical way for the Colliery community to begin to address their grief. Note that he is not suggesting that gathering the grief and placing it at the Cross will somehow magically erase all the pain and make everything better:
“I want you to gather up the pain and grief of this community: the mining disaster half a century ago when over 80 men lost their lives; the other mining disaster — the pit closures — of 20 or 30 years ago, when nearly twenty times that number lost their jobs and the family and social sorrows, whatever they may be. I want you to write down, some time over the next two or three days, just a sentence or two, or maybe just a word or two, about the particular griefs this community has had to bear in recent years. And over the course of the week, we’ll gather them up, we’ll put them in a basket here somewhere, and when we get to Good Friday, we’ll bring them to the cross and leave them there.
Because, you see, that is the only way we can really and truly deal with them. We come, like the crowds on Palm Sunday, with all kinds of hopes and frustrations, with sorrows and fears, and we have that glimmer of hope that maybe Jesus will be able to do something about it all…
…scribble something down…and we’ll keep them here and fold them into the story on Good Friday itself. I have no idea what God will do with them. But I do know that, when you bring things to the foot of the cross, the music of Jesus’ death transforms them in ways we can’t predict or explain.”
I’m posting these words because I know so many people who are dealing with profound grief from incomprehensible stories. Even those of us who are not wrestling with deep suffering have hard stories in our past. As we approach the ending of Lent, I wonder…what griefs of the past would you or I like to write down and place at the foot of the Cross? I wonder how seeing these griefs anew in the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection might transform us?
