Day Twenty Three - Is It Nothing To You?

I grew up in a Baptist church, and in true reformed tradition, there were no images on the walls, not even an empty cross. Nobody ever explained why this was. My Junior School was CofE Controlled so periodically we had to attend the nearby Parish Church which had a large crucifix in the graveyard near the entrance and another inside. But I preferred the simplicity of the Baptist Chapel to the ornate Parish Church Building. When I hit my teens I took the opportunity to get out of church attendance and my lifestyle soon had little to show for the years of going to Sunday School and Church every Sunday.

However, in St Leonards-on-Sea, there is a main bus stop outside a high Anglican Church that had a large crucifix mounted on its outside wall. Sitting on the upper deck of the bus I regularly found myself eye to eye with the figure on the cross. Written in large letters above the cross were the words, “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?”. It was not until many years later, and after God had captured my heart, that I discovered these words come from Lamentations 1:12 and it is actually a cry of despair from the ruins of Jerusalem, devastated by the Babylonians and feeling abandoned by God.

As a usually positive and cheerful character, I have tended to avoid reading or studying Lamentations, telling myself that the experience was likely to be depressing. However, pastoral practise has led me to sit alongside those who struggle mentally and, on one occasion, I spent so long visiting a friend in an old psychiatric hospital, that I found myself locked in. I had considerable difficulty, calling on staff through a locked office door, convincing them that I was a visitor and was entitled to be let out!

The words from Lamentations 1:12 fit well with the crucifixion and the suffering of Christ. We hear his mental struggle expressed in his prayer in Gethsemane and from the cross his crying out the words from Psalm 22, “My God, why have you abandoned me?” Unsurprisingly, the latter part of Lamentations 1:12 is found in Handel’s Messiah, “Behold and see, if there is any sorrow, like unto my sorrow?”

My years of rejecting church and, though unintended, rejecting God, came to an end during a Christian meeting on Hastings Pier. There I listened to an evangelist speak on the loving words of Christ from the cross: “Father, forgive them…”. Skillfully she portrayed the various characters who each played their part in causing Jesus to be crucified. In all of them I could see the flaws in my character. I learned two important things that evening. The first was that I was the cause of the lament of the cross. The second was that despite my abandoning him, he still loved me, wanted me, and that both the cry of despair and the prayer for forgiveness was because he loved me.

As an older man, I now appreciate the need some Christians have to retain the image of the man upon the cross. It is not a need I feel. But then I have that image from the wall by the bus stop burned into my memory. To the question written above it I am now grateful to be able to answer, “Yes! Because ‘love so amazing, so divine, has won my soul, my life, my all’”.

Man of sorrows! What a name

for the Son of God, who came

ruined sinners to reclaim.

Hallelujah! What a Saviour!

Barry Osborne