Good Friday homily (PKT)

Imagine, if you will, yourself on a train.  It is going fast.   The world whizzes past outside the window.  You stare at it, but can barely get a sense of each scene before it is gone.  Occasionally, you notice a little detail, an individual tree, house, person – but all too soon, they are gone from your sight again.  And anyway, you don’t have time to look.  You’ve got your laptop out – you are working hard, you’ve brought the office with you.  That report needs to be completed by the time you get into Liverpool Street.  Phones are ringing around you – mobile phones, reminding your fellow passengers that there’s work to do at home tonight, too.  Yours goes off – just the boss ‘suggesting’ that you might like to call Bob in the Brussels office and talk through an idea he’s floating.  You might need to pop over there on the Eurostar tomorrow morning for a quick meeting over a sandwich lunch – but remember to get back sharpish for the report launch at 3!

The train is going faster, now.  So fast that you cannot even pick out those individual details any more.  Was that a farmer you just passed, or a man walking his dog – was it just a pig or goat?   You really can’t say you had the time to be sure.  It is all blurring into one, a bit, now.

And now, suddenly, the train starts to accelerate yet again.  It starts to shake a little, going too fast for its own good, just as all its passengers are going too fast for their own good.  It’s out of control.  The accelerator pedal has become fixed to the floor and the brake is broken.  We’re heading for a crash…

What’s to be done?  What will be end of this story be?  It could be the crash, it could be headlong collision with the seemingly-inevitable, it could be tragic ending and separation and oblivion, cut off from those we love and who love us.  Or it could end in a different way.  It could end with the train being brought to rest by some buffers – buffers which now appear in order to absorb all the impact of this train’s destructive, runaway force; buffers which shatter, themselves, but which save the train and its passengers; buffers which allow the passengers to get off the train and walk to freedom.

This, I reflect for today, can be a metaphor of the Atonement for our time and our culture.  To a culture of accelerated working, of family life under strain, of voracious, vicious consumer demands, of impending debt-crisis fuelled by credit-spending; to a culture of rapidly-rising house prices, of bucket-shop prices for airfares to all parts of the world which mask the true environmental and  economic costs of such flights; to a culture of mass private transport, cars and gridlock everywhere; to a culture where so many are ‘money-rich and time-poor’: to such a culture, the Cross signifies Jesus saying “No more!  It stops here!  There is another way, a better way, a saving way!  There is a way that leads to freedom:  freedom to get off the runaway train, freedom to say “Enough!”, freedom to be whole and still…

Before the Cross - the Buffers for our runaway, accelerated culture -  let us, together, learn and listen to what God says to and does for our lives in our time and place…