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Good Friday

  • April 18, 2014

    Those of us whose trade is words do well to remember the relative value of a picture and a thousand words. The front page of the Guardian yesterday (17 April 2014) presented an unforgettable instance of the power this adage can carry.

  • March 30, 2013

    An Anglican priest has poured his own blood on the floor of a petrol station on Good Friday, to protest against Total Oil’s investments in Burma.

  • March 29, 2013

    Christians need to re-envision the meaning of the Cross in history and in our culture, such that we are equipped to go and do the Gospel that shapes us in a confused, broken, unjust and often violent world, says Simon Barrow. This will help us see that it is not true that the only ‘weapons’ at the Church's disposal are not the coercive ones wielded by our opponents. Rather, God’s cross points to the resources of suffering love that only the God of life can offer, because they are ‘beyond our means’ humanly, but not beyond divine gifting.

  • April 23, 2011

    Good Friday is behind us, Easter Sunday ahead. In the meantime, says Simon Barrow, we must inhabit the long, uncertain Saturday. Indeed, we Christians may need considerable help from others to be able do this truthfully, such is the tendency to be pulled back a day or pushed forward one. For Saturday is an indelible and crucial part of the Easter story. Without Saturday, Friday has no end and Sunday has no beginning.

  • April 23, 2011

    Waiting is difficult enough when you know what you are waiting for. It is interminable when you do not. And it can be confusing and frustrating when you either do not really know whether you are waiting or not, or when you realise that what you are waiting for may very well turn out to be something quite different to what you imagine... when (and if) it comes.

  • April 23, 2011

    Next to efforts to explain Christian trinitarian language for God, it is sermonising on the message of the cross and the meaning of the resurrection that I often find most painful at this time of year.

  • April 23, 2011

    How, we may ask on Good Friday, can wholeness, deliverance and healing possibly flow from a state execution resulting in the unjust violent death of a good person - one in whom his friends and followers felt they had met divine love at its most tangible and engaging? Simon Barrow explores the troubling mystery at the core of Christian belief, and looks at ways theology can address it intellectually, humanly and practically.

  • April 22, 2011

    Christians agree that the death and resurrection of Jesus is central to their faith. But as soon as we try to understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’, it becomes much more difficult to articulate this belief. Alison Goodlad suggests that the evocation of poet R. S. Thomas is among the imaginative resources that construe meaning with vitality, while 'leaving the reason torn'.

  • April 22, 2011

    As Good Friday coincides with Earth Day in 2011, churches around the world are reflecting on environmental concerns while marking Christ's crucifixion.

  • April 22, 2011

    A setting by an 18th century German composer of a translation into his own tongue of a Greek account of the trial and execution of an Iron Age Mediterranean religious radical, performed in a 15th century English church. This cultural, artistic and creative hybrid has enabled Jill Segger to think afresh about the death of Jesus and its meaning.