Foreshadowing the Cross
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. ”
The prolific contemporary exegetical artist Chris Powers here depicts a verse from this week’s epistle reading: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” (Romans 8:35-37). The forces of darkness, though overwhelming, are pierced and defeated by the Cross: and along the Cross, Jesus calls the soul to himself. He is the goal, the way, and the support along it, against which the shadows recede into their meontic source.
You shall not leave my soul in the grave, neither shall you allow your Holy One to see corruption.
— Psalm 16:10
Second Sunday of Lent
Texts for this Week
Prayer
Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities that may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts that may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The God of Abraham Praise
Our lessons for this week remind us that God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is also the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob: that the Cross is etched in anticipation on those most ancient stories and most primal experiences of God remembered by his people Israel, the children of Abraham. It is he, “Who was, and is, the same, and evermore shall be: Jehovah, Lord, the great I AM,” whom this hymn names and proclaims. If the story of how a 13th C Italian Jewish liturgical text came to be modulated into a classic and well-beloved Christian hymn, more profound is the concealed-yet-manifest unity and continuity between the God who created us and the God who redeems us through the Cross, which what makes such a crossover possible.
Here the hymn is performed by the choir of the Anglican Cathedral in Edinburgh.
