Morning Prayer - Good Friday

Hebrews 10:1-10 (For text see here)

Here is the heart of the Gospel; that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus once and for all.

To a post-modern mind this statement can appear shocking.

To start with 'we' are passive in this. However, being made 'holy', taking on the likeness of Christ is a divine act of Creation. We cannot give ourselves life, we cannot choose to be born or be instrumental in our own making. In the same way, we cannot be instrumental in our sanctification - our being 'born again'. This is an act of God - an act that has been completed in the death and resurrection of Christ. The Old Testament tells of man's awareness (his consciousness in this passage) of sin. This awareness invokes fear of judgement and guilt and the systems of sacrifice were there to absolve the conscience on an annual basis - a ritual dealing with the fear and guilt that the consciousness of sin invoked. It did not prevent sin, but enabled the people to continue in some kind of relationship with their Creator despite the awareness of the reality of the grip of sin on their lives.

Jesus Christ is a new act of Creation by God. Fear of judgement and death are removed permanently by the cross where the divine takes the reality of sin and judgement and death visibly and transforms them into the resurrected Christ. The consciousness of sin is the first stage in a process of spiritual creation (spiritual evolution?) in which the direction of humanity (as free from sin - i.e. sanctified and holy) emerges. The Cross is the act of God which offers the way into the completion (next stage?) of humanity. The cross, by the reckoning of it's shadow (the sacrificial system of the OT) deals with punishment - but the event is much more than that. The shadow or type can never hold the reality of the new paradigm, of the new order. Likewise the OT model is broken in God making Himself the offering for sin. But in its place is a new power - a sanctifying power - now at work in the world, the power to take the human being and lift her into God. In this way a whole new consciousness is born - a new mind - the mind of Christ. Not a set of boundaries of behaviour or rules to be followed, but a new way of thinking that shapes us so that we are different and from this change in our being new behaviours flow and new possibilities arise.

So if this is God's work what is our role? Our role is to live it!! To believe in what God is doing and to embrace His vision for us. To connect with the power of the Resurrection for our own lives - to open ourselves to its possibilities. This is not a return to an older, more perfect order of things before 'a fall' but the on-going Creative work of God, leading us on. This we work towards, guided by the same Holy Spirit that raised Christ to new life from death. This is the meaning, purpose and direction of all life. It is not a political vision (but change flows out of it), it is not a cultural vision (but new ways of keeping this vision before our eyes are essential). Embracing this work of God, living in it, is quite simply the answer to life's questions and the basis and direction of all human life.