Good Friday

J Kirk Richards

Unkept Good Fridays

by Thomas Hardy

There are many more Good Fridays
Than this, if we but knew
The names, and could relate them,
Of men whom rulers slew
For their goodwill, and date them
As runs the twelvemonth through.

These nameless Christs' Good Fridays,
Whose virtues wrought their end,
Bore days of bonds and burning,
With no man to their friend,
Of mockeries, and spurning;
Yet they are all unpenned.

When they had their Good Fridays
Of bloody sweat and strain
Oblivion hides. We quote not
Their dying words of pain,
Their sepulchres we note not,
Unwitting where they have lain.

No annual Good Fridays
Gained they from cross and cord,
From being sawn asunder,
Disfigured and abhorred,
Smitten and trampled under:
Such dates no hands have scored.

Let be. Let lack Good Fridays
These Christs of unwrit names;
The world was not even worthy
To taunt their hopes and aims,
As little of earth, earthy,
As his mankind proclaims.

Good Friday, 1927

Balage Balogh

Good Friday

by Christina Rossetti

 Am I a stone and not a sheep

That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy Cross,

To number drop by drop Thy Blood's slow loss,

And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved

Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;

Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;

Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon

Which hid their faces in a starless sky,

A horror of great darkness at broad noon,—

I, only I.

Yet give not o'er,

But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;

Greater than Moses, turn and look once more

And smite a rock.

More Stations of the Cross 

RHS note: many of these stations are legendary, but it helps to know Christian traditions.

By Malcolm Guite

These  are taken from ‘Sounding the Seasons; seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year, Canterbury Press 2012′ 

VI Veronica wipes the face of Jesus

Bystanders and bypassers turn away

And wipe his image from their memory

She keeps her station. She is here to stay

And stem the flow. She is the reliquary

Of his last look on her. The bloody sweat

And salt tears of his love are soaking through

The folds of her devotion and the wet

folds of her handkerchief, like the dew

Of morning, like a softening rain of grace.

Because she wiped the grime from off his skin,

And glimpsed the godhead in his human face

Whose hidden image we all bear within,

Through all our veils and shrouds of daily pain

The face of god is shining once again.

 

VII Jesus falls the second time

Through all our veils and shrouds of daily pain,

Through our bruised bruises and re-opened scars,

He falls and stumbles with us, hurt again

When we are hurt again. With us he bears

The cruel repetitions of our cruelty;

The beatings of already beaten men,

The second rounds of torture, the futility

Of all unheeded pleading, every scream in vain.

And by this fall he finds the fallen souls

Who passed a first, but failed a second trial,

The souls who thought their faith would hold them whole

And found it only held them for a while.

Be with us when the road is twice as long

As we can bear. By weakness make us strong.

 

VIII Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem

He falls and stumbles with us, hurt again

But still he holds the road and looks in love

On all of us who look on him. Our pain

As close to him as his. These women move

Compassion in him as he does in them.

He asks us both to weep and not to weep.

Women of Gaza and Jerusalem,

Women of every nation where the deep

Wounds of memory divide the land

And lives of all your children, where the mines

Of all our wars are sown: Afghanistan ,

Iraq, the Cote d’Ivoire… he reads the signs

And weeps with you and with you he will stay

Until the day he wipes your tears away.

 

 IX Jesus falls the third time

He weeps with you and with you he will stay

When all your staying power has run out

You can’t go on, you go on anyway.

He stumbles just beside you when the doubt

That always haunts you, cuts you down at last

And takes away the hope that drove you on.

This is the third fall and it hurts the worst

This long descent through darkness to depression

From which there seems no rising and no will

To rise, or breathe or bear your own heart beat.

Twice you survived; this third will surely kill,

And you could almost wish for that defeat

Except that in the cold hell where you freeze

You find your God beside you on his knees.

 

IX Jesus is stripped of His garments

You can’t go on, you go on anyway

He goes with you, his cradle to your grave.

Now is the time to loosen, cast away

The useless weight of everything but love

For he began his letting go before,

Before the worlds for which he dies were made,

Emptied himself, became one of the poor,

To make you rich in him and unafraid.

See as they strip the robe from off his back

They strip away your own defenses too

Now you could lose it all and never lack

Now you can see what naked Love can do

Let go these bonds beneath whose weight you bow

His stripping strips you both for action now

Salvador Dali

XI Crucifixion: Jesus is nailed to the cross

See, as they strip the robe from off his back

And spread his arms and nail them to the cross,

The dark nails pierce him and the sky turns black,

And love is firmly fastened onto loss.

But here a pure change happens. On this tree

Loss becomes gain, death opens into birth.

Here wounding heals and fastening makes free

Earth breathes in heaven, heaven roots in earth.

And here we see the length, the breadth, the height

Where love and hatred meet and love stays true

Where sin meets grace and darkness turns to light

We see what love can bear and be and do,

And here our saviour calls us to his side

His love is free, his arms are open wide.

 

XII Jesus dies on the cross

The dark nails pierce him and the sky turns black

We watch him as he labours to draw breath

He takes our breath away to give it back,

Return it to its birth through his slow death.

We hear him struggle breathing through the pain

Who once breathed out his spirit on the deep,

Who formed us when he mixed the dust with rain

And drew us into consciousness from sleep.

His spirit and his life he breathes in all

Mantles his world in his one atmosphere

And now he comes to breathe beneath the pall

Of our pollutions, draw our injured air

To cleanse it and renew. His final breath

Breathes us, and bears us through the gates of death.