The Tortured Christ – Guido Rocha
In the meditations of Holy Week, it works better for us if we take the journey a step at a time. Sometimes I have seen the impact of Good Friday snatched away by rushing too quickly to the promise of resurrection; equally it lessens the outrageous, unimaginable joy of Sunday if we dampen it down by returning too soon to the Cross. There is a time for everything; a time for joy and a time for sadness.
Today we remember the awful suffering and crucifixion of Jesus. He stood for life and love and justice and faith, upsetting convention and exposing hypocrisy, until the world couldn’t stand it and tried to stamp it out of him. The Early Fathers saw this death as God tricking the Devil; the Devil would have him dead, and failed to understand that the son of God cannot remain dead for long.
In one of the most heart-rending images of the cross, Brazilian sculptor Guido Rocha portrays the fact that Jesus really suffered through his torture. It calls us to assess soberly what kind of Christianity we are prepared to take on – a comfortable, conventional, respectable faith? Or one of radical action that will really cost us something too?
Rocha’s sculpture also calls to mind the fact that Jesus endured real, vile torture to the point of death. As we remember Jesus, let’s also pray with compassion, and act in courage on behalf of those who are victims of torture somewhere in the world today. How? You have to find out. But when we look at religious imagery like this, it lacks something to say in our prayers that we wish we could take Jesus down from the cross and end his suffering, but not to do the same for those who suffer today. That’s not just a "social gospel" – it’s the call of jesus himself, when he said, "I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me… ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did this even to the least of my brothers or sisters, you did it to Me.’
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
In an increasingly secularised society few people have a good working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - are built on Christian concepts and biblical references. The Writing on the Wall provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories. Each chapter gives some background to the text of the Bible, and shows how the stories have become enmeshed in Western culture. Adam and Eve, the ten plagues of Egypt, The Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene all feature - along with how the Bible has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Monty Python, and Caravaggio to Banksy. 
Giving It Up explores the Lenten idea of 'giving up', taking it beyond the traditional idea of simply abstaining from something, and suggesting instead that what we need to give up is our existing ideas about God. With a daily readings for each day of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, it follows the heroes of the Bible who had to give up their own too-small ideas about God.
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This looks really interesting. Loved this:
“For the individual, your life can’t be part-religious and part-secular – if you are a Christian, it pervades everything. And equally, the big wide world can’t (even if it wants to) shuffle religion off into a corner marked “private”. Christianity is not private, by its very nature, and it can’t restrict itself to religious concerns, because the Christian faith is concerned with the whole of life.”
As one of many who won’t be able to be there, thanks for the promise of some blog posts. Looking forward to it!
Nice intro to the event, Maggi. Really looking forward to all the other interviews.
I wandered over to the official website to check out the events (several thousand miles away, unfortunately, though). Is it just me or is it ironic that the event on Homelessness is the only one to be held at a “location to be announced”?
Thanks for posting this, Maggi!
I started to write a reply to the claim that Missions might be “broken”, but it got a bit long, so I posted it on my own blog: Are Missions Broken?
I look forward to reading the results of your interviews!