The Revd Dr Kevin Snyman, United Reformed Church Programme Officer (Global Justice and Partnerships), focuses on Psalm 22: 1 in this reflection for Good Friday.

It won’t surprise you to learn that I love the movies. A key moment in all storytelling is the “all-is-lost” moment.

Here, the protagonist’s ordinary world is disrupted. She can no longer avoid the painful evidence that her worldview is somehow wrong. Something has happened that causes her to see through the illusion, self-delusion, and false information of her world.

The all is lost moment is also the start of something entirely new and possibly beautiful. Our hero is forced to die to the old and embrace the new, to change in a way that she’d never considered.

Good Friday is Jesus’ all-is-lost moment. He’d already attempted everything to dislodge the destructive Roman system of domination. He’d confronted the devil, challenged Herod, unmasked the powers, subverted the monetary system and called his followers out of empire into God’s new reality.

But it all comes to nought. Empire strikes back viciously. It trumps up charges against him to maintain business-as-usual. As we enter the story, we find ourselves uncomfortably and fearfully scattering with the disciples (except for a few brave women.) We find ourselves in danger of crucifixion, having to share in Jesus’ anguished and fearful cry.

Life, they say, is stranger than fiction. Today, humans face multiple all-is-lost moments; confronting the rise of fascism with its spike in anti-Semitism; the dismantling of our public institutions, like the NHS, under right-wing capitalist ideologies while having to deal with COVID-19; and most alarming, we see our Nero-like governments fiddling while our earth burns. Climate inaction is wiping out species, eco-systems and millions of people, with some projecting 90% of all humanity lost. This truly is an all-is-lost moment that is the biggest saga ever told.

If the story tellers are right, mind you, we will soon have no choice but to die to all we know, to cry out with the psalmist: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?” This Good Friday, we must have the courage to embrace the cross, or have no hope of resurrection to resolve the crisis facing life itself.

_{Picture: A little boy reading a Bible. Samantha Sophia/Unsplash
Published: 9 April 2020}