Because it’s Holy Week, as a Christian the death Christ is vivid for me. The suffering in Ukraine is seemingly never absent from my awareness. And the word of Jesus, “If any man would come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me,” has a sharper edge than usual.
The suffering in the Ukraine is beyond our imagination, but hopefully it calls us to consider the Cross of Christ as the center of the Christian faith. Herbert Farmer has been one of the most convincing interpreters of that faith. His personal experience is challenging and inspiring. He writes,
“Many years ago as a young man I was speaking on the love of God; there was in the congregation an old Polish Jew who had been converted to the Christian faith. He came to me afterward and said: “you have no right to speak of the love of God, until you have seen, as I have seen, a massacre of Jews in Poland—until you have seen, the blood of your dearest friends running in the gutter on a grey winter morning. I asked him later how it was that having seen such a massacre, he had come to believe in the love of God. The answer he gave in effect was that the Christian gospel first began to lay hold of him because it bade him see God—the love of God—as it were, just where he could not but always be in his thoughts and memories—in those bloodstained streets on that grey morning …not somewhere else—but just in that sort of things, in the blood and agony of Calvary. I shall always remember…He said, “As I looked at that man on the cross…it was at a point of final crisis and decision in my life; I knew I must make up my mind once and for all, and either take my stand beside him and share in his undefeated faith in God…or else fall finally into a bottomless pit of bitterness, hatred, and unutterable despair.”
The Ukraine suffering is a call to us, a call to decision. And it is all there in Jesus’ call: deny self, take up your cross, and follow him.