Holy Week Poem: Good Friday

Image: ICN/JS

The Wood between the Worlds

I lit a candle.
Not for peace-
not yet-
but for the man
who called himself
the Bread of Life,
now broken,
butchered,
starved by the world
that never knew him.

He who claimed,
"I am the Resurrection and the Life,"
now swallowed
by the darkness of death.
The one who said,
"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,"
is lost in silence,
shut behind stone,
as I, too, am hidden
in the alleyways of this world.

I know hunger,
the gnawing ache of it,
the cold grasp of isolation.
I know what it is
to be unseen,
to be passed by.
He- he knows this too.

The man with no home,
no pillow but stone,
the Good Shepherd,
now abandoned,
left to die alone-
as I, too, am forgotten,
swept away in the gutters of the city.

He hangs there,
between heaven's longing
and earth's despair,
the wood between the worlds,
a threshold to the realm of love,
where the sacred and the broken meet.
It is not a distant place-
it is here,
in the cracks and corners,
where we wait,
breathless,
for someone to see us
as more than dust.

The one who healed the sick
now bleeds from his own wounds.
The one who fed the hungry
is emptied of life.
The one who called the lost home
now lies abandoned.

But I- I light this candle
because I am not beyond reach,
and neither is he.

His body,
torn by the world,
is the threshold,
the door where our suffering meets
the mercy that refuses to look away.
And I-
standing here,
a man of the streets,
a shadow in the crowd-
I whisper,
"If this is the wood between the worlds,
a doorway to the realm of love,
then open wide,
that the dark may be swallowed
in the light that calls us
in the gift of Sunday dawn."

Rev'd Jon Swales is a theologian and poet who ministers to marginalised and vulnerable adults at Lighthouse, Leeds

LINKS

Cruciform Justice: www.cruciformjustice.com/

Between the worlds: www.cruciformjustice.com/post/the-wood-between-the-worlds-good-friday