The Redemptions of Good Friday

At the same time as the chemicals that will heal my mother were flowing into her this afternoon, I was in a church built by working men and women in wandsworth 116 years ago, and which began, as do some of my conscious memories, above a pub. I was surrounded by people descended from every continent. The rain was pouring outside.

A choir was singing in Latin and English behind me, to a melody which sounded some mixture of the twentieth century and the baroque; and as I walked to kiss the left arm of the wooden Jesus on the cross, held out by two young women for veneration, the words of Easter flooded into my mind.

Or, more precisely, one word kept surfacing above the phrases; "behold the cross upon which was hung our salvation...redemption...behold the cross upon which was hung the saviour of the world...redemption...behold, behold, do this, do that, recall...redemption".

Redemption. To be redeemed. To pay off a debt. I've seen, in my friends and all around me, and in some difficulties I had last month when a cheque was late, which does not begin to compare, the troubles people are facing at the minute. I know people who can't pay their mortgages; others who can't get tenants to pay, or who can't pay landlords. I've seen the effects of what the state does when it fails to redeem its trust on pensions, on the monies people pay into its funds in the fear of a rainy day.

It is a mark of my fortune in life that redemption in those terms is for me a speculation, an occasional burn, an exercise in observation or a glancing threat from sundry debt collectors when creditors panic, who go away paid. For some people, it is a false and fleeting and yet obsessive hope. Thirty years of obsessive capitalism, and for many, this country has been delivered back to the world of Dickens.

Redemption. To be incarnated into a form which cannot possibly understand what you are, because to be who you are you cannot be a you, and must exist at all points in time, and yet to suffer a passion as an ultimate exemplar of the redemption of the comically flawed; what must that have been like? Is it wrong to wonder?

I'd suggest that we have to wonder. All philosophy can be devolved into grammar and logic without an imaginative attempt to ask questions like that. They redeem us from the quotidian, and from the suffocations and strains of now. When Pilate asked, 'what is truth', and continued upon his vain and weak man's attempt to bend the rules and release Jesus, what must he have thought he was doing? Redeeming?

There is merit in the contemplation of the cross, supreme merit. There is also, however, merit in contemplating the story of how He got there, for all its things unsaid and contradictions.

Redemption. To be free, to think and choose. I thought finally of Bob Marley's song, written during the enormity of a more engorged and determined illness than the one my mother and science and the national health service are about to defeat. I found versions, written by Joe Strummer after he passed, and by Marley's sons, and by others who did not hear the echo of Marcus Garvey or even understand who he was, or how he came to rest in Kensal Green.

I love Garvey's words, and am touched across the years when I wonder at what must have gone through his rebellious, narcissistic, proud rebel mind as he stood revolted at the oppressions of people he considered his because of their common suffering and the shared colour of their skin. I hope that somewhere, at the end, he felt himself redeemed.

This Good Friday night, I hope that you find the comfort of your redemption too.