Tuesday in Holy Week - April 15

The Collect for the Tuesday in Holy Week: 
O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. 

These first three days of Holy Week, I am focusing on the collects. There is almost no history on this one. It is from an early 20th century English prayer book, appointed for Holy Cross Day.

It’s focus is the cross. Yesterday’s collect talked of walking in the way of the cross. Today we pray to glory in the cross.

Glory is used as a verb. I understand glory as a noun. Glory is magnificence, beauty. But what does it mean to glory in something? According to the dictionary it means to take great pride in. So to take great pride in the cross.

I’m still not quite sure what that means, but it sounds passive and remote. I might have a whole list of things I take pride in… my cooking, my CD collection, the cross…

For me, to glory in something, especially the cross, evokes something more tangible, more physical. More like revel in. Or it’s all the fashion these days to use “marinate” in religious conversation. “I’m marinating in the Scriptures.” Or marinating in the cross.

And as I marinated or ruminated on all of this, several visual images came to mind. Stay with me, I will circle back to the cross.

I swam competitively as a child and teenager, and somewhere along the way I took life saving training. One of the things you learn is that people who are drowning often resist being saved. They are panicked, they flail about, they push you under, but they will not hang on so you can swim them in. It is actually much easier to save someone who has lost consciousness. There is a special way to hold their head above water and a special stoke to use to swim to shore and safety.

Thinking of live-saving, I cannot help but think of Newfoundland dogs. They are bred to be lifeguards, water rescue dogs. Part of their instinct is to bump or nudge towards shore, but ultimately they rely on the person being able to grasp hold and hang on as the dogs, who are powerful swimmers, swim to shore.

The cross is very well constructed for hanging on to. The same shape that makes it an instrument of shameful death also makes it easy to hang on to if you need saving.

In the collect we pray that this instrument of shameful death may be for us the means of life. The same shape that makes it an instrument of shameful death also makes it easy to hang on to if you need saving. If you are drowning, floundering, in need of saving, the cross is the means of life.

But you do have to grab hold.