Good Friday--On a Hill Faraway

 

On A Hill Far Away - Good Friday

This Good Friday I remember a story I heard somewhere. A preacher chose slides for her Good Friday’s evening service. One of the slides of the crucifixion the minister was painted by Grunewald. It was painted for the Hermitage of DSt. Anthony in the fifteenth century during an outbreak of the black plague. The hermits had taken upon themselves the mission of nursing the sick and burying the dead from the plague.

Many of the victims suffered from the symptom called “St. Anthony’s Fire,” where the circulation stops and the lower limbs become gangrenous and putrefying even while the person lived. This was in the days before scientific medicine and the hermits could do very little for the victim but to cool their fevers and be with them in their agonizing deaths.

Over the altar Grunewald painted the figure of Christ on the cross—dead, twisted and repulsive, gray and green with corruption...His legs swollen with St. Anthony’s fire. He painted the Lord against a black sky and a dead sea. 

The hermits did what they could for the victims, and one thing they did was to leave each arriving patient alone on his pallet before that picture, many of them almost too sick to see it. But now and again one of them almost too ill to see it. But now and again one of them would look at it and say to himself, “In a few hours I must go t my death through foul and terrible pain. But so did He, and God turned that experience to the salvation of the whole world. If that is so, what, then, can He not do for me?”

And so this day let us grow quiet and remember that hill far away. And bring with us names and loved ones and people we do not know—and lift up this whole tattered world to the One with the nail-scarred hands.

“See from His head, His hands, His feet

Sorrow and love flow mingled down

Did e’re such love and sorrow meet,

Or thorns compose so rich  crown.”