The people who run the TV networks don’t want us to be adversely affected or upset by their programmes. So they quite often give us warnings to make sure that this doesn’t happen – in fact they may be required to do so by the television regulator. The warning we hear most often comes on the news, and is of course designed to protect people with epilepsy: “This report contains flashing images”. But there are many others: a murder mystery may be preceded by the warning that “it contains scenes of violence from the start”, a drama may come with the comment that it “contains strong language”, we can be told that characters in a historical documentary display “historic attitudes which some viewers may find offensive”. My favourite advisory though is the one that’s given before Channel 5 programmes about a hospital Accident and Emergency Department: “contains scenes of trauma and surgery”. To be honest, I’d feel a bit short-changed if it didn’t!

There is one warning, though, which I haven’t yet mentioned. It’s used on news bulletins and we’ve heard it all-too-frequently in reports of the destruction and violence in the Ukraine: “the following report contains scenes which some viewers may find distressing” – scenes with children crying in pain from their injuries, or where dead bodies can clearly be seen lying on the ground. We, sitting comfortably in our homes, may choose to look away from our screens or even switch over to another channel. But we probably shouldn’t try to avoid the horror, especially when we realise that we’re not being shown the worst bits.

On Good Friday Christians are forced to confront scenes of appalling violence: of a man first whipped to within an inch of his life, compelled to carry a heavy beam through narrow city streets, having a crown of sharp thorns pressed down upon his head, nailed through his wrists and ankles to a cross which was then raised, leaving him panting and gasping for every breath. And that’s before we add in the mental and human cost of the unjust trial, the baying of the crowd, the mocking of the soldiers, the jeering of the bystanders, and the agony which Jesus could so clearly see in his mother’s eyes. Perhaps those sights were horribly routine for the citizens of first-century Jerusalem (after all, it’s not all that long since British people thronged to see a “good hanging); but we prefer not to see nor even imagine them, we avert our gaze in disgust. Isaac Watts may have “surveyed the wondrous cross” and asked us to “See from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down”; but we’d prefer to decline his invitation.

I don’t know if we’ve become more squeamish over the years. In the past most people probably had more first-hand experience of death, disease and mutilation than we do: surgery was barbaric, industrial accidents were frequent, punishment was severe, the death of some children almost to be expected. Thankfully we live in a society with much better standards of safety and medical care. But many people love to play gory video games or visit attractions such as the London Dungeon – although Madame Tussauds’ famous Chamber of Horrors is no more. Perhaps that means we’re OK with fantasy (or historical) violence, but find reality harder to handle. It disturbs us, especially if we think that we might meet it unexpectedly and head-on.

So we really don’t want to think of Christ’s crucifixion: neither the events of that momentous day, nor its theological significance. There is something shocking, primitive and disgusting in the suggestion – St Paul called it a “scandal” – that this is the scene which lies at the heart of our faith. And we recoil at the thought that a hideous human sacrifice can release us from guilt and sin, we despise the notion of a God who, it seems, doesn’t just approve of such barbaric violence but actually demands it. We know that Christ’s death on the cross is one of the most basic tenets of Christianity, but we find it an obscenity that’s unworthy of a God who calls himself ‘Love’. How could he think of asking his son to die in this terrible way? And how could his death “pay the price of sin” and “unlock to gate of heaven, to let us in?”

It strikes me that the various Christian traditions have different ways of depicting, or dealing with, the Cross. There is a Catholic tradition – which, I believe, reached its peak in late mediaeval Spain – that almost seems to relish the horrors of Calvary, that wallows in the blood and pain. I think there might be echoes of it in Mel Gibson’s infamous film “The Passion of the Christ” (which I haven’t seen). Then there’s the Orthodox tradition which takes the Cross and beautifies it will silver ornamentation and precious jewels; it’s taken out of its historical context and turned into an object of veneration. There’s an Evangelical tradition – much reduced these days, I think – which asks believers to constantly conjure up mental images of Christ’s death and pray that God will “make them understand it, help them to take it in, what it meant to Christ, the Holy One, to bear away their sin”. This of course can become sentimentalised as “the old rugged cross”. And then there’s the tradition which really wants to take the Cross out of Christianity altogether but, finding that it can’t, strips it of its crude roughness and trims off the splinters, removes any hint of a man pinned to it, and replaces it with something smooth, polished and lean, devoid of pain and little more than a meaningless logo.

Most of us are guilty of doing that, aren’t we? Yet we shouldn’t. Back in 1518 the Reformer Martin Luther coined the phrase “the theology of the Cross” which stated that the place we most clearly see God’s glory is – against all our human expectations – not in the beauty of the natural world but in Christ’s death. The same point was made by the French Christian mystic Simone Weil about 80 years ago, when she wrote, “The death on the Cross is something more divine than even the Resurrection”, suggested that the heart of Christianity could be complete with only with the Crucifixion, and asked what would happen if the focus of our faith was Good Friday rather than Easter. Weil says that we should counter our natural tendency to rush ahead to the Resurrection, because by doing that we fail to recognize the depth of the agony and suffering required for Christ to be our Redeemer.

This is important, especially in times like ours when we have seen so much suffering in Ukraine, in Syria, and because of Covid, for it shows us God identifying in a very intimate way with our human pain and anguish. Yes, there is a Resurrection to give us hope – thank God that there is! – but I think we must linger at the Cross for longer than may be comfortable. For Good Friday is very much more than an irritating speed bump for us to negotiate on the way to Easter: it’s absolutely central to God’s story of redemption.

So yes, the sight of Jesus dying on the Cross is ugly, cruel, shocking or obscene – I’m sure we could pile up the adjectives. Yes, it’s something we’d prefer not to look at or even imagine. And no, it isn’t something that we fully understand. Yet it declares more fully than anything else God did that he loves our world, full of pain as it is; that he identifies with it, that he suffers with it and that he wants to bring it healing and life. The cross is, as St. Paul said, an embarrassment or a folly; an object we’d prefer to smooth over or forget. But we mustn’t.