The steel spikes felt cold and hard to the touch, akin to the nails that must have been used to crucify Love on that first Good Friday. And here I was using three - a trinity - on each corner of my raised beds to build a cross. (I was using three spikes on each corner to hold my Jerusalem cross shaped raised beds together as the center piece of my garden). Nails. Trinity. Cross.
My mind played with this thought of using a trinity of nails to build the cross.
Hammering to the rhythmic sound of steel on steel, something stirred deep within me to think of Love submitting to be nailed so cruelly to a cross with spikes similar to these, acceptable for my garden but brutal if used on hands and feet.
Can the reason Love submitted be anything other than the Father's "your-ways-are-not-my-ways" (Is. 55:8-9) revealed now in Jesus and expressed as he hung on the cross by his words, "Father forgive them for they know what they do?" (Lk 23:34).
God - the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit - needed this cruel trinity of hard, cold nails used on Jesus' hands and feet, to help humanity re-imagine how God works to redeem the world. That, no matter what, God will love. The cycle of meeting violence with violence will be broken.Jesus says it best in John 12:24. "Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you have it forever, real and eternal." (MSG).
It is in the reckless "letting go" that life happens. And so Love, in Jesus, could not but rise again in the hearts of the disciples as they too became reckless in their own loving to seed the change in the world that God yearns to bring.
No matter what. God will love. I hope Jerusalem Cross gardening is seeding the same kind of union with Love in my soul.
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