There is a quiet intensity to Passiontide, as we come closer to Holy Week.  The great hymns and paintings of this week invite us to focus our hearts and minds on Jesus and the Cross, often using all the power of language and imagery to evoke the scenes of Good Friday and place us there too.  ‘O Sacred Head sore wounded’ is perhaps the most famous of these hymns, with its at times overwhelming insistence on drawing us right to the Cross.  Yet even here we are also reminded that the point of Passiontide is not only, not even primarily, to remember Christ’s suffering but to recognise the depth of divine love that transforms us and the whole world. 

It is no coincidence that St Paul’s famous words about love in 1 Corinthians 13 are not a standalone poem but part of a letter, a letter that begins with the Cross and ends with the Resurrection. What Paul underlines is the sheer foolishness and the scandal of the Cross, the way it turns upside down all we thought we knew about power and wisdom and heroism and shows us instead the vulnerability and the immensity of God’s love.  In Jesus’s life, in his death, and in his resurrection he reveals to us a God who does not delight in violence or pain but in compassion and true relationship – whatever the cost.   For, as Paul makes so clear, the folly of the Cross is not the exaltation of suffering, but the infinite generosity of love.