Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is another Good Friday one, addressed ostensibly to the cross itself. Yesterday’s comments about it being better to worship Christ himself apply here too; not surprisingly it is from the Catholic community at Stanbrook (see also 14 January and 26 February).
Taking the words at face value though, the cross is seen in verse 1 as a shelter for the world, from what is not stated, but perhaps from the pain of death. In verse 2 the dead wood of the cross itself is contrasted with the ‘tree of life’ that it represents, that is the tree at the heart of the Garden of Eden which Adam and Eve never reached, but which in the book of Revelation appears again at the heart of the heavenly city as a symbol of eternal life in Christ.
In verse 3 there’s another contrast, between the ‘ages running their course’ and the cross that ‘stands unmoved [as] foundation of the universe’. This suggests the doctrine that Christ’s saving death was part of God’s plan even before the world was made, and thus outside time. There is no space here to go into questions of how cosmology and theology interact: other writers such as Polkinghorne have gone much further in that direction than I could. Enough to say that the more scientists try to understand the nature of time and space, the stranger they seem, and writing off God as creator, redeemer (perfector) and sustainer of the universe may not be as obvious as it may seem.
So taking these three verses together, we have the cross (i.e. Christ’s saving death) as a shelter from death, a symbol of eternal life and a constant in a changing and inexplicable world. No wonder that this Christian symbol is still popular in art and personal devotion.
The final verse exhorts us to ‘give glory to the risen Christ’, therefore a verse for Easter rather than on Good Friday.