Elli Sitina Kuruse

On the cross where you hang,
to save the world, they say,
this is your own, my son,
weeping at the foot of the cross

How am I to bear it, my son,
the suffering you endure this day?
the love you show to them,
do people not know it, my son?

On the cross where you hang…

Mankind, destroying the world,
laying waste to goodness and virtue,
will you, asking once more,
prepare the good news and give it to them again?

On the cross where you hang…

This is a Good Friday lament, and its power comes from its point of view: it is sung as if by the mother at the foot of the cross, watching her son die. The scene is stated with terrible simplicity, “on the cross where you hang, to save the world,” and then the intimate grief, “this is your own, my son, weeping at the foot of the cross.” The vast theology of salvation is felt here as a personal, human sorrow.

The second verse is the cry of a helpless love. “How am I to bear it, my son, the suffering you endure this day?” There is no way to make the pain bearable; a mother can only ask the question. And beneath it runs the deeper ache of the whole gospel, that “the love you show to them, do people not know it?” The ones he is dying for do not even understand what is being given.

The final verse widens from the cross to the world that put him there, “mankind, destroying the world, laying waste to goodness and virtue.” And it ends on a question that is really a hope: even now, will he “prepare the good news and give it to them again?” Even as he suffers at their hands, the possibility of forgiveness and another chance hangs in the air. What the listener is left with is the sorrow of Calvary seen through a mother’s eyes, and the astonishing mercy that keeps offering itself to a world that does not know what it is doing.