The strange thing is that the closer we come the more clearly we see the red thread that runs like a pulsing, bloody artery through the myriad figures of the world. This motherly earth, on which even the greatest of men and women walked, on which they erected cities and cathedrals and monuments, has drunk the blood of Abel. And this blood of the murdered and abused appears in stains and rivulets everywhere, including the greatest figures. Cain, the "great brother" and progenitor of humankind, betrays his mysterious presence...

[Forgiveness] cannot mean that we cover up a fault with the "mantle of charity." Divine things are never a matter of illusion and deception. On the contrary, before the sin is forgiven the mantle with which it is covered must be removed. The sin must be unmercifully—yes, unmercifully—exposed to the light of God's countenance.
Helmut Thielicke

Call me an old misery-trousers, but faith needs to be death-affirming before it can bring to life; be tragedy before it can be comedy. It must, as the playright Dennis Potter observed before his death, be primarily "in the wound not the bandage".

In a solution-based world, it is the most natural thing to give a positive, solution-based faith, rushing to give answers without letting the great questions really sink in. But unless we let the realities of life and death weigh us like William Walker down to the foundations of things, the church risks a soggy collapse...

CHRISTIAN FAITH CAN BE TRUE to life only because it is true to death. This is Easter's remarkable heart of darkness. As the novelist and theologian Frederick Buechner writes in his wonderful book, Telling the Truth:
"The pressure on the preacher is to promote the gospel, to sell Christ as an answer that outshines all the other answers by talking up the shining side, by calling even the day of his death Good Friday when if it was good, it was good only after it was bad, the worst of all possible Fridays".

A life that guffaws forth the news of resurrection is only possible when, like Mary, we have waited long hours by the tomb. When we have experienced the deafening silence of that forgotten Saturday on Easter's Eve. Andrew Rumsey