Today is the fifth Sunday of Lent, a season of watching and waiting. This Lent is about patience for me in quite a few ways. As a community, this period between the end of January and end of March is the longest time that we spend living at Lambeth Palace without a week-long retreat elsewhere. We watch and wait as we get to know each other better, with all the opportunities for difficulty, reconciliation, and joy that this entails.

Many of my prayers in this desert time of Lent return to the cross. Time and again I’m led here, to the silent truths that God shows me through Jesus’ passion. There is always something more to discover in this mystery of Jesus entering into the deepest suffering to reveal God’s love for us. Here are some of the points I’ve meditated on in the silences this Lent. I’ll share these thoughts from my journey with you:

The cross is God’s sign of love for the world. Sometimes we look for a sign of the might and power of God, something that would almost demand us to believe. But Jesus doesn’t defend or demand on the cross. He can only love into that silence of suffering.

God’s justice is mercy. God’s mercy is justice. The cross is where truth and love are inseparable. And our role in God’s kingdom is to welcome this mercy and learn to live in it. If we don’t recognize God in our own poverty of spirit, and in those who hunger and thirst around us, we fail to meet the God who is long-suffering.

To know the cross, driven into the ground, as Jesus’ unmovable love for us. To know its beams as pure light that search out and penetrate everything in our world, especially those things that appear most hidden in the darkness of shame and confusion. To have the freedom to draw close to Jesus on the cross, not out of any compulsion or ability to make him love us, but to choose to be with him in his suffering, our suffering, the suffering of all God’s children. To know that in the cross Jesus shows us the greatest freedom: the freedom of choosing to love rather than accuse.

I have found what I was looking for.

I thought it was a certainty of direction-

Maybe the right relationship,

The adequate strength to be myself,

A control over my comings and goings,

An understanding of my dreams,

The stamina for a never-ending adventure.

But no,

I have found the cross of Christ,

Where there is perfect liberation in God’s will,

And a perfect freedom born of Love.

When our little salvation projects fail,

We surrender to the justice of God,

Which is none other than Mercy.

God does not look down on our life to judge it-

He looks up at us as a child,

He walks beside us as a companion,

He looks down at us from the cross,

In all of these, giving love and needing love, freely.

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” -Jesus, from John 12:32

I had the experience this Friday night of a Taize prayer around the cross at a church in central London. It is always powerful for me to come to the cross and witness so many others making this pilgrimage up the aisle to be drawn once again to the hands and feet of Jesus. We touch his wounds and he touches ours.

Lent can be a tiring time, a spiritually dry time. What I’m learning through the cross is, bit by bit, the call to welcome this season of waiting as it is. The call to have faith not out of strength but in weakness. To choose love when I don’t see how I can.