I serve as a youth director at a suburban church and yesterday at our staff meeting a fellow employee commented on the graphic nature of our Good Friday service. She mentioned that the reality of what took place on the cross is best left to the imagination so that the fragile minds of our children won't be haunted by the gruesome images of Christ's sacrificial death.

After a month-long, personal journey into the totality of what took place atop Golgotha I have swimming in my mind a myriad of images from Passion Week: palm branches waving, Temple tables spilling over, a city being wept for, drops of blood falling from a furrowed brow, bread cracking and tearing, wine falling and filling, nails, thorns, wood and stone. And as I continue to ponder the significance of the incarnation, I begin to understand the cross of Christ as an eternal questions posed to our souls.

Our lives are so full of abstractions. We construct and craft theories and theologies to make sense of our circumstances and bring some semblance of solace to our perishing lives. We toil and tarry in hopes of presenting to God and the watching world a compelling case for why we matter. Yet amid all of our striving towards making sense of this life, the question the cross poses continues to persist within our hearts like the monotonous wailing of a winter wind against a tired wooden fence. And this question is compelling because it arrives at the door of our hearts not with a systematic set of philosophical suppositions, but with concrete symbols. The question is whispered through skinny palm branches and spilled in tears. The question is echoed off of two-ton tombstones and pools of fresh blood. And the question threatens to disturb and haunt little children sitting snug in church pews alongside mothers who are poised to quickly cover their tiny ears. And t mothers will want to cover their own ears, because the question will equally haunt their own souls.

This question troubles our wayward and fickle lives which drown in abstraction because it arises from a bloodied, mangled and naked God who eternally whispers, "What will you do with me?"

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