Monday, March 16

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life." John 3: 14-15


There is a difference between inscape and landscape. The poet Gerard Manly Hopkins defines “inscape” as the internal “patterns or design” in painting or literature, as differentiated from the whole painting, or landscape.

Have you ever been to a Catholic hospital or nursing home and seen the crucifixes on the wall in each patient’s room? Reacting to their overall “landscape”, I used to think they were repulsive, old-fashioned Roman Catholic. It took a tolerant nun to turn my mind around. She pointed out that the wounded person in bed can identify with the wounded One on the cross and thereby confront their own disease and begin to experience healing.

So in this Lenten season as we gaze upon the landscape of ugliness of the cross we are compelled to look at ourselves. Then we begin to see the inscape of ourselves in the landscape of the cross.


Holy God, may we see in the awful wounds of your Son on the cross our own woundedness and realize that he was “Wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities." Amen

Roderic Frohman, Associate Pastor for Church in Society