In his poem “The Coming,” Welsh Anglican priest R. S. Thomas (1913-2000),  pictured the Son in Eternity, next to the Father, looking off to the strange place we know as Earth:

     And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Color. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

This season, we focus, as he did, on “the bare tree that saddens the sky,” the cross where Jesus died. And we recognize that it was this vision that prompted him to say to the Father,  “Let me go there.” We are among the “many people who hold out their thin arms” for his salvation.  We join with other believers who “wait for a vanished April to return” with his resurrection and the new life he offers us.

This is the heart of our Christian faith. This is the Gospel.

– George Van Alstine