“The Cross is Always Avant Garde”: Good Friday Poetry from R. S. Thomas
Jesus’ life narrows down to one day, the day the church has come to call “Good Friday.” It is the day of his crucifixion, defeat. Those of his followers who had not already fled, watched in depressing horror as Jesus’ life fled him. This day is “good” only in retrospect. We do not give it its due if we see it only from the vantage point of the resurrection. There are some voices, a few, who help us see this day in its own right as a profound and crucial moment in the life of God as of human beings (complicit as we all are in its tragic happenings). One is the Welsh poet-priest R. S. Thomas (1913-2000). His epigram, “The cross is always avant garde” (The Echoes Return Slow) seems to mean that for him the radical challenge of the cross to all human doing and knowing comes first. It forestalls easy answers and complacent faith. In his poem “Petition” Thomas writes that on seeing the “rueful acts” of theft, oppression, murder, and rape inflicted by human beings on each other, h...