The Iron Nails

(Preaching the Cross, Part II)

Part 2 of a three part series preached on Good Friday 2022 at the University Church of Great St Mary’s, Cambridge

I am the iron in the nails.

Cold. Rusted from use and reuse. Heavy, perhaps a full third of pound of iron. Not your penny or roofing nail, more like a spike:

I am the iron in the nails.

For all the thousands upon thousands who have been crucified, only three bodies have every been found which can be connected with any confidence to crucifixion — the most convincing of which, Skeleton 4926, was unearthed by archaeologists just a couple years ago right here in Cambridgeshire, in Fenstanton: an iron nail driven through his heel bone being proof of crucifixion.

For all the countless thousands crucified by Rome, an iron nail in a heel bone at the very outskirts of the Roman Empire seems very little to go on.

Iron is solid, heavy, and ancient.

What solidity does your faith offer?

Where is your concrete, iron-clad evidence?

Then again, rebels, criminals, messiahs and zealots were, after all, rarely given a decent burial. And the iron nails? We were nearly always taken – valuable hardware to be reused again, or stolen by those who, as Pliny and Lucian tell us, used crucifixion nails as magical healing amulets to cure malaria. Disturbing, yes, but magical thinking has often paired execution and healing, death and life.

Blood-stained as my iron was, your blood too is filled with iron, about four grams worth. You need that iron to breathe, to live, to carry oxygen from your lungs to your cells. For your body, iron is not death but life. The iron core of this earth molten and spinning, provides the magnetosphere that keeps solar radiation from stripping the atmosphere away.

I might say, my iron is life. And my iron is death.

The iron in your blood, the iron the nail, the iron at the core of this world might be 10 billion years old, formed in the last stages of a star that’s about to go supernova, Hydrogen crashing together to form Helium, atoms smashing together at impossible energies to make heavier and heavier elements: carbon, neon, oxygen, silicon….But once the star starts fusing iron, it’s doomed. Fusing iron uses more energy than what it gives back, and the star begins to die.

So here I am, not merely forged at the death of the star, but in my forging a bringer of death.

I am cousin to the bronze in the solider’s spear, and the stone in Cain’s bloody hands.

I am the shell landing on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, I am the shackles on the wrists of the asylum seeker. My iron sang in the blood of the tenants when they cried out, in their greed and bloodlust:

“This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.”

I am the iron sense of fear and dread which drains away hope, the iron darkness when you wake in the middle of the night, filled without doubt, bound by fear of death and the heavy weight of fear of failure.

And still,

and still,

the God who set the stars in their courses at the very dawn of creation, who brought forth my iron with a word, that God placed me in your blood to give you life, and let me wound his hands and feet, that he might restore life to the whole cosmos.

The nails were driven in, and he cried out in his agony, as all the rebels and convicts did before him.

And then he kept those wounds.

He kept those wounds of my iron, even after he broke the very bonds of death, that you might see the nail marks in his hands and put your finger where the nails were.

Who does such a thing?

Who transforms such pain into faith?

Who builds a cornerstone from the stone the builders so sensibly rejected?

Who brings life out of iron?

O dearest Lord, thy sacred hands

with nails were pierced for me;

O shed thy blessing on my hands

that they may work for thee.

O dearest Lord, thy sacred feet

with nails were pierced for me;

O pour thy blessing on my feet

that they may follow thee.

O dearest Lord, thy sacred heart

with spear was pierced for me;

O pour thy Spirit in my heart

that I may live for thee.