by Fletcher Lowe

George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community, once wrote,

I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek . . .  at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died. And that is what he died about.

As we experience Holy Week and Easter it is well to remember what George MacLeod has put so dramatically.  The real action for the Christian is not in the “cathedral” but in the marketplace where life is lived.  That is where the baptized live into their Baptism.  That is where, for the Christian, “the rubber meets the road.”