​​A week or so ago I was speaking with a couple of visitors from Ontario about the pink salmon that are running right now here in Squamish. I love salmon, and I was sharing some different pieces with them about their ecology and life history. As I was describing how they transform to swim up the rivers to where they hatched to spawn and die, they suddenly stopped me. “They all DIE?!” they asked incredulously. 

Yes, they all die.

I guess not everyone grows up learning about the life cycle of the salmon like we do here on the West Coast.

This Sunday is Holy Cross Day, a day set aside to meditate on the significance of the cross of Christ apart from Good Friday. These people’s reaction to this surprising fact about the salmon gave me a wonderful insight into this feast day.  

Just like my familiarity with the biology of the salmon had taken away my shock at their deaths, perhaps our familiarity with the cross has taken away some of the shock that we might feel faced with this instrument of death, despair and humiliation that an oppressive Empire used to execute Jesus.

The people of Jesus’ day hearing the story and seeing the crosses in our churches, in our homes and around our necks would probably stop us to ask incredulously: What do you mean your Christ died such a devastating defeat and death on a cross?! How could you possibly think to so prominently display this tool and symbol of humiliation, terror and despair so proudly?!

Yet, paradoxically, followers of Jesus have claimed for millennia that the cross of Christ is the ultimate sign and story of God’s power and redemptive love for the whole world.  

In this way too, the cross is a little like the pink salmon, because the story of the salmon might seem like a story about death, but it is actually a story about life. The journey, lives, and maybe most importantly the deaths of the salmon give life to the next generation, but also to countless other species. Through their bodies they nourish a whole ecosystem.

As we meditate on the cross in this season of creation, I hope that the pink salmon may give you a little insight into its meaning and significance. As we look to the cross, may we find there not despair, but hope; not hate, but love; not death, but life.

Thanks be to God!

CG+