Posted on: 2nd April 2026

As we approach Easter this weekend I have been reflecting again on a book entitled The Wood Between the Worlds *1. This title was based on the wood described in The Magician’s Nephew from CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It is a wood filled with various pools that can be used as portals into multiple universes. Brian Zahnd, has chosen the phrase, The Wood Between the Worlds as a theopoetic of the Cross.

The cross of Christ is the wood between the worlds
There is a world that was and the world to come
and in between these two worlds
Is the wood upon which the Son of God was hung. *2

I have always been intrigued by this description of the cross. Two trees are referred to in Genesis, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Things went badly wrong when Adam chose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There was a loss of innocence, shame and blame, being exiled from Eden, and later so much more, including violence, war and death. This describes “the world that was” and still is, in many ways.

But this is not the end of the story-the tree of life has been revealed again, not in Eden but on Golgotha (the place of the skull) where Jesus was crucified. Although the blood stained cross was a symbol of violence and death, Jesus the Son of God, the Son of Man and Lamb of God caused it to become the tree of life.

Although there were many crosses that littered the landscape during the time of the Roman empire, the uniqueness of the cross of Christ can only be understood in the light of the resurrection. As Jesus cried from the cross “It is finished” *3 “death was crushed to death” *4, new resurrection life was released and made available for all.
In our current world, its different contexts and our personal circumstances, with their conflicts and suffering, the triumph of the cross may not seem to make sense, but its power is seen through the self-sacrificial suffering love of Jesus. He not only identified with the weight of suffering, but experienced it. Yet, resurrection life, both to be lived out now and later to be experienced in its fullness, has broken through. The cross really is the hinge point from which all things are made new.

May you experience afresh the power of the cross and its revelation as the “the wood between the worlds” this Easter.

Paul Lancaster (Hope for the Nations)

*1 - Brian Zahnd. The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross. Intervarsity Press
*2 - Zahnd p10
*3 - John 19 v30
*4 - The Power of the Cross. Keith Getty/ Stuart Townend