Good Friday April 10, 2009

Good Friday
April 10, 2009

Good Friday tells an all too human story.
On Wednesday night, some of us prayed the fruits of our meditations on this moment by moment portrayal of Jesus’ suffering.
It was clear from the prayers that we each brought our own lives, our own life experiences, to this exercise. The way of the Cross, the way of pain—that’s deeply understandable to us, because we know what pain is like.
We know what taking up an unbearable burden is like. We know what grief is like, so our hearts ache for Mary; we know what friendship is like, so we cheer for Simon of Cyrene; we know what compassion is like, so we long to be there with Veronica, a piece of torn veil in our hands.
Then, last night, after our commemoration of the Last Supper, we stripped the altar, we covered the gold cross, we even took away the consecrated bread and wine from the aumbry, this little box in the wall. See, it’s empty.
Empty, gone, like the hopes of Jesus’ friends.

But there’s more to Good Friday than the human story. Look at this painting of the second Station, Jesus takes up his cross.
Marcia Santore, the artist, reminds us of another crucial part of the story of Good Friday. Look how, around Jesus’ body, she’s painted flecks of gold.
Because this is not just the all-too-human story repeated every day in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, of the terror tactics wielded by the state.
The flecks of gold remind us that the story of Good Friday cannot be fully told without talking about God.

The Good Friday story really goes back to the very beginning.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
This Word, of course, is Christ. John’s Gospel goes on: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” That means that when God’s word sounded at the moment of Creation, Christ was in that word. All creation, which God found, “very good,” was made in the image of Christ. How wonderful! What happened?
When I was a little girl, a favorite birthday party game was “Gossip.” You might remember it: one person makes up a sentence and whispers it to the person next to her. That person whispers it to the girl next to her, and on and on round the circle.
The last person gets to say what she heard. Depending on how big the group is, what comes out at the end is a muddled, sometimes barely recognizable, version of the original statement.
In the same way, as creation evolved and especially alas, when humans appeared and human history began, God’s original creative word became distorted, soiled, turned backwards and upside down.
God could have turned away from the mess we made of the world. Christ might have scorned the world created in his image, like a writer who rips up 200 pages of a novel she’s worked on for years because it just isn’t any good.

But no. St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians tells what happened instead: Christ Jesus “though, he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”
The original Greek is perfectly clear—I checked it: Christ was not sent or compelled to come according to some cosmic plan. No, he resolutely, freely emptied himself. He shook off godly privilege and became human, human enough to suffer death on a cross.
And God let him go.
You who are parents, imagine this: watching your beloved child leave home to go into the worst possible danger—to be a human rights worker in the Sudan, an army ranger in Afghanistan, a volunteer “peacemaker” using the fragile barrier of his body to block tanks in Israel/Palestine.
God lets Christ go and Christ feels the loss in his blood and in his bones. Not in John’s Passion Gospel, but in Matthew and Mark’s, Jesus screams into this cosmic void, this total emptiness, his connection with God apparently broken: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

We can’t tell the story of the Crucifixion without realizing that in it, we and God are intertwined.
The human part: Mary his mother, and Mary Magdalen, and John and Joseph of Arimathea catch their beloved Jesus’ body as the soldiers cut him down from the cross. They hold him and then grieve him into the tomb.
The divine part: God catches the dead Son. Catches the Word, the Word of light and life, and holds him, ready for the Resurrection.
But--- When Mary and the others bathe Jesus’ body before his burial, they are washing God’s wounds. And when God reaches out to catch up Christ, God’s arms wind up embracing not only Christ but us—all of humanity, and yes, all of Creation.

What words are left? Good Friday brings us finally to silence, and reverence, and awe.