Good Friday: Nourishing Words
On Good Friday we remember the strange pairing of defeat and triumph, of suffering and power, in the Son of God. John Donne likens Christ to a sun that gave every appearance of setting, but did “by that setting endless day beget.” Good Friday is about that darkest hour just before the dawn.
This morning I woke up to a chorus of birds and the thought of Michael Card’s song “In the Garden.” Strange, because I haven’t listened to it in years:
There in the darkness
The light and the darkness
Stood still,
Two choices, one tortured will.
And there, once the choice had been made,
All the world could be saved,
By the One in the garden.
I also have in mind these words from Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow (included in Bread and Wine), where Jayber glimpses something central about Christ’s seeming powerlessness on the cross:
Christ did not descend from the cross except into the grave. And why not otherwise? Wouldn’t it have put fine comical expressions on the faces of of the scribes and the chief priests and the soldiers if at that moment he had come down in power and glory? Why didn’t he do it? Why hasn’t he done it at any one of a thousand good times between then and now?
I knew the answer. I knew it a long time before I could admit it, for all the suffering of the world is in it. He didn’t, he hasn’t, because from the moment he did, he would be the absolute tyrant of the world and we would be his slaves. Even those who hated him and hated one another and hated their own souls would have to believe in him then. From that moment the possibility that we might be bound to him and he to us and us to one another by love forever would be ended.
Where Jayber goes from there — that our suffering is endless, that God grieves and that Christ’s wounds are still bleeding — I can’t follow; I believe in what happened a few days later. But I like this insight into the absolute, willed humility of Christ on the cross, and his refusal to flare out in majestic rejection of the rescue he had come to effect.
Speaking of Godhead flaring out, last Sunday’s sermon provided me with a valuable missing piece to the story of Jesus responding to the crowd who came to Gethsemene looking for him:
4 Jesus, knowing all that was going to happen to him, went out and asked them, “Who is it you want?”
5 “Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied.
“I am he,” Jesus said. (And Judas the traitor was standing there with them.) 6 When Jesus said, “I am he,” they drew back and fell to the ground.
7 Again he asked them, “Who is it you want?”
“Jesus of Nazareth,” they said.
8 Jesus answered, “I told you that I am he…”
I have always had the sense that the men fall to the ground in recognition of Jesus’ divinity. But the missing piece is that the actual translation of the phrase commonly rendered “I am he” is, “I am.” As in, “I AM that I AM.” This is the Creator, the source of all being, freely giving himself in a controlled explosion of divinity. It foreshadows the moment to come a few hours later: “Surely this man was the Son of God.”
Finally, here is a favorite passage from C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm. I’ve cited it before on Good Friday, and I think of it again this morning.
Does not every movement in the Passion write large some common element in the sufferings of our race? First, the prayer of anguish; not granted. Then He turns to His friends. They are asleep — as ours, or we, are so often, or busy, or away, or preoccupied. Then He faces the Church; the very Church that He brought into existence. It condemns Him. This also is characteristic. In every Church, in every institution, there is something which sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. But there seems to be another chance. There is the State; in this case, the Roman state. Its pretensions are far lower than those of the Jewish church, but for that very reason it may be free of local fanaticisms. It claims to be just on a rough, worldly level. Yes, but only so far as is consistent with political expediency and raison d’etat. One becomes a counter in a complicated game. But even now all is not lost. There is still an appeal to the People — the poor and simple whom He had blessed, whom He had healed and fed and taught, to whom He Himself belongs. But they have become over-night (it is nothing unusual) a murderous rabble shouting for His blood. There is, then, nothing left but God. And to God, God’s last words are “Why hast thou forsaken me?”
You see how characteristic, how representative, it all is. The human situation writ large. These are among the things it means to be a man. Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut as you reach it…
As for the last dereliction of all, how can we either understand or endure it? Is it that God Himself cannot be man unless God seems to vanish at His greatest need? And if so, why? I sometimes wonder if we have even begun to understand what is involved in the very concept of creation. If God will create, He will make something to be, and yet to be not Himself. To be created is, in some sense, to be ejected or separated. Can it be that the more perfect the creature is, the further this separation must at some point be pushed? It is saints, not common people, who experience the “dark night.”
Have a blessed Good Friday.
