Good Friday Reflection on the "Homeless Jesus"

Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

After such a long, gray winter, it has been difficult to think Good Friday thoughts this week, as green bursts forth all around me and bright flowers blossom on every side. The earth is shouting “Rejoice!” yet I am supposed to be meditating on the gruesome death of God. It has been harder than usual this Holy Week to keep Easter at bay. I tried to get in the right Good Friday mood by watching the haunting movie, Twelve Years a Slave. Whippings, human cruelty, heartbreaking injustice: all of the elements of Jesus’ Passion were present in the movie, Mel-Gibsonlike on the big screen …. But the horror of a free man’s capture didn't match the thought of Almighty God submitting to such suffering out of love. Even after the somber movie, the spring sunshine outside the theater continued to burn away any gloom.

Then I heard the NPR story about the homeless Jesus. Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz has created a life-sized bronze Jesus poured out like a pile of bones under a shroud on a park bench. The homeless Jesus is easily mistaken at dusk for a real homeless man, curled up under a blanket for warmth, rejected and alone. There is room on the bench for a person to sit at the statue’s bare feet, if one dares to come so near. Only when seated beside the heap of human being, can one notice the nail holes in the feet, the mark of crucifixion. The interesting thing is that this statue has turned out to be rather controversial. Two churches turned the statue down before an Episcopal parish in an upscale neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina purchased it, making the national news. Although the statue is clearly inspired by the verses of Matthew 25 in which Jesus says that when we care for “one of the least of these,” we care for him, many good Christians are not happy with their Lord as a bum on a bench. One upstanding Charlotte resident, fearful for her safety, called the police when she first spied the statue at night, believing that the homeless hordes had invaded her own neighborhood. She rejected the sculptor’s theology, too, protesting that Jesus stands watch over the homeless to protect them and to care for them; he therefore cannot be one of them.[1]

At first I was surprised to notice that the picture of the homeless Jesus huddled in the sunshine did more to bring out a Good Friday spirit of contrition in me than did all of the pain and horrors of the Cross. On reflection, however, I began to understand. For the first Christians, the Cross was a daily horror that they ran into on their way to the market. It was a sign of Roman oppression: of hatred, violence, God-forsakenness and despair. For God to end up on one—and for Christians then to venerate such an object as the source of their salvation—was a scandal beyond the pale, as the apostle Paul tries to make clear to us. For me, however, the Cross has become a religious symbol of salvation over which I need to pour all kinds of drama in order for it to move me to the horror that I know it requires. I have to reach deep down into my darkest imagination, pulling up all of my own hurts and then stirring them with all of the world’s wrongs, in order for the scandal of that smooth Cross in the chancel of my cozy parish church to enter my life in a meaningful way.

But a homeless man huddled on a park bench—that is a sight that I recognize only too well in my world. It easily conjures up connotations overflowing with sin and suffering:  oppression, injustice, addiction, loneliness and despair, just to name a few.  Indeed, for the man or woman suffering on that bench, cast out by me and my community, truly to be Almighty God—well now, the fearful woman in Charlotte is right to call that a scandal! But such is the true scandal of Good Friday: the scandal of God completely caught, out of love for the world, within the pain and the sin of the world. To let myself be moved by the homeless Jesus is not to manufacture horror as a religious duty. It is to let God into the place where God longs to be: into the depths and hidden nooks and crannies of my world. W. H. Auden wrote a poem about Good Friday in which he expresses the challenge that we face in making the crucifixion something that transforms us as much as resurrection does. Describing the crowd right after Jesus dies, he writes:

Soon… The shops will re-open at four,

The empty blue bus in the empty pink square will

Fill up and depart: we have time

To misrepresent, excuse, deny,

Mythify, use this event

While, under a hotel bed, in prison,

Down wrong turnings, its meaning

Waits for our lives …[2]

If Jesus suffers on that park bench, and I can reach out and touch his cold and bloody feet, then the scandal of the Incarnation has entered into the gated community of my life. The homeless Jesus can expect more from me than shame at the place of pain and rejection to which I have consigned him. Because he is a part of my world, the homeless Jesus can expect my life to change in response to our encounter.

My struggles with the beautiful weather this Holy Week made me realize that we always bend over the horrors of Good Friday with Easter victory in our pockets. It is OK for us to look at the suffering of our Lord with the knowledge of the resurrection to follow.  It is OK to ask for forgiveness knowing that we have already been forgiven. After all, Christ’s death flows into his resurrection just as smoothly and secretly as “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” flows into “Praise the Lord … For he does not despise nor abhor the poor …but when they cry to him he hears them.”[3] We don’t quite know where Psalm 22 turns from suffering into joy. We only know that it does. We don't quite know where the homeless Jesus ends and the victorious Christ begins. We only know that they are one and the same. All we know is that we live most of our lives in those moments of gray-and-pink streaked dawn when dark night begins to give way to bright daylight and where winter somehow turns into spring. The important Good Friday question for us is this: Like the psalmist’s, will our lives speak what God has accomplished, to generations yet to be born?  Will our lives be signs of God's grace and love? Will our tears of repentance bathe not just the bronze feet of the homeless Jesus but the fleshly feet of our brothers and sisters in whom the risen Christ has made his home?

The Rev. David Buck sits next to the Jesus the Homeless statue that was installed in front of his church, St. Alban's Episcopal, in Davidson, N.C.
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/13/302019921/statue-of-a-homeless-jesus-startles-a-wealthy-community

---

[1] http://www.wcnc.com/news/neighborhood-news/Homeless-Jesus-sculpture-sparks-controversy-247134691.html

[2] W.H. Auden, “Nones,” from the Horae Canonicae, found at  http://vl­adivostok.com/Speaking_In_Tongues/auden9eng.htm

[3] Psalm 22