Good Friday
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.
In Helen Waddell’s novel Peter
Abelard, Peter and a friend are walking through the forest and
discussing the world’s pain. Peter’s friend notices a fallen log on the
ground, a log that has been sawed in two, exposing the inner rings.
“That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree,
but you only see it where it is cut across,” he points out. “That’s what
Christ’s life was; the bit of God that we saw.” Abelard asks, "You think
that all ... the pain of the world, was Christ's cross?" The friend
replies, "God's cross ... And it goes on [and on.]"[1]
The Cross of Christ that we venerate tonight is the tree suddenly broken
open, God’s suffering dramatically exposed to view. And yet, that suffering
runs all the way through the life of our Creator.
In choosing to bring life to the world, not from outside the world, but
from within the depths of the world, God shares in the world’s pain.
To trace the dark ring of God’s suffering deeper through the wood, let's
turn to the prophet Isaiah’s Suffering Servant. Often, we Christians make
Isaiah’s poem simply into an allegory for Jesus—Jesus punished by God “for our
iniquity.” Isaiah, however, writing to the exiled Jews in Babylon, wasn’t
specifically writing about Jesus. No one knows exactly “who” the Suffering
Servant is, and we can’t draw neat, clean lines that match him up with any
historical figure. Isaiah 53 isn’t just a nice prophecy about Jesus that we can
drag out on Good Friday, admire, and then put away again. It’s not a logical
explanation of the mechanics of redemption, either. It’s a poem that leads us
deep into the heart of our compassionate God.
The first kind of suffering that God dives into in this poem is
deformity. Isaiah portrays the Servant as a hideous creature. He seems to have
a facial disfigurement so horrible that we almost don’t recognize that he’s
human. This creature is like all of the parts of ourselves that we
hate. He’s the ugliness that war and human greed wreak upon God’s amazing
creation: clear streams turned neon green, cities gashed by bombs, forests
mowed down like wheat, mountains blown open and left to bleed, majestic species
gone missing. God suffers deformity along with his servant.
We reject God’s Servant in this poem; indeed, we despise him. We hold him
of no account. He is like all of the peoples who have ever been enslaved, like
the lost ones who crouch under freeway overpasses and cry behind walls. He is
like the foreigner, the prisoner, the outcast, like all those who are pushed
away because they are different. God suffers rejection along with his servant.
The Servant suffers from pain and illness in this poem, too. The Hebrew
says that he is “a man of pain;” defined by his physical suffering. Moreover,
he does not just bear his own sickness, but ours as well. Even though we can’t
be bothered to look at him, he is ground down by the sickness of the world. He
is like all of those suffering from illness in places where doctors fear to
tread, like soldiers and civilians wounded in war, like the teenagers bloody
from gang violence in no-man’s land. He’s like children mowed down by guns at
school, like people in hospital beds that no one bothers to visit. God suffers
physical pain along with his servant.
The servant suffers unjustly. Like Job, he never does anything to merit his
grief. It all happens by life gone awry. He never even complains about his lot.
He remains as silent as a baby lamb who doesn’t know enough to cry out before
his throat is cut. He does violence to no one, but justice completely passes
him by. He is like the children of poverty, like the caste-less and the
homeless, the victims of abuse, the millions who never get a chance. God
suffers persecution along with his servant.
Oh, how we would like to take the Suffering Servant, the Suffering God,
the Suffering Christ, the Suffering neighbor, the Suffering land, the Suffering
heart, and put them aside, where they don’t hurt our eyes and cut into our
hearts. But they are all a part of us, and we cannot let any of them go. And
so, our loving God joins us, remaking our decaying world and our decomposing
souls by his constant healing presence within them, lifting up, exalting,
loving, transforming, turning inside out.
Far outside of the realm of our categories and understandings, the true
power of God works with a strange, compassionate grace—a grace that can bring a
broken people back from exile, a grace that can rebuild out of crushed dreams,
a grace that can make the Crucified One our Risen Lord and Savior, a grace that
can heal and transform our lives.
Poet Wendell Berry writes:
“…These times we know much evil, little good/ To steady us in faith/ And
comfort when our losses press/ Hard on us, and we choose,/ In panic or despair
or both,/ To keep what we will lose./ For we are fallen like the trees, our
peace/ broken, and so we must/ Love where we cannot trust,/ Trust where we
cannot know,/ And must await the wayward-coming grace/ That joins living and
dead,/ Taking us where we would not go--/ Into the boundless dark./ When what
was made has been unmade/ The Maker comes to His work.”[2]
Not just on Good Friday, but every day, we live and move and have our being
within the embrace of a God who has always known the darkness, a God who loves
where God cannot trust and trusts where God cannot know. Hold tight, today and every day, to the hand of the one
who walks with us through the darkness, the hand of the one who created the
Light.
[1] Shared
in a lecture by the Rev. Martin Smith, The School of Theology of the University
of the South, July 2017, and found in his article found at https://www.questia.com/magazine/1P3-2622999731/god-s-cross-to-bear
[2]
Wendell Berry, from “Sabbaths 2.” Can be found at:
http://alteredfaces.blogspot.com/2013/03/wednesday-words-lenten-selections-week-4.html
[1] Wendell
Berry, from “Sabbaths 2.” Can be found at: http://alteredfaces.blogspot.com/2013/03/wednesday-words-lenten-selections-week-4.html
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