Good Friday

There is a strong strand in Christian spirituality that invites us to feel personally responsible for Jesus’ agonizing death.  As a youth I was taught that if I was the only person in the world ever to sin Jesus still would have hung on the Cross for me.  I was told that my sins are the nails that hold him to the Cross.  It was led to believe the question, “is it I Lord?”, should be my question because I betray Jesus and I deny Jesus again and again and again.

Given this spirituality, it is easy to see how Good Friday becomes a day of extended confession for many.  Each swing of the hammer and each drop of blood are meant to elicit in us deep remorse and complete remembrance of every wrong we have ever done.   In some form or fashion the focus of this day becomes me and what I did to Jesus.  Let me suggest we lay aside this strand of spirituality and approach this day and this moment in a different way: as a sign of love… God’s enduring love for us and our Christ-like love for the world.

During Holy Week I have been meditating on and praying over the poem “African Easter” by Abioseh Nicol, a writer from Sierra Leone.  The poem consists of three parts: Good Friday, Easter Eve, and Easter Morning.  Let me read Good Friday for you, which has the subtitle The Wounded Christ:

I am not your God

if you have not denied me once, twice,

if I have not heard you complaining,

or doubting my existence.

I am not your Love,

if you have not rejected me often.

For what then am I worth to you

if you are always sinless.

Pace these sandy corridors of time,

turn again and live for me your youth, listening

to the gently falling rain, the distant cock crow

then proceed once more to deny

that I had a part in your being.  Say

that I am an invention to keep you held

always in thralldom.  That I was

the avant-garde of your disintegration.

After me, the stone jars of cheap gin, ornamental

glass beads, the punitive expeditions, your colonial status,

I have heard it all before; hide your face,

bury it, for fear that finding me, you may find peace.

For in this hour when the dying night lingers

unwilling to surrender its waking darkness

over your face and fevered brow, my torn fingers

will stray bringing such comfort

as may claim your doubting heart.

From Nicol’s perspective, human sin and shortcomings are an inevitable; they are something God expects and accepts as inherent in the relationship between creature and Creator.  To focus exclusively on our sin is to “hide our face”, to “bury it” – as Nicol puts it – so as to miss completely the depth of relationship God seeks to have with us.  It would be like a child who knows nothing of the parent except “I told you not to do it, now go to your room and stay there.”  Yes, this is a facet of the parent/child relationship, but only a small part.  The relationship is so much richer than just rules, remorse, and reprimands. 

“I am not your God if you have not denied me once, twice, if I have not heard you complaining, or doubting my existence.  I am not your Love, if you have not rejected me often.”  As a youth Nicol believed otherwise and it led him away from God.  He embraced doubt and distraction because at a deep level he believed himself unworthy of God.  His great fear was that he might learn God loves him and in that love would find peace with God and himself.  Nicol says this day – Good Friday – is an invitation to do just that… to face not our sins, but God’s overwhelming, all-encompassing love for us.

Each year at this service I say essentially the same thing.  The distinctive feature of the Good Friday liturgy is The Solemn Collects which we will pray in just a moment.  These biddings and prayers are comprehensive; no person or need is left out.  Placed where they are in the liturgy, the Collects suggest that once Christ’s work in the world is completed on the Cross, our work in the world begins.  His love for the world becomes our love for the world.  And the starting point for us as we seek to manifest this love is prayer.

As I said, Good Friday is many things.  Certainly this includes the spirituality that was instilled in me as a youth.  Today I add to it this… God saying, “O.K., I get it.  You sin.  I know it and I expect it.  It is a part of the contract I signed on for when I created you.  Don’t look away in shame.  Don’t hide your face.  Look at me and see the love I have for you.  Look at me and find peace.  And then look out and look around.  See the world I love so dearly.  See the world through my eyes.  Help me show my love for the world by sharing my love for you with others.”

African Easter

by Abioseh Nicol (1924-1994)

Good Friday

The Wounded Christ:

I am not your God

if you have not denied me once, twice,

if I have not heard you complaining,

or doubting my existence.

I am not your Love,

if you have not rejected me often.

For what then am I worth to you

if you are always sinless.

Pace these sandy corridors of time,

turn again and live for me your youth, listening

to the gently falling rain, the distant cock crow

then proceed once more to deny

that I had a part in your being.  Say

that I am an invention to keep you held

always in thralldom.  That I was

the avant-garde of your disintegration.

After me, the stone jars of cheap gin, ornamental 

glass beads, the punitive expeditions, your colonial status,

I have heard it all before; hide your face,

bury it, for fear that finding me, you may find peace.

For in this hour when the dying night lingers

unwilling to surrender its waking darkness

over your face and fevered brow, my torn fingers

will stray bringing such comfort

as may claim your doubting heart.

Easter Eve

The African Priest:

I have sat down by the waterside

watching the grey river pulling away.

I have listened me with willing ears

to your vesper bells across the fields.

Come close to me, God, do not keep away,

I walk towards you but you are too far,

Please try and meet me here halfway,

because you are my all, my all.

What are you, Negro, Lebanese or Jew,

Flemish, Italian, Indian, Greek?

I know within my heart exactly what you are – 

What we would like to be, but never are.

The warm blood sticks to your whipped shoulders

(Drink this in remembrance of me).

Only when the whirling throngs have raised red weals

on our complacent bodies, then we remember you.

Change our salty tears of brown remorse

into your flowing blood, it tastes the same.

(Oh, River Niger, you too have come from far away),

Fill my uplifted silver calabash

with your sacrificial wine.

And I, your least novitiate, will sip,

with my thick lips, your ancient memory

So God the Father who art above,

Christ His Son, our only love,

Holy Ghost, eternal Dove,

make me a goodly man.

Easter Morning

The African Intellectual:

Ding dong bell

Pussy’s in the well.

Another day…

Sleep leaves my opening eyes slowly

unwillingly like a true lover.

But this day is different.

The lonely matin bells

cut across the thin morning mist,

the glinting dew on the green grass,

the cool pink light before the heat of day,

the sudden punctual dawn of tropic skies, 

before the muezzin begins to cry, 

before the pagan drums begin to beat.

Easter morning.

But still for me

the great rock remains unrolled.

within my wet dark tomb

wounded peace remains embalmed,

the pricking thorns still yet my crown.

Easter morning.

Where are my ancestral spirits now?

I have forgotten for many harvests 

to moisten the warm earth

with poured libations.

Where are you now, O Shango?

two headed, powerful

man and woman, hermaphrodite

holding your quivering thunderbolts

with quiet savage malice;

brooding over your domain,

Africa, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil,

slavery of mind is unabolished.

Always wanting to punish, never to love.

I have turned away from you

to One who stands

watching His dying dispossessed Son 

shouting in Aramaic agony

watching the white Picasso dove

hovering above the Palestinian stream

watching and waiting, sometimes

to punish, always to love.

Sleep confuses my tired mind

still the bell rings

I must up and away.

I am a good Churchman, now.

Broadminded, which means past caring

whether High or Low.

The priest may hold the chalice,

or give it to me.  It depends

on where he trained.  I only mind

that he wipes the wet rim

not to spread dental germs.

A tenth of my goods

I give to the poor

through income tax.

Easter morning.

Yet you Christ are always there.

You are the many-faceted crystal 

of our desires and hopes,

behind the smoke-screen of incense, 

concealed in mumbled European tongues

of worship and of praise.

In the thick dusty verbiage

of centuries of committees

of ecumenical councils.

You yet remain revealed

to those who seek you.

It is I, you say.

You remain in the sepulcher

of my brown body.

Christ is risen, Christ is risen!

You were not dead.

It was just that we

could not see clearly enough.

We can push out the rock from the inside.

You can come out now.

You see we want to share you

with our masters, because

you really are unique.

The great muddy river Niger, 

picks up the rising equatorial sun,

changing itself by slow degrees

into thick flowing molten gold.

Expectations & Disappointments

I wrote a paper in seminary on a 1941 book titled The Nature and Destiny of Man written by a theologian named Reinhold Niebuhr.  In it, Niebuhr argues that we human beings are both finite and limitless.  We are limitless because we are made in the image of the Creator.  Our minds are capable of soaring to fantastic heights and our souls are endowed with the possibility of infinite expression.  But we are also creatures and thus limited.  We are confined to space and time.  We are imperfect and lack omniscience.  Niebuhr said that humanity is both free and bound, both limited and limitless, sinner and saint, subject to history and social forces but also the shaper of history and society, creature of the Creator but potential lord of creation, egotistical but capable of living for others.

Niebuhr believed we are drawn into relationships with other people when we see the infinite in them; when we see in a lover or a mate or a friend the mystery of that person, his or her unique capacity for good and beauty and strength and virtue.  Conversely, these relationships are challenged when we recognize the other person’s finite nature; when we see how small and powerless and petty a person really is.

Niebuhr’s thinking sheds light on one aspect of the hugely complex events that envelop the Passion of our Lord.  Throughout the Gospels we see people being attracted to that part of Jesus which gives flesh to true Divinity.  Drawn by his miracles and his healings and his signs and his teachings and his personal aura, they came from far and near to meet Jesus.  He seemed to be unencumbered by the elements of this life that drag down the rest of us.  He contended fearlessly with oppressive politicians and corrupt, uncaring religious leaders.  He demonstrated a boundless capacity for compassion to all who were sick, lonely, anxious, or despondent and for those who were not accepted in society’s upper echelons.  Demons cowered at his rebuke and the raging seas lay still at His command.  He was God from God, Light from Light... of one Being with the Father.

And, as you know, by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and was made man.  He emptied himself, as St. Paul says, and became humble as we are humble.  He was limited by thirst and exhaustion.  He was not able to right every wrong or exceed everyone’s expectations of Him.  His critics recognized his finite nature and wagged at the foot of the Cross, “He saved other but he cannot save himself.”  As he rode into Jerusalem, Jesus was praised by those whose held high expectations for what he would do and as he stood before Pilate the same people rejected him for disappointing them.

Expectations and disappointments: these are emotions born of our limitless potential and the finite nature of our physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual condition.  The cry of “hosanna in the highest” is raised for those from whom we expect great things and the shouts of “crucify” are aimed at anyone who lets us down beyond all measure.

It is a dynamic that we do not reserve just for the Savior of the world.  It plays out in every relationship between individuals, between groups, and between individuals and groups.  How many marriages have begun with two people singing hosanna only to end with demands for crucifixion?  How many politicians have strolled into office on a red carpet only to be booted out the back door when they fail to deliver the world to their constituents?  How many coaches have helped how many young people to graduate only to be fired because they did not win enough league championships?    How many churches have split when two sides can not agree on the ‘truth’?

We demand a kind of greatness and perfection from one another that only God can live up to, and even then, only on God’s best days.  As a result we have become an extremely cruel and unforgiving society that throws away those who disappoint us with a stunning, but predictable regularity.  We shun, sue, or sabotage anyone unfortunate enough to have their limitations exposed to our boundless expectations.  The cry may not be “crucify him,” but the intention is the same.

The great irony is that the words “crucify him” – aimed at those who, in their limitations, have disappointed us – these words are generated in us not from what is infinite and glorious and generous, but from what is finite and mean and unforgiving.  We condemn in another what fail to see in ourselves.

Each one of us has been victimized by unrealistic expectations and each of us knows what it is to be thoroughly uncharitable with regards to the short-comings of others.  It is an old phenomena, older than the Passion of our Lord for sure.  One of the things we learn from today’s story is that it should be O.K. to be human.  It should be O.K. to have limitations and to make mistakes.  We ought to cut some slack for others when they fail to attain the impossible standards we set for them.  We are not God.  We are not even gods.  We are limited human beings making our way through life as best we can. 

But we can be like God in this respect: God recognizes and accepts that we are finite and thus we will fall far, hard, and often.  The Passion of our Lord is the most powerful testimony imaginable of just how low we can sink.  Yet it also shows us that God’s mercy for us knows no bounds.  That very mercy is woven into the fabric of our being.  It is – should we choose to act upon it – a part of who we are in our limitless potential. 

Each week we come to the Lord’s Table to taste the bread and drink the wine which will promote in us that which is charitable to those around us.  Living on our own resources and left to our own devices, the cry of “crucify” seems to well up within us again and again and again.  Making ourselves present to God’s grace opens within us that which is limitless and capable of near-infinite mercy and compassion.