GOOD FRIDAY

[cappie]

 “It is finished” (v 30). 

In the agony and crucifixion of Jesus God was not hurt merely by sympathy with the latest prophet to be martyred. God suffered in Christ. In the Passion of the Son, God shows that he keeps company with us, is one with us in all the suffering that is built into our fallen human existence. Jesus identifies himself with the guilty. He dies the most degrading death, the culmination of a ministry in which he kept company with the sick, the possessed, the despised and devalued. His suffering and dying and descent into hell is God living our life.

Theologians have constantly shied away from saying the two words outright: God suffers. It has been the mystics and the artists of the church who have had the daring. One of the classic places it has been said in our tradition and century is in a famous scene from Helen Waddell’s novel Peter Abelard, about the great theologian of the middle ages who was punished and exiled for his affair with his pupil Heloise. Abelard is with his companion Thibault in the woods and they come upon a dead rabbit mangled by a snare.

He looked down at the little draggled body, his mouth shaking.

“Thibault,” he said, “do you think there Is a God at all? Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?”

Thibault nodded. “I know,” he said. “Only-I think God is in it too.”

Abelard looked up sharply. “In it? Do you mean that it makes Him suffer, the way it does us?” Again Thibault nodded.

“Then why doesn’t He stop it?”

‘” I don’t know,” said Thibault “But all the time God suffers. More than we do.”
Abelard looked at him, perplexed …. “Thibault, do you mean Calvary?”

Thibault shook his head. “That was only a piece of it-the piece that we saw-in time. Like that.” He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle. “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. That is what Christ’s life was; the bit of God that we saw. And we think God is like that, because Christ was like that, kind and forgiving sins and healing people. We think God is like that for ever, because it happened once, with Christ. But not the pain. Not the agony at the last. We think that stopped. ”

Abelard looked at him, the blunt nose and the wide mouth, the honest troubled eyes. He could have knelt before him. “Then, Thibault,” he said slowly, “you think that all this,” he looked down at the little quiet body in his arms, “all the pain of the world, was Christ’s cross?”
“God’s cross,” said Thibault. “And it goes on”

Good Friday is the time for us to ponder this mystery. It could help us realize how revolutionary the doctrine of the Incarnation is. If Jesus is nothing more than the greatest prophet of God, then we can leave God out of suffering in heaven. But if the Crucified is God, then God is revealed as the one who is with us in suffering. The concept of God as a remote and dispassionate observer is smashed.

What effect might it have on your own life to ponder this mystery? First, you may find your understanding of sin changing. We think of sin as a kind of lawbreaking or failure God observes from afar, with disapproval. But this is very much farther from the truth than the description of sin as “grieving the Holy Spirit” (Eph. 4:30). Sin is what we do to block and frustrate God’s action in our lives. Sin is thwarting and injuring the loving presence of God in our hearts.

Second, you may find your way of thinking of God’s presence in the world undergoing a change. If God suffers, then God truly can be recognized by faith as present everywhere. We will stop praying to God to pay attention to this suffering or that tragedy. God doesn’t need to pay attention to suffering because he is already present in and with the sufferers, and from that place of pain is moving us to contribute our caring and loving to his.

Third, contemplating the mystery of God’s cross will change the way we come to terms with our own pain. If we have explored the mystery beforehand we may, when Sickness, death, betrayal, or disappointment befall us, be better prepared to see that God is not far from us, but keeps us company and continues to hold us up with those hands that from the beginning of time have been pierced with unimaginable nails.

But such is the mystery that all the Good Fridays left to us in this life will not be enough to sound its depths. Only by seeing Christ in the glory of the Father with his hands, feet, and side still pierced with wounds will we grasp the mystery-or be grasped by it.