Good Friday

I don’t know what’s good about a day on which a man who told the truth was marched up a hill and nailed to a cross, but we call it Good Friday. On this day, over two thousand years ago, a Jewish Holy Man from the colonial backwater of the Galilee was murdered by the Roman Empire. He was not the only Jew this occupying force left to die, nailed to a wooden cross, his body surrendering to prolonged torture over several days. Thousands of Jews were murdered in this way. Rabbi Hillel recounts finding several of his friends so impaled. One had already succumbed. The other two, he was able to free. We don’t know their names, or how it is they ended up on the wrong side of Rome. We do know this, though: that truth is never welcomed into the presence of hegemonic power. Of all the Jews to be crucified by the vicious Roman Empire, it is the story of Jesus that has come to us as Holy Writ. This one Jew of thousands is the One we remember each year, on this day. We remember him in the pews of churches, singing sad hymnody; our praying hands before us in contrition. Christians look into themselves and find the part of them that hammered those nails into him; that pierced his side with a spear. They feel unworthy. They repent. They go home and wait for the Resurrection.

All that unworthiness and penitence are focussed on the death of this one Man: hoi anthropos (the Human One). He is isolated, somehow, from the rest of us, up there on that Cross in silent rebuke. Christians accept their part in this death. They acknowledge that their own sins were those for which Jesus was killed. Yet, this acknowledgement is part of a cosmic bargain in the mind of a Christian. From Jesus, comes forgiveness. From the Christian, comes agreement to believe that Jesus rose from his tomb and again walked among us. The cosmic bargain is set in an abstraction, so individualized that its resonance is lost in evanescence. The truth about Jesus is certainly that he stands in all our places. The truth about Christians is that they don’t see Him in others, or they would put down their hammers and spears and truly take up that Cross. The truth about the cosmic bargain is that it represents a child’s eye view of what the Passion of Jesus actually means to the Human Family he came to save from its own violence and evil.
The Passion Narrative reveals a humanity is all its glory and muck. Here are the sneering soldiers, playing dice for Jesus’ cloak. There, a woman wipes Jesus’ face. The people scream for his blood and spit on him, their scapegoat. A man helps Jesus bear his Cross. Soldiers beat him half to death and offer him vinegar to drink. A man offers up his own tomb for the broken body to be buried in. We are the good, the bad, the ugly, the thoughtful, the loving and the irredeemably cruel and stupid. That is what it is to be human. This One Man came to show us what it costs when we choose our cruelty and stupidity and ugliness over our most noble impulses. A man hanging on a cross in the desert is a picture of what we are when we lose ourselves to violence and hatred. That is the message of the Passion. Jesus did not endure what He did to satisfy our voracious self-love and egotistical need to be eternal. Rather, Jesus endured what He did to teach us to reject the base impulses that propel us into the void of chaos and to choose, in their stead, those impulses which lead us to the fullness of our humanity. Jesus, the Human One, came to show us what God is like and that God lives in all of us.

On April 4, we’ll remember another, more recent crucifixion; that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He too, knew what was coming for him. Just as Jesus knew he was about to die, Dr. King was visited by the pall before it fell over him. His was not a lingering death, suspended on a cross. His death was expeditious, but it was for our sins that he also died. It was for our stupidity, violence and ever-agitating evil that Dr. King fell that day, almost two thousand years after Jesus came to teach us that this was the way of chaos and descent and not the way of humanity.

Still, the chaos closes in. No matter how many Dr. Kings, Metger Evers, Malcolm Xs, Viola Liuzzos or Mahatma Gandhis die, human beings will not listen to the voice of Jesus. They will not read His Passion in any other context than that of their own exaltation: salvation and eternality; the great Platonic satisfaction of the almighty human ego. Christians, today, walk into churches and kill doctors for doing their legally-mandated jobs. They drive cars into women’s health clinics. They blow up buildings and daycare centres, filled with other humans. They spit on legislators they don’t agree with and call them names that abjectify their personhood. They threaten. They lie. They hammer. They pierce. Christians carry guns with pride, sneering and spitting like vipers. They support government initiatives to criminalize those of minority sexualities, which impose death and prison sentences. They rape children and hide behind their clerical robes. They deny and wallow in self-pity and claim the light of day shining on their evil is some kind of persecution. Meanwhile, a million hammers pound a million nails into a million bodies, all over the world and Christ still hangs from His Cross in silent rebuke.

Jesus did not die to make of us eternal realities. Jesus died to point the way to a humanity that models the love of God. When God formed the mud doll, taking earth and Divine Breath to create this bundle of instability we are, God intended that we were to be the hands of Divine Love in this world. That’s really what that old story means. The Divine Breath in us means that we bear God into the world, just as Jesus did, for He, too, was fully human, animated by the same Divine Breath. Irenaeus called Him the “Human Being fully alive”. In that incarnation, Jesus stands as our exemplar of fully-actualized humanity. He is the paragon of what being human can actually look like: loving, just, truthful, fearless, bold and confrontational in the face of what enslaves us...especially that murky corner of us that glorifies engulfing chaos, murder, hatred and bigotry.

A Christianity that will not look at itself cannot hold its head up. The Body of Christ is riddled with disease. It hates and scapegoats. It lies and dissembles. Public Christianity has become a source of ridicule and derision. It brings no light, no hope, no peace. Lately, some Christians even want to write a Bible to suit their own vile bigotry. So deeply invested are these supposed followers of Christ in their own hubris, that they are willing to defile Holy Scripture by tailoring it to their own petty prejudices. So heinously vainglorious are these alleged Christians, they spit on the very justice Jesus embodied. In His broken, bloodied Body, all these ersatz Christians see is an opportunity for their own, highly-personalized and ever-so-special salvations. They do not see their neighbour, certainly. They do not see the spit upon, the poor, those left in the margins by greed, bigotry, war and social exclusion. They can’t see their own reflections in the eyes of the mob screaming “Crucify Him!”, nor do they feel the weight of the hammers in their hands. They see only the Disneyfied Jesus, beckoning them to a glorious eternity, just for them and those they agree with. It never occurs to them that they are the evil engulfing God’s world, because that would compel them to true repentance.

It’s Good Friday and once again, we look at the Cross and think back two thousand years, to this One Man we beat into a pulp and then nailed to a cross of wood. He falls all around us, once, twice, a third time. We spit in His face. He gets up and we hit Him, again. In Africa, we beat him senseless. In the Vatican, we leer at His suffering. In America, we yell “nigger” and “faggot” at Him.

Look upon Him who you have pierced. Put your fingers in His wounds and know the truth. Jesus died for your sins, and only once. Why must you continue to mutilate Him in the bodies, minds and souls of His People?