Good Friday: sometimes it makes me tremble
The other day walking with a friend, as terrible news came pouring in again, I asked aloud: where is Christ suffering today? My friend replied, “That’s too difficult. People don’t make the connection.” Perhaps, that’s true; but the event of Good Friday compels us to make the connection between the unspeakable suffering in our world today and the horrific suffering of Jesus hanging on a cross. Not all that long ago in my area, 67 bodies died in the Potomac River many of them young people on the threshold of life. This was a few days away from the tragedy in New Orleans when a deranged man drove his car into a crowd. A regular event nowadays. When such accidents or atrocities occur, it is only natural to cry in lament; if we cease to lament their pain, we seal ourselves from our neighbors and lose something of our common humanity. After all, in Luke’s, if not John’s account, Jesus himself spewed out his prayer from Psalm 22: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Anyone who has experienced death, up close and personal, tragedy without any discernible reason, has uttered the cry of Jesus. Those of us who witness such suffering join our prayers with their anguish. Our hearts are rendered with their own because we are in fact one human family. It would be a mistake though to think that the cries of the brokenhearted only signal that God is absent to them or to anyone. Quite the contrary; it is signals the presence of God in the most real way possible. In her poem, Looking at Stars, the poet Jane Kenyon, who died of breast cancer at the tender age of 39, wrote:
The God of curved space, the dry
God, is not going to help us,
but the son whose blood splattered
the hem of his mother’s robe.
It is only the triune God who knows the depths of human suffering, even unto death upon a cross, that is near the brokenhearted, bent over with grief. This is the mystery of the world’s salvation: that God chooses to be hidden in the brutal, shameful suffering of man crucified, naked before his torturers.
James Cone, in his remarkable book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, points out the shocking reality that over 5,000 African American men were lynched in America during the early years of the 20th century. Many of them were burned alive before they were hung on trees for all the community to witness. It’s a gruesome fact of history that white Christians, and their pastors, met this reign of terror with approval. They did not make the connection that Jesus too once hung crucified upon a tree, tortured, rejected and despised by all.
The black community, on the other hand, you might expect them to turn away from God in the face of their terror. Cone tells us that some did; but remarkably most did not. In the suffering of Jesus Christ upon that first century lynching tree, black folk experience a God who understands their tortured history. In the cross of Christ, the black church found a reason to carry on in the world of pain, sorrow and agony. They wrote the blues and the spirituals, to express both faith and lament, like the one we will sing tonight. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes it makes me tremble, tremble, tremble.
Here the mystery of the incarnation – God in flesh for us – finds its culmination in the mystery of the cross – God becoming vulnerable for us, experiencing the depths of human suffering.
Jesus, the Son of God, died as One forsaken. Yet when with the eyes of faith, we perceive that in this God-Forsaken-One, all the forsaken are caught in his wide embrace. No one is left out of the embrace from the God-Forsaken-One because there is no margin far enough away where he has not traveled – including the far country of godforsaken death. The Church that lives by faith in the God-Forsaken-One will stand with the forsaken, the lost and the marginalized of this world.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer drew upon his own experience of suffering and his experiences with the black community in Harlem during his stay in 1930.
Those who have found God in the cross of Jesus Christ know how wonderfully God hides himself in this world and how he is closest precisely when we believe him to be most distant.
Love so amazing, so divine demands my soul, my life, my all.
In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
John 19:16-35
The God who hides
Good Friday - St. John’s Episcopal Church
Roy W. Howard