by CCW | 6 April 2012 22:00
Mary’s word brings us ultimately to the Cross, to the words of the Crucified. The conjunction of the Annunciation with Passiontide heightens the interplay of Christ’s coming to us through her and Christ’s going from us through his death on the Cross. Her word connects to his words, his last words, we might say, and provides us with a critical and interpretative way of pondering them.
Mary’s word is her ‘yes’ to the divine will and purpose for our humanity. That is accomplished on the Cross in the humanity which Christ assumes from her. She is the true and pure source of Jesus’ humanity, soul and body, without which there can be no passion, no death, and no redemption. At the heart of the Passion is the same intensity of commitment and willingness to suffer for the will of God, for the will of the Father.
Good Friday. It is a paradox. Christ is crucified and dies – a kind of judicial murder and yet one in which we are all, in some sense or another, totally implicated. “Were you there when they crucified the Lord?” as the old spiritual so strongly, eloquently and rightly expresses it. A rhetorical question to which the answer, though unstated, is yes; we were there, we are in the story! That is the point without which there can be no good for any of us on this day. And yet, this darkness of the human heart on this day is the occasion for what is precisely called good. Good Friday.
The good of this day lies entirely in the will to good, the will to will God’s will that alone can triumph over all sin and wickedness. That is the full meaning of Mary’s “be it unto me according to thy word”. Yet it has its fullest expression and meaning in Christ’s willingness to embrace our brokenness and folly, our sins and wickedness in himself out of nothing more and nothing less than his love of the Father, out of nothing more and nothing less than the love of God.
But what are such theological musings to you and to me? How does it change anything in our own poor, pathetic and miserable lives? Where’s the good in Good Friday, I am sure we ask? Well it means everything and changes everything. How? Good Friday teaches us that there is nothing that lies outside the love of God. God himself embraces our deaths and our dying. There is a kind of marvel at work in this. God empties himself even. In so doing, God, who never ceases to be God, yet becomes more God, if one could possibly apply more or less to God who is far beyond such finite calculations. That of course is the point. That is the marvel of the Crucifixion. God embraces our nothingness. Sin is nothing, after all, pure negation. It is the dogmatic and willful antagonism against all that is, the refusal to accept our creatureliness and by extension the Creator. And yet, God embraces this emptiness and futility and makes something out of it. Only God can make something out of nothing. Creation and Redemption.
The marvel of Good Friday is the nothingness of God. God embraces the nothingness that we have chosen. Oh, I know we can easily get caught up in the whole pile-on-the-guilt-trip stuff as if that were the purpose and meaning of Good Friday. No. The purpose of Good Friday is not so much about ourselves and about feeling bad about ourselves but rather about our capacity (or incapacity!) to feel the love, poignant and heart-rending as it is, of Christ. To see in the agony of the Cross, Christ’s deep love for our humanity. It is quite a challenge. Our sins are, in some real sense, the occasion of his Crucifixion, but Christ’s willing acceptance of our faults and failings, our follies and nonsense, transforms our sins and makes them the occasion of something profound. It is captured on the Cross in the words from John’ Gospel. John gives us three of the seven last words. John’s Gospel is read on Good Friday. His Gospel, too, has been the formative part of the Office readings throughout Holy Week, too. It is not too much to say that Holy Week is according to the word of John’s Gospel!
“Woman, behold thy son. Then saith he to the disciple, behold thy mother.” “I thirst”. “It is finished”. Powerful words. Christ’s thirst is at once physical and immediate, real, we would say. This is actually serious and suggestive. All of the Scriptural images of water and wine and all of the images of desert emptiness and drought meet in this word. Christ’s word is also profoundly spiritual and moral; it encompasses the moral pursuit of the good and the intellectual pursuit of what is true and holy. Christ thirsts, it is not too much to say, for our good and our salvation. He does so through our humanity, in the body and soul which he has taken from Mary. And John alone gives us the one word of Christ to his mother in the agony of his crucifixion.
He thirsts for our good and that is accomplished, finished, in his death on the Cross. The last word from John is about completion and perfection with respect to what has been undertaken. “It is finished.” Christ has come to do the will of him who sent him, to do according to the will of the Father, to do according to the divine will, we might say. And now it is finished but only because of his deep thirst, read love, for our good and blessedness.
How does this apply to us? “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” The Cross is ultimately our satisfaction. Christ, having satisfied all that belongs to setting right our wounded and broken world, provides us not with a blue-print for action but instead a way of thinking. He thirsts for our good and he accomplishes it on the Cross. Such is the blessedness, the Good in Good Friday.
And it is not too much to say that it is all because of Mary’s word, “be it unto me according to thy word.”
Fr. David Curry,
Good Friday, 2012
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