by CCW | 29 March 2013 21:00
“While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Such is the mystery of this day, the double mystery of our disobedience and Christ’s obedience, his obedience unto death, a death that is somehow a blessing for us. How shall we think about Good Friday? The Scriptures unveil the great spectacles of obedience and disobedience that help us to ponder the deep mystery of human redemption in the passion and death of Christ. We ponder the mystery of Christ crucified.
The words of the Crucified challenge and confront us in our complacency and our cynicism and in our folly and our despair. These words which illumine so much of our understanding of the Scriptures and human life are also illumined by the whole pageant of God’s Word written.
The stories of Isaac and Absalom are the stories of obedience and disobedience that provide an interpretative framework for our reflection together on the mystery of human redemption.
The story of the Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac belongs historically and traditionally to the sorrowful and serious theological considerations of Good Friday. A most disturbing story, think how troubled Søren Kierkegaard was by this story, for example, it nonetheless helps us to think about Christ’s crucifixion. In Genesis, God puts Abraham to the test, to an almost unbelievable and utterly disturbing test, bidding him sacrifice his only son, the son whom he loves, the son of God’s promise to him and Sarah, the son through whom “all your descendants shall be named” and “through whom all nations of the earth shall be blessed.”
We are apt to focus more on Abraham’s dilemma than to consider Isaac’s disposition. Abraham, it seems, must find his love for Isaac in his faithful obedience to God. Faith untried is hardly a living thing. There is no life without sacrifice. But what is that sacrifice? The sacrifice is love found in the good-will of another. There is as well, Isaac’s obedience to his father. But how hard it seems!
“And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son.” Isaac goes trustingly and willingly with his father, but he goes unknowingly. “My father … behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham’s desperate and yet hopeful answer echoes hauntingly down through the corridors of the centuries, reverberating in all our hearts: “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” Faith is formed in the crucible of sacrifice. “God will provide.” Even more, “God will provide himself.” Somehow these profoundly disturbing words take on a whole new meaning in the spectacle of Christ crucified. As we hear in the last word from the Cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
Apart from Abraham’s dilemma, there is the amazing spectacle of the obedience of Isaac. He goes willingly but unwittingly even as he carries the wood for his sacrifice. Not so with Christ. He goes willingly and full knowingly even as he carries the Cross of his sacrifice. His love for the Father embraces the death of the Cross. The Words of the Crucified reveal this at the same time as they reveal the intensity of the reality of his suffering even unto death.
Isaac is the obedient son who goes willingly but unknowingly. Christ is the obedient Son who goes willingly and full knowingly. Therein lies the difference. But what about the sons of disobedience, the disobedience that Jesus bears in his obedience? The story of Absalom, David’s son, illumines something of the nature of our disobedience.
As told in II Samuel, Absalom conspired against his father, King David. His campaign of disobedience sought to take his father’s throne and his father’s life. Yet the father, David, did not wish in return the death of his son, though disobedient. “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom”, he commands. And yet, disobedience must display its true character. It is death. The disobedient die by disobedience.
Absalom was riding upon his mule, and the mule went under the thick branches of a great oak, and his head caught fast in the oak, and he was left hanging between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on (II Samuel 18.9).
Disobedience leaves you hanging on a tree “between heaven and earth.” And on that tree, the heart of Absalom is pierced by the hand of Joab, one of David’s generals in the field who acts in formal disobedience to David’s command. He is pierced and dies.
What exactly do we see in the disobedience of Absalom? We see the revolt of sin against the truth and goodness of God. “Touch not mine anointed”, the psalmist warns, yet who have our sins touched but Christ whom we have pierced? All sin is disobedience. All sin counters God’s will. “Against thee only have I sinned.” All sin from the greatest to the least seeks this one and only simple thing, the overthrow of God. Such is the hidden intention in every act of sin.
Absalom sought the death of his father. The full horror and meaning of our sins is that we would kill God. We seek God’s death. We would bury him in the dark wood of our confusions. Such is the utter folly and madness of our disobedience. Sin is always about our way over and against God’s way. That is simply no way. It leaves us hanging between heaven and earth – in a kind of no-man’s land and without God. Nowhere and no place to go; “the mule that was under him went on.” Yet it belongs to the greater mercy of God in the witness of the Scriptures to the Crucified that we are not simply to be left hanging like Absalom. “God will provide himself.” It is the way of forgiveness, the way of the son’s prayer to the father for the forgiveness of the sons of disobedience. We hear it in the first word of the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
The wood carried by Isaac and the tree in which Absalom was caught bring us to the Cross upon which Christ hangs and dies and is pierced. His perfect obedience bears the full brunt of all our disobedience.
No doubt, we all know something about the force and power of human wickedness and evil. But how can it be that my sins and yours can hurt God? They can’t. We can only hurt ourselves. We can no more touch God than we can tweak his nose. And yet, what if God so wills to be touched? What if he provides the way by which our intention to destroy can be seen and known for what it is? “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son.” God become man that he might suffer in the flesh of our humanity, bearing in his own body all the marks of our disobedience, becoming “sin for us.”
Christ’s obedience bears the full meaning and intention of our disobedience. The wonderful grace of this day is the terrible death of Christ. What do we see? We see our disobedience – both the intention and the consequence – and we see Christ’s obedience. What does it mean? It means that “God shows his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Such is the great good of this terrible yet holy day.
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday, 2013
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