by CCW | 3 April 2015 19:00
What else is there for us to do but to look on him whom we have pierced? It is simply the business of this day, the day which is called profoundly Good Friday. Somehow it is all our good to contemplate Christ crucified.
The intensity of the Passion reaches its crescendo in the services of Good Friday in such things as the meditations upon The Seven Last Words of the Cross and in The Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday. The spectacle of the Christ crucified is fully before us and if Holy Week means anything at all it is about finding our place in the events of the Passion, finding our humanity in all of its disarray in the crowd at Calvary. That is itself something profoundly spiritual. To see something about ourselves through the witness of the Scriptures in the figures who are part of the terrible pageant of the Passion. How can we do that?
It requires the capacity to be convicted about sin. Not a happy topic, perhaps, and certainly one which we do everything to ignore, mostly by ignoring Church where the Scriptures are proclaimed and the Sacraments celebrated. Our communities are filled with those who pass by with utter indifference, unaware of what happens here. No doubt, that is partly our fault in not making it clearer as to what the Church is really all about. It isn’t community service and communal socializing except in so far as such things make visible the love of God and our communion with Him which is the ground and basis of all our labours and life with one another.
The good news of Good Friday is that we look upon ourselves and are convicted of sin. Why is that good news? Because you can only do that if you know love. Only the love of God makes it possible to know the human situation. And to talk about love is equally meaningless without acknowledging sin. In a way, we really only know love through sin.
The wonder of Good Friday is that God draws us to himself through the knowledge of sin. John takes up a powerful image from The Book of Numbers about Israel being punished for their kevetching and complaining in the wilderness by being afflicted with fiery serpents. They repent and Moses makes a bronze serpent and holds it up. They look and are healed. John applies this image to Christ crucified. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Good Friday lifts up the Son of man on the Cross that we may look and be saved. What does salvation mean? Nothing less and nothing more than our being found in the loving embrace and look of Christ upon us. We look upon Christ crucified but there is also the sense that Christ looks upon all of us. As the great Passiontide hymn by Venantius Fortunatus puts it, “he reigns and triumphs from the tree;” it has become the sign and symbol of triumph and victory, the triumph and victory over sin and death.
In keeping with our Holy Week programme, we note that the lessons for this day contribute to our understanding of the Passion, both the lessons from Genesis (22.1-18) and Isaiah (50.1-4) along with the Epistle from Hebrews even as The Passion According to St. John deepens our meditation upon those readings. What could be more intense and intimate after all and yet more disturbing than the story of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of his only son, Isaac, the son of promise through whom all nations and all peoples shall be blessed? That Abraham is being put to the test about his faith in God is the classical understanding and rightly so. Isaac asks, “where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” To which Abraham responds, “God will provide himself the sacrifice.”
Potent and terrifying words, they play upon all our emotions. God will provide himself is what we realize in contemplating the sacrifice of Christ. But as soon as we separate the Son from the Father we are left with the horrible dilemma of a Father deliberately destroying his Son. Or so it might seem and has seemed to many. Yet, the point of this reading in the light of the Passion of Christ is that Christ goes to the Cross not as an unwitting and unknowing sacrificial victim to some primitive and atavistic logic but knowingly so that “the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” and even more, as the lesson from Hebrews indicates, as the form of atonement for our humanity; in other words, love restores what is broken in us but only through our being convicted too of our unrighteousness.
The lesson from Isaiah (50.4-10) is another one of the Suffering Servant Songs that also contributes to this aspect of the Son’s willing embrace of the Cross. “I turned not backward. I gave my back to the smiters … I hid not my face from shame and spitting… Who will contend with me? … Who is my adversary?” and, in a wonderful triumph of faith, “Behold, the Lord God helps me… Who among you fears the Lord?” In every way we are opened out to what God seeks which always passes human knowing at the same time as it belongs to our good. Our good is found in God’s will and in our submission to it.
But there is an intimacy and intensity to Christ crucified. The intimacy of the Cross is expressed in the words of the crucified, words to the Father and words to us, words which reveal the deeper meaning of what is seen and looked upon by us in the mystery of Good Friday. Three of the seven words are addressed to the Father. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do;” “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Only two words are addressed directly to others, one to the penitent thief, the other to Mary and John respectively. “Today,” Jesus says to the penitent thief, “thou shalt be with me in paradise.” To Mary and John, he says, looking down upon them from the Cross, “Woman, behold thy son” and to John he says, “Behold thy mother.” The other two words speak to the nature of his sufferings, “I thirst,” and “It is finished.”
We are bidden in our text from Zechariah to “look upon him whom they have pierced,” knowing that they are us. To what end? To contemplate “two vast and spacious things,” namely, “sinne and love,” as the poet George Herbert puts it. And of those two things the greater thing is love. As Lancelot Andrewes says, we “look upon him whom [we] have pierced” so that we may “look and be pierced with sorrow for our sins” which are the cause of his Passion. Yet we must also “look and pierce our sins” in repentance and commitment to amendment. But above all, he says, we must “look and be pierced with love” because that is what is paramount and what belongs to the good of this day. It is all about the love which restores and redeems our humanity. We are restored to what we are made for. We are made for love, made for God.
Good Friday teaches us that lesson. As Lancelot Andrewes wonderfully puts it, “Christ crucified is liber charitatis, the book of love opened before us” that we made read and learn. Here are the lessons of love. But if we do not look then they are worth nothing to us and we ourselves are nothing worth. “If I have not charity, I am nothing,” as Paul puts it in his great hymn of love. If we would learn love, then it means looking upon Christ crucified and seeing the whole of his life and ours in him as the pilgrimage of love.
Our age is nonchalant about sin and indifferent to the deeper realities of love. Good Friday recalls us to the divine love which teaches us the most about both sin and love. We can do nothing more than look and love. Only so might we become what we behold.
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday, 2015
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