“What mean ye by this service?”
It is called Good Friday? Why, we might ask? In so doing, we are really asking, “what mean ye by this service?” How is this good? The Passion of Christ reaches its fullest and inexhaustible intensity in the Crucifixion of Christ. And while we can only contemplate Christ’s Crucifixion because of the Resurrection, itself the fruit of the Passion, it is equally the case that without Good Friday, Easter has no meaning. There is a profound good that belongs to what we contemplate on this day.
We contemplate the real horror and meaning of human sin. There is lots of violence and nastiness, selfishness and self-regard, narcissism and nihilism, not to mention sheer stupidity and stubbornness, to go around in our world and day, more than we can take in and deal with, and yet this day shows us the greater evil which moves in all of the disorders of human hearts and minds since the beginning of time and even to the end of time. What is that? Simply our attempt to kill God.
That is the radical meaning of Christ’s Crucifixion. God in Christ gives himself into our hands so that we can do with him what we will. We have our way. It is not a pretty picture. Yet this is the real meaning of having our way, the real meaning of our vaunted claims to autonomy, the real meaning of all our assertions of control. It is not only destructive of one another through our domination and control of one another whether in passive aggressive ways so finely tuned or in the more brutal forms of active aggression. No. Good Friday bids us plumb the depths of satanic evil that is potential and real in all our hearts. Christ crucified shows us exactly the deep and radical meaning of sin. It is the attempt to eradicate altogether the very principle of our being and knowing and loving, the very principle of the being and knowing of all things – God. We who depend upon God for our every breath and thought and word and deed deny him and seek to annihilate him from the horizons of our minds.
It is utter folly, a delusion, a contradiction. Yet to confront this and to see this made visible before us is the only way in which we might discover the real truth and dignity of our humanity. We “look upon him whom [we] have pierced,” as our liturgy reminds us, drawing upon the words of Zechariah recalled by John. The point, as Lancelot Andrewes teaches, is that we in turn should be pierced; in other words, convicted in our consciences about the radical meaning of all sin. We pierce God. We kill God. To say that seems quite astounding but it is the deep logic of the Christian faith without which we cannot understand the radical nature of the Resurrection. What is the good of this day? It is Christ’s death. His death for us is freely embraced and endured for the sake of our being made new. And so we are broken-hearted in order to be made new.
The world’s attention has been captivated by the devastating fire at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. The response to that event has been remarkable. Much attention has been called to the significance of the building, to its role and place in the history not only of France but of Europe and beyond. And yet so much of the commentary dances around the obvious, afraid to name the real meaning and significance of the Cathedral. The real significance of Notre-Dame de Paris, as a Canadian commentator, John Robson, notes, is that it is a church! More than an icon of culture, more than a tourist attraction, it “speaks to our aspirations to be better than we are,” to a kind of universal hope in us that we can be better (National Post, April 16th, 2019). Exactly.
It reminds us of an age defined by a vibrant and an intellectual faith which we have largely lost and yet is always there to be recovered just like Notre-Dame can be restored. The fire confronts us with other features of our disordered world. There are, it seems, no trees in France or in the whole of Europe large enough to replace the huge wooden beams that were part of the roof of the cathedral. We confront the sad and sorry consequence of our failure to be good stewards of our world. And so here too. Look up and behold the beams of this Church. They are at once functional – they hold up the roof – and symbolic. They are Alpha and Omega beams that signify Christ as our beginning and end. We are embraced in Christ, the alpha and omega of our lives. Those beams were all hewn from local trees of remarkable stature and size that once abounded in these regions but no more. It is a telling indictment about our careless use and abuse of the world in which we find ourselves. A cautionary tale perhaps but part of what belongs to the pageant of the Passion.
To face such things is to confront ourselves and at the same time to be reminded of our aspirations to be better than what we are. To contemplate the forms of our sinfulness is to awaken to the greater truth of God. Such is the good of Good Friday. It is not about ignoring sin. It is about facing sin in its truest form. Such is the Crucifixion of Christ which this day sets before us to break our hearts so that our hearts can be made new. It is a constant process, a constant work in progress.
The intensity of the Passion is about our capacity and willingness to enter into the Passion with heart and mind. T. S. Eliot observes about the Metaphysical poets of the early seventeenth century that they “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience,” even more, he says, they had the special quality of “feel[ing] their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.” To feel the thought.
John Donne’s poem, A Hymn to God the Father, captures something of the deep meaning of this service and reminds us of the constant need to behold Christ crucified; in short, to feel what we behold.
I. Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still: though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
II. Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin? and, made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two: but wallowed in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
III. I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.
Such is the good of Good Friday, if we can think and feel what we behold. Such is the real meaning of this service.
“What mean ye by this service?”
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday, 2019