Christ Crucified: Good Friday Meditations 2020
Fr David Curry
Introduction: “We preach Christ crucified.” (1 Corinthians 1.23)
Paul’s words go to the heart of the Christian religion. Like it or not, the Christian Faith is religio crucis, the religion of the cross. What does that mean? It means that the mystery of the Cross is the mystery of love. We easily forget this and even reject it. The great English mystery writer, P.D. James, in her rather unusual novel, The Children of Men, acutely observes that the contemporary churches at the end of the last century had “moved from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism” which leads in turn to the virtual abolition of “the Second Person of the Trinity together with His cross.” To some, if not many, “the cross, stigma of the barbarism of officialdom and of man’s ineluctable cruelty, has never been a comfortable symbol.”
Yet the Cross for all of its disturbing qualities is the essential symbol of the Christian religion. It sets Christianity apart from other world religions and yet, more importantly, connects with them in terms of the realities of the human experience. This is especially true with respect to suffering. The Cross symbolizes redemptive suffering. It is crucial to how we think about suffering and to the forms of our engagement with other world religions including the culture and religion of secular atheism. The Cross speaks to our present distresses, to our fears and worries about all the forms of suffering in our global world, not the least of which are our current concerns about Covid-19.
Preaching Christ crucified has always been central to Christian witness and practice. The traditions of Lent, of Holy Week and Easter belong to a deep and profound reflection upon the Passion of Christ and to the ways in which the Christian Faith is represented artistically and aesthetically. It may surprise you to know that the practice of preaching or meditating upon the Seven Last Words of Christ, something deeply embedded in the modern Protestant and Catholic imaginary since the eighteenth century, was actually a service devised in the Americas, in Lima, Peru, by the Jesuit missionary, Fr. Alonso Messia Bedoya, just after the devastations of the terrible earthquakes of 1678 and 1687. The devotion inspired eighteenth century composers such as Haydn in Europe.
The Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross complement the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, though not in any systematic sense. The words from the Cross begin and end with the prayer of the Son to the Father. Both the Our Father and the Cross are essential to the Christian understanding. Simone Weil, the 20th century passionate philosopher of attention and an activist devoted to the poor and the suffering, says that “the Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer which is not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity. It is impossible to say it once through, giving the fullest possible attention to each word, without a change … taking place in the soul.” The theologian Anthony Boers observes the intimate connection between the Our Father and the Seven Last Words of Christ. Both “ably condense and collapse into one set of short passages the essentials of our faith.”
“The whole of our life says Our Father,” the Patristic biblical theologian, Origen remarks, noting that nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures do we find any prayers to God the Father, and, of course, precious few references to God as Father or as Mother. It has entirely to do with Jesus. The “infinite power, wisdom and goodness” of God, traditional and philosophical attributes of God, are now seen through the spiritual lens of God’s self-relation as Trinity. It is what is made known to us by Christ. His last words are for us even as in the Lord’s Prayer, his Father is now Our Father, though not in any earthly or worldly sense but spiritually.
The connection between the Lord’s Prayer and the Words of Christ shape our Good Friday meditations. They do so in the context of the world’s suffering. We live, it seems, in rather apocalyptic times, though more in a secular sense than a spiritual one. Yet for Christians the times are always apocalyptic in the sense of always recalling us to God and to our life with one another in Christ. The conjunction of the Our Father with the Seven Last Words is wonderfully concentrated in a sonnet by John Donne which recalls us to the Cross and to meditating upon the Cross. It does so in the awareness of how the sufferings of Christ redeem the sufferings of our humanity.
“What if this present were the world’s last night?” the sonnet begins. What if now, right now, were the end of the world, whether for you individually, facing your own death, or for us all, collectively speaking? “Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell/ the picture of Christ crucified.” Look into your heart, into the core of your being, into your soul, and see there an image of Christ crucified. From the description of that image, I think that he has in mind one of the many rather grotesque representations of the crucifixion that arose after the Great Bubonic Plague, the Black Death, which destroyed close to half the population of Europe between 1347 and 1351. The artistic representations of the crucified identify Christ with the sufferings of the plague victims. The emphasis is on Christ’s embrace of human suffering which belongs to his Incarnation. “Tears in his eyes quench the amazing light,/ Blood fills his frowns, which from his pierc’d head fell”. The soul in recalling this image is asked “whether his countenance can thee affright?” Does the picture of Christ crucified frighten you?
The poem then shifts from what is seen on the Cross to what is heard, asking the soul to remember what Christ said. “And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell, which pray’d forgiveness for his foes fierce spite?” The reference is to the first word of the Cross, a prayer to the Father. Both questions are rhetorical; the answer is “no, no.” No to both. Neither what is seen is meant to frighten you nor what is heard is intended to condemn you. What is seen and heard reminds us instead of the inner beauty of the Cross precisely in its outward ugliness. In this sense, the sonnet’s content is sacramental. “This beauteous form assures a piteous mind,” a mind like ours which is in need of grace and mercy. We look at sin and evil made visible on the Cross of Christ but what we see and hear is love. That and that alone is the good of Good Friday.
“We preach Christ crucified”
The First Word: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”
(Luke 23.34).
Forgiveness. The first word of the Crucified is the prayer of the Son to the Father for our forgiveness. The Cross and forgiveness go hand in hand; they are necessarily and intimately connected. This word takes us back to the paradise of creation and to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. All sin is like eating the fruit of that forbidden tree, doing what we know in some sense is wrong but through self-deception, through a kind of ignorance of God’s knowledge and purpose, in which we presume to put ourselves in the place of God. Such presumption is our ignorance. We pretend to be and to know what we do not know. The consequence is what we see and hear on Good Friday.
Our Palm Sunday cries of ‘Hosanna” have turned to the shouts of “Crucify, Crucify.” Such is our profound ignorance of ourselves and God. It is at once destructive of ourselves and of our relations to one another and to the created order because it is an ignorant denial of God. “Against thee only have I sinned and done that which is evil in thy sight.” We confront the reality of human sin but only through the greater goodness of God in the prayer of the Son to the Father. This is the mercy and grace of the first word.
Forgiveness is God’s grace seeking our re-creation, our redemption, through our being returned to God in love. In a way, the first word of the Cross reveals the radical meaning of the Lord’s Prayer which begins with “Our Father.” Through the prayer of the Son to the Father we pray “Our Father” and thus seek what Jesus seeks here for us, namely, forgiveness.
To seek forgiveness for ourselves means to forgive one another. “Forgive us our trespasses even as we forgive them that trespass against us.” It requires us to seek the good of those who have offended and hurt us. How is that possible in a world of conflict and hatred? Only through the prayer of the Son to the Father who prays for our forgiveness in the very midst of the pain and suffering of the Cross. “Hallowed be thy Name.”
Responsory Prayer:
Leader: “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy Name.”
People: “O Christ, hear us.”
Leader: “Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us,”
People: “For we have sinned against thee.”
Second Word: “Verily, I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23. 43).
The second word of the Crucified is Christ’s word to the penitent thief. It, too, is a word of mercy in the face of conflict and insult. Jesus is crucified between two thieves, as Matthew and Mark tell us, or “malefactors,” as Luke says; “criminals,” as some translations say. Malefactors mean those who do evil which has a deeper significance than just breaking the law. Just because something is legal does not mean it is ethical. Good Friday is about the primacy of the ethical. It is about the goodness of God in the face of our evil.
One of the “malefactors” rails against Jesus in an insulting way. “If thou be the Christ, save thyself and us.” But the other thief or malefactor, counters this statement. “Do you not fear God, seeing that you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly; but this man has done nothing wrong.” It is a strong testimony to the innocence of Christ and a strong confession of his own wrongdoing. But then he turns and speaks to Jesus. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
“Remember me.” Prayer is about remembering the God who remembers us. We are embraced in the knowing love of God. This word is about our being remembered by Jesus. That is the paradise of divine love. It is not so much, ‘do you know Jesus?’ but does Jesus know you? This word reminds us about what Jesus seeks for us, our being remembered by him in his kingdom. Such is the paradise of his love.
Responsory Prayer:
Leader: “Thy Kingdom come,”
People: “O Christ, hear us.”
Leader: “Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us,”
People: “For we have sinned against thee.”
The Third Word: “Woman, behold thy son. Then said he to the disciple,
Behold thy mother” (John 19. 26,27).
“Behold thy son,” Jesus says to Mary about John. “Behold thy mother,” he says to John about Mary. The third word recalls us to our care and concern for one another, a paramount concern for us all in this time of pandemic and isolation. In the midst of the crucifixion, in the chaos and disintegration of all relationships and all goodness, Jesus’s word re-establishes what belongs to the fellowship of our humanity. He establishes us in relation to one another. ”Behold your son … Behold your mother.” Look with respect and love upon one another; not in fear and antagonism.
How do we look upon one another? In a world of hate and destruction, of anxiety and worry, we look upon the other with fear, the fear of the other. This is to forget ourselves and one another as made in the image of God. Instead of care and respect there is death and destruction, of ourselves and of one another. Here Jesus shows us the radical meaning of his word spoken earlier in John’s Gospel. “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.” Here is the divine friendship in the midst of our enmity. His word reconstitutes the human community in love.
“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we pray in the Lord’s Prayer. We seek to live in the love of God now and forever. That means our commitment and care for one another even in the face of the evils of our world and day. Being careful does not mean being fearful of one another. It is about the proper exercise of care in whatever context and circumstance. The point is that we are bound to one another. Will it be in fear and hatred of the other or will it be in care and love for each other? In this word, the Crucified who gives his life for us, gives us to each other in love and care.
Responsory Prayer:
Leader: “Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven
People: “O Christ, hear us.”
Leader: “Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us,”
People: “For we have sinned against thee.”
The Fourth Word: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
(Mark 15.34; Matthew 27. 46)
“He made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin,” Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians (5.21). This great and disturbing word shows us something of what Paul means. Sin is our alienation and separation from God. Here Christ who is ”like us in all respects save sin,” as Hebrews notes, is made sin for us and so voices for us the real meaning of sin. He feels the alienation which we have caused, the sense of utter isolation, the sense of abandonment that belongs to our having abandoned God.
Is this the atheist’s delight? ‘Look, you see, even Jesus is an atheist! He expresses his sense of God’s not caring, of God’s abandonment of him. Why care about God if God doesn’t care about you?’ Even Christ doubts God’s love, it seems. It seems, but it only seems. It only appears for a moment but even a moment would be enough, wouldn’t it, to overturn all faith? But no. What is overlooked and forgotten is that this so-called cry of dereliction, this cry of abandonment, is itself a prayer. A prayer if not, as in the first word of the Cross and presupposed in the other words of the Cross, to the Father, at least and wonderfully, it is a prayer to God. It is not just that Jesus quotes Psalm 22, thus echoing Israel’s sense of complaint and abandonment by God, but that this word captures the reality of sin as the great abandonment of God by sinful humanity.
Christ teaches us in the very body of his suffering humanity the deep truth and meaning of sin. Sin is our abandonment of God. God cannot not be God and cannot abandon his creation. But his creation can abandon him. Such is sin. And that is what is captured and expressed here. It challenges not only the idea of God’s preferential treatment of one group over another such that when things don’t work out we blame God, but, more importantly, it reminds us that God is not simply God for us. Sin alienates us from the truth of God in himself and as such from God for us. This word captures our self-willed alienation; in short, the reality of sin.
Responsory Prayer:
Leader: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.”
People: “O Christ, hear us.”
Leader: “Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us,”
People: “For we have sinned against thee.”
Fifth Word: “I thirst” (John 19. 28).
This is the second of three words of the Crucified that come from John’s Gospel alone. How paradoxical that the Gospel which seems to be the most challenging, intellectually and spiritually speaking, should convey to us a word which seems so prosaic, so ordinary, and so physical! “I thirst,” Jesus says. We get it. We understand thirst or at least we think we do.
Yet this word challenges us to think about thirst in more than simply a physical sense. The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross connect to the Lord’s Prayer with its seven petitions but they also connect us to the Beatitudes in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. “I thirst” is at once intensely physical and yet profoundly spiritual. “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness,” the fourth Beatitude teaches. The whole of Christ Crucified is about our good, our righteousness, which can only be found in God. He thirsts for our good. He suffers for our good. His passion is our good.
The spiritual life does not and cannot deny the physical, the material, the embodied being of our lives. To the contrary, the Cross teaches us precisely through the reality of the things of the world about the greater reality of God upon which those things depend. Christ’s thirst testifies to the Incarnation, to the Word made flesh, to God made man, and, as such, willing to be subject to the conditions of our world. But to what end? To the end of our good in God himself. He thirsts for our righteousness.
As Paul notes in Second Corinthians, “he made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin.” Why? “That we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” That is the point. His thirst is not simply descriptive. It speaks to the whole purpose of Christ’s Incarnation; in short, to the desire of God for what is the righteousness of his creation. He thirsts for what we want and need.
Responsory Prayer:
Leader: “Give us this day our daily bread”
People: “O Christ, hear us.”
Leader: “Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us,”
People: “For we have sinned against thee.”
Sixth Word: “It is finished” (John 19. 30).
The sixth word of the Crucified is the last word of Christ on the Cross in John’s Gospel. It is a profoundly theological word, a word which goes to the heart of the Christian understanding of the relation between our humanity and God; in short, to the idea of atonement. Atonement is about our being at one with God. Atonement and communion are intimately connected. Atonement is the condition of our communion with one another. Our communion with God is the ground of our communion with one another.
Sin is about our separation from God and from one another. Pride is about our willful self-isolation as if we were the center of the universe. It means a radical denial of God and of one another and a deep untruth about ourselves. Yet there is no ‘you’ without a relation to others. We are social beings caught up in a web of relations and interdependencies. This is something which we are struggling to learn again. It is about learning the nature of our communion with one another through our communion with God.
Our humanity is radically incomplete without God. In communion with God we are necessarily in communion with one another. To put it another way, our lives are bound up with one another. We are learning, perhaps, about what it means to care for one another as opposed to being in fear of one another. That can only happen through the grace of God who seeks the truth of our humanity in his will for us.
In this word, Christ expresses the whole meaning of the Our Father. “I have come to do the will of him who sent me,” he says. What is that will? It is about our being made one with God, our being restored to fellowship with God and so with one another. “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” His will is our good. His sacrifice is the love which perfects and restores. In him, God’s will for our humanity is accomplished, finished, perfected. “What is it we love in Christ?” Augustine asks and answers, “charity is loved. He loved us that we might in turn love Him.”
Responsory Prayer:
Leader: “Lead us not into temptation”
People: “O Christ, hear us”
Leader: “Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us,
People: “For we have sinned against thee.”
Seventh Word: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23. 46).
We end even as we began with prayer to Our Father. This last word is Luke’s last word of the Crucified. It signals wonderfully the idea that we are gathered into the love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Spirit. Christ crucified, as Lancelot Andrewes notes, is “the book of love opened for us to read.” Good Friday is about sin and love; through sin, paradoxically, we learn the radical nature of God’s love. We behold the divine love which seeks the perfection and truth of all our human loves.
“All our doings without charity [without love] are nothing worth.” What is that love except our being enfolded in the love of God himself? Simple songs often convey deep truths. “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” The deep meaning of those words is that nothing falls outside the reach of God. Nothing is but what is in God, known by God, and loved by God. This is what we read and learn on Good Friday.
This word conveys the whole meaning of the life of Christ. It is entirely about his complete orientation of himself towards the Father. God’s Word and Son entirely directs himself to the Father. But in this word, he has gathered us into that love, into that direction and orientation. Everything is gathered into the love of the Son for the Father. Everything that has gone forth from God returns to God in this prayer of sacrificial love.
We can only love in our motion towards one another. Here the Crucified illumines the eternal truth of his own being. He is ever in motion towards the Father in the Spirit of their eternal love. Our humanity even in its deepest disarray, its evil and folly, is gathered into this motion of the Son towards the Father.
Here is the good which delivers us from all evil because he delivers us into the hands of the Father. The Crucified carries us into the love which is the life of God himself. Here is the good which overcomes all evil. How will we respond? Only in the love which this word shows. It gives us confidence in the face of all our worries and fears that God’s goodness and mercy are our comfort and strength. The words of the Crucified ‘show us’ Our Father. Can there be any greater good?
Responsory Prayer:
Leader: “Deliver us from evil.”
People: “O Christ, hear us.”
Leader: “Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us,”
People: “For we have sinned against thee.”