“Thou art the man”
We have used Nathan’s words as the interpretative text for the Passion of Christ throughout Holy Week. “Thou art the man,” Nathan says to David even as Pontius Pilate says to us, Ecce Homo, “Behold the man,” pointing to Christ wearing a crown of thorns and a purple robe, being scourged, mocked, reviled and scorned before being handed over to the madness of crowds to be crucified. We behold ourselves in beholding Christ. “They shall look on him whom they pierced,” as John’s account of the Passion (Jn. 19.37) concludes recalling Zechariah (12.10). The ‘they’ are ‘we’. We are not the victims but the persecutors who confront our evil in the crucified Christ, the one whom we have pierced and nailed to the cross. We behold our sins made visible in him. Why? To be convicted in our hearts of our sin by beholding in Christ the love which bears our sins. Only so can they be overcome. “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.”
The scapegoat mechanism of blaming others for our sufferings and fears is completely inverted. We are not the persecuted but the persecutors. The scapegoat is the Lamb of God. “Behold the Lamb of God.” “Behold the man.” Behold ourselves at once as sinners and as redeemed in Christ but only if we can say with David “I have sinned against the Lord.” For that is the good of Good Friday, the good of our atonement.
“It is finished” is the sixth word from the cross in the tradition of the preaching on the seven last words of Christ. This devotion was established in Peru by the Jesuits in the 17th century after several devastating earthquakes in Lima and from there carried back to Europe. It has shaped some of the great choral works of the Baroque period; for instance, Haydn’s Seven Last Words. The third, fifth and sixth words of Christ come from John’s Gospel which is read along with the lesson from Hebrews on Good Friday. Here is the love that is “the propitiation for our sins,” that is to say, the atoning sacrifice which makes us one with God and with one another. It means beholding the crucified and beholding our sins in him. “Thou art the man” is about confronting ourselves in the one whom we behold on the cross. “It is finished” refers to the overcoming of all sin that separates us from God and from one another.
It also means beholding ourselves in one another. Thus the third word from the cross bids Mary, his mother, to “behold thy son” in John, the beloved disciple, and bids John to “behold thy mother.” In other words, Mary is to see him in John, and John is to see her as his mother in Christ. It is a form of love, a form of mutual indwelling or coinherence grounded in the eternal coinherence of God as Trinity. Beholding one another in loving care means beholding one another in Christ. He gives John to her and he gives her to John. It captures wonderfully the unity of the love of God and the love of man in Christ. It is the meaning of Christ’s atonement. Our being one with God through Christ’s sacrifice unites us to one another in loving service.
The fifth word provides the motive principle, “I thirst,” Jesus says. In and through the physical agony of the crucifixion there is Christ’s thirst or will for our good, for our salvation, his thirst for the will of the Father. His thirst is at once physical and spiritual; it is about our life in the body of Christ. His thirst for our good is greater than our folly and ignorance. “They know not what they do.”
There is something profoundly disturbing, irrational and frightening in the violence of the mob, in the madness of crowds. It is the surrender of our own conscience to the pressures of power, a loss of our freedom to the good and a loss of the dignity which belongs to our lives together in the ordered life of the body of Christ and, by extension, to what belongs to “peace, order and good government” – a much neglected formula which once defined Canadian political life. The current gnostic and technocratic flight from the world serves the self-interest of the political elite but it is a negative freedom which serves only the few. Good Friday is profoundly counter-culture in calling us to the positive freedoms of our lives in service and sacrifice and not in self-service. It is grounded in what we behold.
“Thou art the man”…“Behold the man.” Both phrases speak to our awakening to ourselves in our disorders and disarray. “Behold the Lamb of God.” Behold the crucified Christ. This speaks to the love which unites and perfects, the love which forgives and restores. Here on the cross the book of love is opened for us to read (Lancelot Andrewes). For it is only in the love of God that we can behold ourselves as sinners and so behold the love which makes us at one with God and with one another. Is that not the great good of Good Friday?
“Thou art the man”
Fr. David Curry
Good Friday, 2022