by CCW | 7 April 2023 21:00
Never more so and never with more intensity of attention than on Good Friday. We hang upon the words of the crucified whom we behold pierced and dying on the Cross. We look and listen. There is literally nothing else for us to do and yet it is the defining challenge for us.
Guarda e ascolta, Dante the poet has Mathilda, the handmaid to Beatrice, say to him in the earthly paradise of the Purgatorio, itself one of the greatest images of the spiritual pilgrimage in which we are made “pure and prepared to leap up to the skies,” to the Paradise of God, the celestial paradise. “Look and listen,” she bids the pilgrim Dante. Look and listen to what? To the symbolic pageant of Word and Sacrament. At its center is a gryphon, a mythical creature at once wholly eagle and wholly lion, thus symbolic of the union of the divine and human natures in Christ.
Good Friday brings us to the Cross. In Dante’s great vision all the books of the Hebrew Scriptures and all the books of the Christian New Testament converge and unite in Christ. All the words of the scriptures are the words of Christ and all those words converge in the figure of the crucified. We look upon him and listen to him who looks upon us and speaks to us. Sin and love meet in the crucified. Look and listen.
Our holy week pageant brings us to the Passion according to St. John and so to the completion and contemplation of the seven last words of Christ. Matthew and Mark have given us the one word of dereliction and desolation, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, the word which derives from Psalm 22. Luke as we saw on Maundy Thursday gives us three words from the Cross; the first, second and seventh word. John gives us the third, fifth and sixth words of Christ. In the seven last words of Christ there is a kind of gathering up of the fullness of revelation, a concentration of Word and Sacrament.
Looking upon the crucified means listening to the words of the crucified. We are, as Lancelot Andrewes suggests, meant to look upon the piercèd Christ whom we have pierced in our sins and follies and be pierced in our hearts and souls; in short to be moved to contrition for our sins by the spectacle of love. The Good Friday devotions on the crucified Christ has been a part of our looking and listening, an essential feature of the life of the Church from the earliest times. “My Eros is Crucified,” as Ignatius of Antioch put it, to take but one example along with a host of Patristic, Medieval and Reformed homilies on the Passion of Christ, all following the idea as Paul states, that “we preach Christ crucified.”
In some places, and this has been a large part of my own experience, that meant a three hour service structured around the preaching on the seven last words of Christ, a serious and significant devotional practice which seems to have fallen into abeyance. The history of that practice is intriguing and surprising. It was actually developed by a Peruvian Jesuit priest in the late seventeenth century and in Peru following a series of earthquakes, especially in Lima.
Fr. Alonso Messia Bedoya, who had learned some of the languages of the indigenous peoples of Peru, devised a series of meditations which made their way back to Europe and entered into the devotional practices of a number of different Christian churches. In the late 18th century, Franz Joseph Haydn composed his famous Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross which was first performed in 1787 in Cadiz, Spain. It is, I suppose, an historical, geographical and cultural expression of the theological idea of a kind of circling around and into the mystery of the Passion. Beginning in the Americas, traveling to Europe and then back again to the Americas, on the one hand, and belonging to the interaction between European and indigenous cultures and different forms of Christianity, both protestant and catholic, on the other hand.
Everything converges on the Cross. The words which John’s Passion records compel our attention. We are meant to hang upon them attentively. The third word of the Cross is the first word that John provides. Christ’s words on the Cross begin and end with Luke’s first and last word; they are an explicit address to the Father. So, too, with the fourth word, the cry of dereliction, though it is expressly “My God, my God” and not to the Father by name. Within that structure of beginning and ending with the address to the Father are the other words of Christ on the cross. In the second word, Christ addresses the penitent thief, “Today, thou shalt be with me in paradise.”
The third word is an address to Mary and to John. Jesus on the Cross sees “his mother and the other disciple standing by, whom he loved”. He says, “Woman, behold thy son”, meaning John, and to John he says, “Behold thy mother.” It is particularly poignant and a significant image of the Church. Christ commands us to the care of one another as the members of his body. The sacrificial love of Christ indwells us in our care and compassion for one another, a kind of co-inherence. We can only live for and in one another through Christ’s love for us and in us.
See how he loves us, we might say, in pondering this word of Christ while he hangs upon the Cross. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us” and as we have seen, especially from John’s Gospel, we are commanded to love one another. Here it is commanded from the Cross!
The fifth word which is the second word of Christ in John’s account expresses something of the intensity of the Passion as it pertains directly to Christ’s own person. “I thirst,” he says, only to be given a sponge with vinegar and hyssop. I am not sure that hyssop, an herb from the mint family associated with herbal medicine, would override the vinegar. Hardly refreshing. Christ’s word, “I thirst,” is at once about an intense physical distress and intensely spiritual. He thirsts in his essential being for our salvation in his love for the Father. And his thirst recalls us to the true desire or thirst in our souls for the things of God without which we are but dry and empty beings. “My soul is athirst for God even for the living God,” as Psalm 42.2 reminds us. His word conveys that sense of longing for what we seek but do not have. He feels in the agony of the crucifixion our lack and emptiness, our sense of separation and alienation expressed in his body. Such is the human condition.
The sixth word in the tradition of the seven last words is John’s third word of Christ. “It is finished,” he says, “and he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit.” All that belongs to redemption is accomplished. It is atonement, the very doctrine explained in the epistle reading from Hebrews. Here is the sacrifice which overcomes sin and death. He who knew no sin became sin for us and thus perfects the law by doing what we might seek to do but cannot because of our sins, namely, the will of God. Here is the one pure true and only sacrifice for sins for ever, the one single offering which belongs to human perfection in union with God. It compels us to the love of one another through our looking and listening upon the words of love in the crucified Christ.
“It is finished.” Why, then, is this not the last word of Christ in the tradition of the seven last words? Because what it means in its fullness is the gathering of all things into the hands of the Father. This is the radical meaning of Christ as the Word and Son of the Father, the radical meaning of the Word which was “in the beginning” and which “was with God” and is God. The whole life of Christ, the whole being of the eternal Son is towards the Father, in the motions of their mutually indwelling love. What is finished is the overcoming of sin and death.
Christ’s death is the death of death and as such reveals the logic of the Resurrection. The Passion is not just one episode, one moment in the life of Christ, something to get through and beyond. The Resurrection is in the Passion and the Passion is in the Resurrection. Hanging upon the words of Christ in all of their fullness and in all of the intensity of the Passion is the overcoming of all that belongs to the culture of nihilism, the culture of death and division. In the very face of suffering and sin, we look and listen to the crucified whose words are life and light. Here is love, the radical love of God.
“It is finished,” Jesus says, as he “gave up his spirit.” But are we? It seems not. For the Passion account of John ends with Christ being pierced in his side by one of the soldiers. Our sins are really a constant piercing of the body of Christ and, yet, as John tells us, “forthwith came there out blood and water” from his side. John ends his account of the Passion by telling us that “these things were done that the Scripture should be fulfilled.” The Fathers of the Church saw in that image the sacraments of eternal life that belong to the overcoming of sin and death. Once again, we contemplate the unity of Word and Sacrament in the Passion of Christ and the co-inherence of all the doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. To look and listen is all our good on this day.
Fr. David Curry
Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, 2023
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