Good
Friday
In 1993 a Neurologist named Oliver Sacks wrote a
paper called “To see or not to see”. In
this paper he discussed the issues that arose for a blind man named Virgil, who
regained his sight as an adult after being blind almost his entire life. When he was blind, Virgil’s world had very
specific boundaries to it. Everything he
knew in any given moment was defined by what he could touch and by what he
could hear. Now when we imagine someone
blind regaining their sight, we imagine it is a simple matter, like opening our
eyes and letting the light in. But it so
much more complicated than that. Sight
is something we learn. When Virgil was
given sight, his world which had once been so small, so manageable, became
incomprehensible to him. He saw
everything as confusing patches of color, and simple objects that we take for
granted he could not identify. Virgil
described some of his experiences saying “During these first weeks [after
surgery] I had no appreciation of depth or distance; street lights were
luminous stains stuck to the window panes, and the corridors of the hospital
were black holes.”[1] He had no depth perception and was confused
by shadows. Again and again he would
examine something in great detail, only to later not be able to identify it
without touching it. For those of us who have had sight since birth we might
find Virgil's struggles difficult to imagine because what he was experiencing as
an adult we all went through as infants.
Dionysius wrote that God shines in our lives ‘a ray
of darkness’. This of course is a
paradoxical statement, after all, Jesus is the ‘light of the world’. A light that cuts through our darkness,
interrupting and disrupting our status quo, but the light that God shines on us
in the person of Jesus Christ is not a convenient light that clears up all
messes and smooths over all difficulties.[2] Quite the opposite is true actually, the light
of Christ is one that turns what we think we know on its head, the light shines
in the darkness and suddenly everything is confusing, because what becomes
clear is that everything that we thought we knew, about ourselves, everything
that we ever took for granted about the world, we didn’t know at all. When God’s light shines in our lives, what we
are quick to know is that we don’t actually know, and never really did.
So often when I attempt to ponder God I suddenly
realize that I have been like a blind person and when I am made to see, I do
not know or even understand what I am seeing, my world becomes only
unidentifiable shapes and confusing blotches of color. And though I may examine an aspect of God and think I understand, I quickly learn that I didn’t grasp it all, and have to
try again to comprehend what is being revealed to me.
Jesus crucified is at the center of this strange,
seemingly incomprehensible light of God.
Christ is the very ray of darkness that comes into our lives and turns
it all on its head. Again and again I go
back to the cross, examining it, trying to understand and I think I do, until I
don’t again.
Everyday in Christianity, but particularly today, we
are made to realize how complicated and difficult our faith really is. In the cross we are faced with the mystery
and paradox of God’s action in the world and our instinct is to simplify it, to
make it easy by untying the complicated knot of the paradox and turning it
instead into a nice neat bow. But to do
that would be to stop short of truly experiencing God, it would be like
accepting the world as a mere collection of random colors where detail and
perspective are completely lost.
Perhaps the reason the cross is so particularly hard
to grasp is because it it an act of violence.
An act of violence that we say was necessary and done ‘for us’. Humanity is quite the expert at covering up
the violence that pervades our lives and the workings of our world. And we try very hard to do the same thing
with the violence that was present in Christ’s death. We have become accustomed to crosses either
gilded in gold on one hand, or completely bare on the other. The cross has become a symbol of imperial
majesty or a fashion statement. When we
hide the violence that stands at the center of the gospel drama, we distort the
message of God’s costly love turning it into a sentimental fairy tale, or a
symbol of domination or something else equally flat and meaningless. Alternatively, when some people choose to
acknowledge the violence of the cross, that violence is blamed on some
particular group, like blaming the Jews for Jesus’ death, or even blaming God
by saying the cross was a necessary measure to appease God's wrath. But these are mere scapegoats that only add
to the system of violence present in the world.[3]
The unfortunate truth of this world is that it is
saturated with violence. No less so now
than it was in Jesus’ time. The
twentieth century was riddled with some of the worst violence the world had
seen and while we may have had hopes that the twenty first century would bring
a new beginning, those hopes were quickly dashed as war and civil unrest rage
across the globe. Socially and economically
the weak are still at the mercy of the strong, with unchecked competition that
glorifies the victors even at the expense of the vulnerable. Still in the United States alone there are
nearly one million reported cases of domestic violence a year and 3 million
reported cases of child abuse. Even the
Church is subject to scrutiny as exploitation, abuse of power and hateful
rhetoric are constantly tarnishing the name of Christianity.
It is true
that we are not all equally responsible for the terrible webs of violence that
ensnare this world, but we are all caught up in it. Most of us are not merely victims or victimizers, but are a bit of both as we both passively and actively take part
in the cycles of violence and exploitation that make the world function in the
way that it does. [4]
This is the real world, the world into which
salvation unfolds. A world of both
systematic and individual violence, both hidden and overt. A world where the poor are exploited the
innocent are slaughtered children abused, the earth plundered, and prophets are
murdered. The message and ministry of
Jesus, clash profoundly with this world, just as it did in the first century
A.D. Jesus announces God’s forgiveness
to sinners, promises the future to the poor, welcomes the outcast and the
stranger and calls everyone to a new way of life characterized by selfless love
for God and for others.
When Jesus proclaims and enacts the kingdom of God
in the world, a world ruled by human kingdoms built on violence, it is
inevitable that the purveyor of God’s Kingdom would suffer. God’s boundless love collides with a world
that desires domination and therefore fears the reign of God that is founded on
self offering, love and forgiveness. The
fear cannot help but incite the desire to retaliate and meets God with
counter-violence. In the face of this it
was indeed necessary that Jesus Christ suffer and die, that God’s love be fully
expressed in all its subversive vulnerability.
This necessity is not of God’s making but the necessity of a world order
of human making. It is a necessity that
the one who brings to us God’s forgiveness and shows the reign of God
characterized by mercy, freedom, peace and love should fall victim to the
violence of retribution, coercion, hate and fear. The good news of this is that God does not
oppose our violence with more violence, does not answer our evil with evil, but
answers only with love. The cross is God’s
free but truly costly gift of love whose goal is the true transformation of the
world, the true transformation of souls.
The cross writes on human history the truth that the
vulnerability of love and the courage of true compassion and forgiveness will
always be greater than the raging passions and fears of this world.
We profess in the Apostles creed that Jesus after he
died ‘descended into hell’, while this statement is perhaps provocative in its
interpretation, it is necessary in that it shows the completeness of God’s
love. Extending to the furthest corners
of being, not just to the victims, but to the perpetrators, not just to the
oppressed but to the oppressors, not just to the betrayed but to the betrayers
too. The cross is the sign of God’s
unending, and unlimited love for us. We
have the freedom to turn away from God both in this world and the next, but God
will not turn away from us, not ever.
Christ died in order to expose the selfish and self
destructive system of violence we have devised for ourselves, a violence that
can only lead to destruction, violence that corrupts both the beauty of this
planet, and the beauty of our own creative gifts. And most especially destroys
the beauty of our own human nature created in God’s image. This is what humanity has done with the
freedom we have been given. So Christ
came to show us what we have let ourselves become, but Christ’s death is so
much more than that, because in the cross we also see the unadulterated,
uncompromising love of God. A love that
does not waver, that does not lose hope.
But Christ’s death goes beyond being merely an
example, because even though God gives us insight into the kingdom of God vs.
the kingdoms of humanity, we are still stuck in the cycle of violence set in
motion so very many generations ago. We
are thoroughly steeped in this world, and our own perspectives can only take us
so far. That is, we are like a blind man
who has been given sight, we may now be able to see the world around us, but we
struggle to truly understand what it means, or what to do next. Christ’s death on the cross forges a way
ahead of us, a way through death which imprisons us in confusion and fear. Christ breaks through that prison of death creating
a path into a new level of being that is beyond our limited imaginations. A path that Christ will lead, but never coerce
us to follow into. It is a seemingly
incomprehensible path of the most courageous and vulnerable of all love, and
while we may seem blinded by all that we don’t understand, we are asked to hang
our faith on the cross.
Because despite all that we don’t understand,
despite how unreasonable the ways of God’s Kingdom may seem to us in the
context of this world, the cross is a promise that God’s way of life, a life we
too are called to live, is so much greater than our own way of darkness and
death.
[1] Sacks,
Oliver. “To See or Not to See.” NY, 1993.
http://www.wfu.edu/art/art111/files/12_tosee.pdf
[2]Williams,
Rowan. “A Ray of Darkness.” A Ray of Darkness:
Sermons and Reflections. Cambridge: Cowley Pub, 1995. 102.
[3] Migliore,
Daniel L. Faith Seeking Understanding. Cambridge:
Eerdman Pub, 2004. 188.
[4] Ibid,
189.
