Good Friday

The ancient Church heavily used the image of the Tree of Life -- from the Garden of Eden in Genesis, and from John's Revelation, both -- and grafted its imagery onto that of the Cross. The Cross becomes a Tree of Life, whose leaves (in John's imagery) are, "...for the healing of the nations."

To start with this image -- or to return to its ancient source -- is essential, if we are to have Good Friday and its images of death and suffering be anything other than a 'looking-at' Jesus (a fetishization of human and divine suffering, if you will) rather than an experiencing what happens on the Cross be a source of healing for the world. A Tree of Life.

If you listen to or read the Good Friday sermon attached/video at St Paul's, you'll hear a call to us to follow Jesus in the Way of the Cross even to the point of putting ourselves there on that Tree of Life and viewing the world from its vantage point. We see there what the world of compassion looks like when God so completely identifies with the suffering of creation: we are shown the way to new life, to resurrection, in this 'suffering-with,' this compassion for all things.

John's Gospel, read today for centuries (with a problematic history of being used to incite anti-Jewish riots, too), has a variety of treasures in thinking about what is happening on the Cross. It is in John's Gospel that Jesus tells his disciples who seek this 'kingdom of God' that, "...unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain. But, if it dies, it bears much fruit." (John 12:24) That, for John and the early Church, was the point of the Cross. A seed that replenished, healed, and grew beyond imagining.

What fruit does this Tree bear? This seed that falls into the earth (for three days, which is how the early Church interpreted this)? New life, yes. More to the point, though: it is balm - healing - for the ills of the world. Indeed, the whole earth, itself, shall be a source of healing: shall become a watered garden, in John's image from his later 'Revelation.' There is a whole tradition in John's Gospel that finds expression when Mary goes to the Garden where Jesus has been buried (not a usual place of burial, so we know we're in John's theology, not 'history'). 'Early in the morning on the first day of the week...' Mary Magdalene turns to this figure she does not recognize, '...supposing him to be the gardener.' And, he is. Elsewhere in John's Gospel is the image of us all being branches on a vine (Jesus) tended by God...

What happens to the Body of Christ on the Cross? It becomes a vine; it becomes a garden. Forces of empire and militarism hang Love Incarnate on a Tree (remember my Palm Sunday sermon?), and through the power of God it becomes a Tree whose leaves are for healing.

Holding images like that in mind lets me re-approach with a different mind ancient anthems of the Church like this:

Adoramus te Christe, Benedicimus tibi, Quia per crucem tuam Redemisti mundum.

(We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, for through your cross you have redeemed the world. -- Here it is in a beautiful chant from the Taize community in France.)

This cross, this place of death becomes a place of Life, Healing, and Hope -- an ultimate rebuke to the powers of empire, despair, and militarism that view power through a very particular lens.
But, today is not a day to move too soon to images of healing, as if we all should rush past the suffering in our world, our lives, and the lives of our neighbors, near and far. Something I have always appreciated about Good Friday is that it is one day when the Christian tradition does not try to rush us to the Good News of resurrection. Through the centuries, Christians have used this day to meditate on suffering and sorrow, writ large, turning something like the Stations of the Cross into an empathy-building meditative exercise calling to mind the suffering of the world and our enmeshment in the perpetuation of the suffering of others and of the Earth, itself.

Becky shared with me this beautiful song - text from an anonymous medieval Irish monk, set to music by American composer Samuel Barber in 1954. Here is the text (trans. Howard Mumford Jones):

The Crucifixion

At the cry of the first bird
They began to crucify Thee, O Swan!
Never shall lament cease because of that.
It was like the parting of day from night.
Ah, sore was the suffering borne
By the body of Mary’s Son,
But sorer still to Him was the grief
Which for His sake
Came upon His Mother.

And, here is a YouTube recording of wonderful American baritone Sanford Sylvan singing it.

How can our awareness of this suffering bring us into greater solidarity with those who suffer in the world? Into greater understanding of the sources of our own suffering?

---

On Good Friday, let us not waste these visions of the suffering of the world. Let these glimpses transform the gardens of our own hearts to be able to see the world as the healed, watered garden it is meant to be. Let there be no 'new normal,' but rather a new vision of what a world lived in solidarity with those who suffer might look like, might become ever more real on the far side of this valley of tears.

Here is an early 21st c (!) hymn of the 'paradox of the cross' I leave you with. The text is by a woman I knew at the retreat center where I once lived, a Lutheran pastor named Susan Briehl. (Here is a more elaborate setting of it, sung. I hear it more simply and plaintively, in my head...)

Holy God, holy and glorious,
glory most sublime,
you come as one among us
into human time,
and we behold your glory.

Holy God, holy and powerful,
power without peer,
you bend to us in weakness;
emptied you draw near,
and we behold your power.

Holy God, holy and beautiful,
beauty unsurpassed,
you are despised, rejected;
scorned, you hold us fast,
and we behold your beauty.

Holy God, holy and only wise,
wisdom of great price,
you choose the way of folly:
God the crucified,
and we behold your wisdom.

Holy God, holy and living one,
life that never ends,
you show your love by dying,
dying for your friends,
and we behold you living.

Grace and peace be with you. May God who has begun a good thing in you bring it to completion.