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Readings (click here for full text of the readings): We all know what pain feels like. There isn’t a person here who hasn't experienced suffering - loss, death, rejection, disappointment. Some of us live with pain each day, whether it be physical or psychological. And so we take solace in Christ, who also suffered, for us, with us, on that day we now commemorate. Whereas other religions worship a God that is all-powerful, on high, judge and arbiter, creator and observer of the world -- we Christians follow a Crucified God. Our God could not bear to watch in detachment -- instead God became one of us, walked among us, loved and taught and healed, and ultimately stood, bleeding and broken, before crowds who longed for him to die. And so He did -- in agony with nails in his hands and feet, flanked by criminals, ultimately buried in an umarked tomb, the closest one around. We're touched and moved by what Christ did for us. By some too-good-to-be-true-or-even-hoped-for miracle, through Christ's suffering on the Cross, we are reconciled to God. Our sins are washed away, and we're put into right relationship with God. As to exactly how this happens, there are countless theories and doctrines. More important is what happens -- we see his sacrifice, we admit the depth of love that can be its only explanation, and there is gratitude and belonging. And in our times of anguish, we find some measure of comfort in knowing that God knows how we feel. That God entered into our suffering, willingly, and whether we cry tears of pain or of loss or of abandonment, we can be sure that God has experienced those very same feelings. We need only walk the stations of the Cross – which are mockery, rejection, abandonment, torture -- to know the pain Jesus endured. Yet despite how truly profound these sentiments of gratitude and empathy are, they limit God. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are God's most wondrous revelation, but they are not God's only revelation. They are supreme examples of how God acts in the world everywhere and in all times. It's fine, and accurate, to say that God experienced pain, and so knows how we feel. But it's bolder and truer to proclaim that God experiences our pain, now, here, with each of us. For God's suffering is not limited to that Friday afternoon 2000 years ago -- God suffers with each of us, in this moment, in our sorrows and travails, which is the literal meaning of "compassion", to suffer with. The Crucified God -- the love and caring of his life on earth, the vulnerability and self-sacrifice that led him to the Cross -- these are not past events. THEY ARE THE NATURE OF GOD, revealed most clearly in that time and place, but also present with us, now and always. It is God's nature to love us without limits, even to death, and to suffer with us, through whatever befalls us, never forsaking us, never letting go. In one of her novels Helen Waddell describes a scene in which the medieval theologian Peter Abelard and his companion Thibault come upon a dead rabbit mangled by a snare. For me, it summarizes the meaning of Good Friday for all of us.
[Abelard] looked down at the little draggled body, his mouth shaking. “Thibault,” he said, “do you think there is a God at all? Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?” Thibault nodded. “I know,” he said. “Only – I think God is in it too.” Abelard looked up sharply. “In it? Do you mean that it makes Him suffer, the way it does us?” Again Thibault nodded. “Then why doesn’t He stop it?” “I don’t know,” said Thibault … “But all the time God suffers. More than we do.” Abelard looked at him, perplexed … “Thibault, do you mean Calvary?” Thibault shook his head. “That was only a piece of it – the piece we saw – in time. Like that.” He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle. “That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. That is what Christ’s life was; the bit of God that we saw. And we think God is like that, because Christ was like that, kind and forgiving sins and healing people. We think God is like that for ever, because it happened once, with Christ. But not the pain. Not the agony at the last. We think that stopped.” Abelard looked at him, the blunt nose and the wide mouth, the honest troubled eyes. He could have knelt before him. “Then, Thibault,” he said slowly, “you think that all this,” he looked down at the quite little body in his arms, “all the pain of the world, was Christ’s cross?” “God’s cross,” said Thibault. “And it goes on.” [1] Amen.
[1] Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard (New York: The Literary Guild, 1933): 289-290. |
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