Good Friday

Day 39 of A Grounded Lent

I averted my eyes in the church, squirming in the pew. I didn’t want to see the newly installed Stations of the Cross. Usually, I find the stations moving — those fourteen traditional images of Jesus’ journey to his execution along the Way of Sorrows. But these were disconcerting.

Unlike Catholic parishes, my Episcopal church didn’t always display the stations, even during Lent. But this year was different. A guest artist had been invited to exhibit them during the entire Lenten season. The canvases were huge, perhaps twelve feet high and eight feet wide, hanging against the soaring stone walls of the neo-Gothic building. They were unavoidable, shocking really, in their depiction of Jesus’ torturous trek to his death. The images dominated the sanctuary with weighty artistic sadness, transforming congregants into witnesses of this ancient injustice.

The artist was Jewish. He’d painted all fourteen stations: Jesus is condemned to death . . . Jesus is forced to carry his cross . . . Jesus falls for the first time . . . Jesus meets his Mother . . . through two more falls, being stripped naked and nailed to the cross . . . Jesus dies . . .

The images portrayed Jesus as a Rabbi — and his executioners as Nazis.

For the six weeks of Lent, we sat under those icons — the condemned, ridiculed, wounded Jew being tortured by Nazis.

That artistic exhibition made it impossible to ever imagine Good Friday in anti-Semitic terms. I saw Jesus the Jew in ways I never had before. And the “Christ-killers”? Agents of Hitler, soldiers of the Reich. The Jews didn’t kill Jesus. No, it was different than the way it had been presented in every other church I’d attended, that unrecognized and unconfessed prejudice that has poisoned Christianity for more than a thousand years. The stations made me deeply uncomfortable, not for the usual reasons of the violence done to Jesus, but for the violence Christians had done to the story of his death by blaming the wrong culprits.

It took those Nazis killing Jesus before I fully understood — deeply, existentially — that an empire murdered him.

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That was a quarter of a century ago. But I can still see those images in my mind’s eye. They come back to me every Good Friday since, those Nazis murdering Jesus in my church. Those stations — of ruthless imperial violence — were unforgettable.

This year, I’m thinking about them in relation to yesterday’s post about the table. If the table, where Jesus manifested God’s communion of mutuality and friendship in bread and wine, is the central meaning of Holy Week, then what of Good Friday?

The cross is Rome’s NO to the table. Empires are built on domination, one group over others, seeing those outside the circle as “alien,” needing to be separated and controlled, unworthy of the goods of society. Such realms are hierarchical arrangements, with a few elites at the top of a pyramid of power and many at the bottom, but where the few own the most and the many possess little. Power is maintained through violence; wealth is multiplied by it as well. New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan refers to this as “escalatory violence,” the destructive logic of domination. Nazis or Romans or whatever imperial power — it doesn’t make much difference.

The Roman Empire, under which Jesus lived, excelled at killing discontents. Rebels, protesters, and resisters were ruthlessly executed. Having gotten word of an alternative “kingdom” attracting followers and stirring up trouble, however small this faction might be, the Roman authorities took decisive action. This pitiful group could be easily crushed by murdering its leader, in the same way Rome had rid itself of innumerable troublemaking sects.

And what of Judas, the one who turned Jesus in? Something happened to him at that table. For centuries, Jesus’ friends have tried to figure out what — a quarrel over monies for the poor, a misplaced hope to reconcile with religious authorities, or motivated by his own fears? No matter the reason, Judas left the table and betrayed Jesus. He turned his back on communion to collaborate with empire.

The whole story of arrest, trial, and execution is, of course, about Jesus. But it is also a brutal attack on and a betrayal of the table.

Tables are always a threat to empire. Tables can be frightening. And they can be destroyed and abandoned. On this Friday, the table is deserted and the cross is laden with sorrow.

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INSPIRATION


The story of the end, of the last word
of the end, when told, is a story that never ends.
We tell it and retell it — one word, then another
until it seems that no last word is possible,
that none would be bearable. Thus, when the hero
of the story says to himself, as to someone far away,
‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do,’
we may feel that he is pleading for us, that we are
the secret life of the story and, as long as his plea
is not answered, we shall be spared. So the story
continues. So we continue. And the end, once more,
becomes the next, and the next after that.
— Mark Strand, from “The Seven Last Words”

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
— David Whyte, from the longer poem, “Sweet Darkness” in River Flow

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A VIDEO MEDITATION FOR GOOD FRIDAY

I invite you to pray through these Stations of the Cross — a video reflection by Irish poet Padraig O’Tuama.

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