Good Friday, April 7, 2023

Good Friday

The Rev. Clint Brown

A couple of years ago, I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night from a dead sleep. Now you might think that this was because I had had a bad dream or heard a noise or suddenly remembered that I had left a door unlocked or the oven on. But that was not it – not it at all. I was roused from sleep by an intense and profound sadness. It was the oddest sensation. From someplace deep within, a palpable sadness, possessed of its own inertia, had broken through from my unconsciousness to my consciousness and manifested itself as a physical thing.

As I lay there trying to sort it all out, I began to identify the shape and contour of this sadness that had presented itself to my awareness, and I finally realized that it was all the negativity and anger and bad feelings of our politics, of the shocking and unkind things we can and do say about one another that, for who knows how long, I had been absorbing and depositing, layer upon layer. It was a vast deposit of negative energy that, on this particular night, my troubled spirit was offering up to me, shaking me awake, demanding to be heard. And not knowing what else to do with the magnitude of these feelings, I felt compelled to pray. And as I lay there praying in the dark – feeling, with the psalmist, a helplessness, a despondency, as of drowning in waters that had risen above my head – it happened that I suddenly became mindful of the Cross.

I guess, upon reflection, it couldn’t be helped. It is to the Cross, after all, where all the negativity and the worst that the world can dish out ultimately leads. This, I thought, is where our hate and anger and bad feeling get us. This is what hate does to love. It crucifies it. And now I lay there weeping in the dark – warm tears that pooled at the corners of my eyes and fell slowly down either side of my face. Weeping for the world, weeping for myself, and weeping for the goodness of the man on the cross of whom we had proven ourselves to be so unworthy. And I thought how whatever I was feeling of the injustice of the world was yet only an infinitesimal part of what Jesus himself experienced when he wept over Jerusalem; as he agonized in the Garden; as Judas betrayed him; as Peter denied him; as he listened to the crowd clamoring for his death; and, finally, as he hung nailed to the Cross, rejected and forsaken, bearing on his body all the malice, all the cruelty, all the confused rage of humanity.

Why, what hath my Lord done? What makes this rage and spite? He made the lame to run, he gave the blind their sight. Sweet injuries! Yet they at these themselves displease, and ’gainst him rise.[1]

This, I thought, is what hate does to love, and I let myself weep for our fallen race.

And so things stood for several days until I shared my helplessness with another priest, who brought me out of the dark. Yes, he said, this is what hate does to love, but look at what love does to hate. The power of the Cross is Christ’s steadfast and obedient faith despite the worst we could do. He did not succumb to the temptation to let the cup pass from him. When he cried out, “It is finished,” it was not to say – or, at least, not only to say – that his torture was over. More than that it was a shout of victory. “It is accomplished!” “It is achieved!” “It is fulfilled!” “Your hate may, indeed, crucify Love, but only because Love allows it!”

This is the victory, that God has taken all the hate and wrongheadedness and poison of our nature and absorbed each and every blow. All these things have been crucified with Christ and their power destroyed for ever.

The tragedy of [humankind had been our] disobedience, [our] resistance to reality, [our] pettiness. The triumph of Christ [was] his obedience, his grasp of reality. In Christ our whole human experience was rerun, this time properly…[2]

Hate may mock and scourge and do its worst, but Love receives the humiliation. Hate may carry the day, but Love wins the war. Hate may kill, but Love is stronger than death.

If love does not seem to make any meaningful headway in society, perhaps it is only because we have never really given it the chance. Yet that is exactly our charge as Christians. We are meant to be infiltrators, working from below, leavening from within. Ours is not to be part of the problem, but part of the solution. We are Good Friday people. Our symbol is the Cross – the symbol of obedience and self-emptying love. We are on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor. We represent those who outlast hate. We are for love. And love wins.

[1] Hymnal 1982, #458, My song is love unknown. Words by Samuel Crossman (1624-1683)

[2] Richard Holloway, The Killing: Meditations on the Death of Christ (Wilton, CT: Morehouse Barlow, 1985), 68-69.