25 MARCH 2005 : GOOD FRIDAY
Last Sunday I read a large portion of the Passion narrative as Matthew’s gospel records it. This morning, a portion of the Passion narrative as John’s gospel tells it was read. Last night at the Tenebrae service we heard portions of the Passion narrative from the time that Jesus and the disciples went into the Garden of Gethsemane to the time of his death alone on the cross, in selections from the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.
I found myself listening each time to a story that is so familiar it has become so much a part of me that this Good Friday, like all Good Fridays recently, I might glance at my watch and involuntarily think that around about this time such and such was happening. Like around about now, 10am or so, depending on which version of the story one takes, Jesus is either in the governor’s headquarters, with a hostile crowd of religious leaders and others outside calling for his blood, or he is being shunted from Pilate to Herod and back to Pilate again. Taking the Matthew version of the story read last Sunday, it might be around about now that Pilate’s wife is sending her husband a warning as a result of a dream about having nothing to do with Jesus.
I am fully aware of what biblical scholars say about the Passion narratives, especially the scholars of the Jesus Seminar, and that although quite likely Jesus’ arrest, trial and execution did not happen in the way that it is told, nevertheless these stories have a truth of their own from having been told again and again, year after year, century after century, since the first of them emerged in written form in Mark’s gospel shortly after the year 70. They are stories so ‘true’, and so real, so written on my heart, that, personally, for me on Good Friday I cannot fully relax until after three o’clock, when Jesus cries “It is finished!” and dies.
Curiously, when hearing these stories this year, I found myself hearing them partially as if through the ears of people many years ago. For instance – and who knows why such mind tricks occur – last Sunday I found myself visualising a little Saxon church somewhere in the north of England that I visited in 1981. I visualised a congregation of peasant farmers full of anxiety about rumours of the Danes invading, just as their own ancestors had invaded England. They heard their priest reading this story and wondering what would be the circumstances next time it was read; hearing the story read with one ear cocked for a warning shout from the villager on top of the church’s tower, recently built to keep watch for invaders.
I found myself during the week visualising the people for whom Mark’s gospel was originally written, possibly a house church of no more than, say, 60 to100 people who constituted the church in Rome in the early 70s of the first century of this era. They heard the Passion story, vividly aware that a year or two previously the emperor’s army had flattened Jerusalem where all this had happened only forty or so years earlier. I visualised them thinking of the apostle Peter, who appears in a not very good light in the story, and who had lived among them and had been martyred there only five or so years previously, and who most likely had told these stories to the person we call Mark, who wrote them down so that his community could continue to remember Jesus.
The Passion stories have been read aloud year after year for close on two thousand years since their first reading in Mark’s version of them to a tiny congregation in Rome that had already experienced their own Passion stories in the persecutions under the mercifully now-dead emperor Nero. The Passion narrative brought the cross right into the heart of a community that had just experienced its own excruciating deaths in the arena with wild animals, or tied to posts, covered with flammable pitch and set alight to illuminate the mad emperor’s pleasure gardens. For this community in the beginning church, as for the Saxons who popped unexpectedly into my mind last Sunday in their anxiety about a Danish invasion, the cross was real. Suffering was real. Torture and death because of one’s faith was real. The way of the cross was physically real.
I think of these stories being read today in countless congregations on every continent of the planet. Read in glorious splendour in the church that is built over the martyred Peter’s tomb, and which traces its origins from that original tiny community in Rome and where Peter’s latest successor is dying and gets wheeled out each day to be shown to the crowds like some animated holy relic.
I think of Christians in southern Sudan hearing the story, cautiously celebrating a ceasefire in a seemingly endless civil war with the Muslim government in the north, and where crucifixion is another name for the multiple rape of someone’s wife or mother, sister or daughter, or the brutal death and pointless death of one’s friends.
I think of Christians in Iraq, a small minority too easily identified with the West because they share the symbol of the cross with Western Christians, wondering if this will be the day a car bomb will take their life while they are listening to the story of that other middle eastern death at the hands of an occupying foreign power.
One could tell of many places where this story is being read today – some of them in comfortable and self-focussed places like the Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles, some of them in poverty such as a hilltribe village in the north of Thailand. Some of them in churches with long and ancient histories like the Coptic churches of Egypt or the Mar Thoma churches of India; and some of them in churches as new as yesterday with names like Christian Life Centre or such-and-such Community Church. But in all places where this story is told today, people confront the reality of the cross.
All of them, all of us, confront the cross according to our own particular circumstances this day – our age, our gender, our family situation, our relationships, and of course our theological and religious presuppositions. All this plays a part in how we hear this story this Good Friday – hearing it perhaps differently from the way we have heard it on other Good Fridays. Hearing it perhaps, for some inexplicable reason and in the well-chosen words of theologian Marcus Borg, hearing the stories “again, for the first time.”(1) However we hear the stories, and through whatever filters we hear them, we are nevertheless confronting the reality of the cross.
In the New Testament, in history, in Christian worship and practice, in Western popular culture, the cross is the single most universal symbol of Christianity. Like all symbols, it has multiple meanings. Over two thousand years, Christians have seen many meanings in it. Today as the Passion story is told again and the cross is placed physically or metaphorically before people, the circumstances and faith tradition those people are in will give the stories and the cross different meanings. Literally and historically, the cross – Jesus’ crucifixion – was an execution. The authorities killed him. The rulers of this world executed him. But, from the early Christian movement on down to us, a number of different meanings have been seen in the cross.
We here in St Lukes are not a people who come to church today wondering where our next meal or the next car bomb will come from. The cross does not for us stand as a symbol of God’s identification with our collective suffering. Nor does it stand for us as a symbol of some titanic struggle between evil and good. Although we are, as church-attending Christians, a religious minority, we are not in a country where we are likely to be persecuted, for all that Christianity is held in some odium as the result of actions and statements by the religious right here and in the United States in recent months. Christians in New Zealand are not likely to be persecuted for their faith; they are more likely to have their faith challenged through sheer boredom.
For me today, given my stage in life(2) and books I am currently reading (3), and today for us in our situation here at St Lukes, it might be that the cross is best confronted in the way the earliest Christian movement saw the cross – as a symbol of what they called “the way”. “The way” is the path of transformation, the way to be ‘born again’. “Born again” is language that has been hijacked by a particular strand of Christianity, and has come to mean a worldview that is moralistic, judgemental, and hopelessly conservative (in the worst sense of the word conservative). Being ‘born again’ is a concept as old as Christianity itself. The cross, the central symbol of Christianity, points to a process at the heart of Christianity – “dying and rising with Christ”, is how the apostle Paul puts it; being raised to newness of life, being ‘born again’ in Christ.
Because of “the way”, Paul vowed to preach “nothing but Christ crucified”. Because of “the way”, the gospels, especially the three synoptic gospels, were written so as to show the way of Jesus as ‘the way of the cross’; because of “the way” the season of Lent climaxing in Good Friday and Easter is about participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Sometimes this is spoken about as “dying to self” or the “death of the self”. Such language has historically been used to encourage the repression of the self and its legitimate desires and aspirations. Oppressed people, in society or in the family, have been told to put their own selves last out of obedience to God. This turns the message of the cross into an instrument of oppressive authority and self-abdication. This is not how Paul, the earliest witness to the convictions of the early Christian movement that we have available, understood things. For Paul, the cross is the symbol of the process of personal transformation which is at the heart of the Christian life.
For Paul, it was a personal transformation that was very sudden and dramatic. For most of us, it is a gradual and lifelong process. The gospels portray Jesus as urging his followers to “take up their cross and follow me.” Luke, perhaps with some insight into how human beings really operate, added “daily”. Martin Luther, echoing Luke, wrote of “daily dying and rising with Christ.”
It speaks about a daily self-forgetfulness, and an outward-looking attitude, and other-centredness as distinct from our natural, instinctual self-centredness, which is why the ‘dailiness’ is important. It is easiest to remember self and not to remember the other – the ‘other’ being God, or people with whom we interact daily. It is hardest to go against instinct and to focus away from self, which is why the ‘dying’ imagery is significant. The ‘born-again’ metaphor, the dying and rising with Christ imagery, is both about that rare single dramatic event, or the more common lifelong process. It can also be referring to shorter rhythms in our lives, a process where awareness of a ‘death’ and a new ‘rising’ may occur several times in one’s life in periods of major transition, whatever the cause – a bereavement, for instance, or a job change, or an age-change.
Many voices will be telling the story of that dying today; many, many more ears will be listening. The way the story is told and the way the story is heard will vary much from context to context. In our context, it might be that this year this annually-told story is inviting an awareness of a new need for transformation, a new need for “the way” of dying and rising which is central not just to Christianity, but is found in different ways in the other great faiths of the world. The business of personal transformation – what we as Christians call being born again, dying and rising with Christ – is a central theme in human spirituality and human experience.
We confront the cross as a symbol of a deep ongoing need in our own lives – of change and renewal, and of the difficulties associated with all that – and as a symbol of a “way” that has already been followed, not just by Jesus, but by countless Christians in countless communities on all continents of the earth over two thousand years.
(1) See Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) and Reading the Bible Again for the First Time (HarperSanFrancisco, 2002)
(2) In the tail-end of my fifties, and so transitioning from 'mid-life' to whatever it is that comes next.
(3) Especially Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco, 2004; John S Spong, A New Christianity for a New World, HarperCollins, 2001; and David Tracey, the spirituality revolution, HarperCollins, 2003.