Good Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 16-25
John 18:1 - 19: 42

This too is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it. AMEN.

We've heard the long narrative of the crucifixion and death of Jesus. I am always jumbled up with a range of feelings, reactions, and the overwhelming conviction that saying anything is superfluous. The BCP expects it, and I am a creature of the BCP. Bp Shaw preached a fine homily Tuesday at the renewal of clergy vows. (Jep Streit had asked him to describe his spiritual experience of Holy Week and why it was so important to him. He did.)

Aside from an interesting and personal homily, it also reminded me of one reality of personality and therefore of spirituality: no two people are the same. The more Bp Shaw talked about the perfection of the Holy Week observances at his seminary, the ancient sermon he'd heard annually, and that this was the piety which had lead him to the monastery, to experience that same perfection, the more I recognized that I was learning more than I'd ever learned about him, and that his spirituality is not mine.

My thought is his is a male spirituality, and like it, maybe most Good Friday devotions like Stations of the Cross, which show a kenotic (emptying out) theology, have more men attending than women. I also recognize that the 4 crosses I wear regularly have these images: Mary making the cross by holding the baby, 3 Greek crosses: one that says light and life, one says Victory, and one has a crown in the middle with a XP-none with the tortured crucified figure. It is different imagery than that so important to the Bp, the Stations, and much of Good Friday.

 After his sermon, I listened to Judith Shulevitz, talk about her book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. She asserted that observing the Sabbath, observing regular religious rules and customs built social solidarity with remarkable efficacy.  A shared experience built, and still does build, community. Terri Gross, interviewing, asked how she understood her living as an Orthodox Jew and observing the Sabbath, fit with her regular involvement with psychoanalysis. She asked: wasn't the point of religious observance to make people a group, while psychoanalysis was to help differentiate/ individuate her exactly from her group, and from all others. Shulevitz said "No." She thought that the more one did things in common and/or by rule, custom, and practice, the more one understood one's place as individual and person in a historical and present context, looking toward a future of common understanding. That's what the Bishop did for me, and is reason I think it important to do these sacred rituals together, whether annual, weekly, or daily, and to offer some of our own "takes" or personal spirituality. We've been sending out to our e-list a series of unsigned meditations for Holy Week. Each has been personal and remarkably interesting, and all in 150 words: thank you every person who wrote one and to the person who suggested and implemented them. We'll hope to do it again. The writing and reading build us up as a worshipping, reflecting community, and each of us experiences new, additional, authentic beliefs and practices, so I'll do a little of that now.

I find the hearing of the crucifixion of Jesus appalling, and yet I've heard if every year for more than 50 years. I'm going to describe some of the things in that long series that have smacked me, hoping you'll hear some of mine, and juxtapose your own, and so share, distinguish, and join together here in this community.

The anti-Semitism always hits me. In my tiny elementary school class, there was a Roman Catholic who used to push me down stairs, particularly on Fridays, but sometimes on Wednesdays too, always saying, "The Jews killed Jesus," and then she'd shove me down, because I had a Jewish name. I was not raised, though I learned later some Jewish kids were, to be held out of school, or told to walk in groups on Good Friday, even on Harvard Street, in Brookline. Good Friday's name therefore was always a puzzle for me. It surely wasn't good for cousins of mine, being harassed by extension, or by other cousins, the Catholic ones, by extension, being the harassers.

Years later I saw a large cross in Spain, at the museum of the Crosses in Barcelona. The figure of Christ was in the center of three crosses. He had a narrow face, with a beard. He looked strikingly Jewish or maybe Spanish-Jewish, by skin color and beard, and he had a narrow crown. One of the smaller figures was missing, but the other was the same image as Jesus, with the same face, beard, and crown-but also had a harp. He had to be David. A community reared in a church with David and Jesus being the same could not have been anti-Semitic, and Catalonia wasn't. That this repeated image shaped its worshiping community's living practices made me value and collect many images of crosses.

Hymns and music shaped my Good Fridays too. For years my mother and I went to the cathedral for Dean Buck's preaching. The hymns between meditations on the seven last words, for the lunch/early afternoon workers and faithful church people, were a way to bond the people who didn't know each other, as weekly congregations know each other, and also it was a time when people could easily come and go. I counted on hearing "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" We all sang it, but I hear it in my mind's ear with someone like Marian Anderson singing it. "Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble. Were you there when they crucified my Lord, when they nailed him to the tree, pierced him in the side, laid him in the tomb?" "Were you there" made me hear what was going on, made me enter the scene and see the death, made me tremble. Rather than being a churchy reading about ancient people in drab brown, it made me tremble and sad. More than that, I heard it with someone, with my mother, rather than with neutral companions. We heard the haunting melody, the sentiment and were together.

After the Thursday stripping of the altar, years later, a service I always found profoundly stark, not because of the stripping of the things, but after the stripping was done, people walked across the altar area, where they'd always, without exception, every time, reverenced the cross, the altar, the east end of the church, and they simply didn't. I saw it was no longer a church, no altar, no salvation. One year I did come back to join the vigil. I'd returned to church after the service to take my turn watching. I'd had to go very late, after midnight, when kids were asleep and Peter home. I sat quietly for my time, and when I got up to leave, now very late, the rector in his long cape, came to say he'd walk me home. I demurred saying I was fine. He said he'd walk me home and did. That courtesy-and perhaps common sense-seemed big. I knew it was important to him that someone be watching all night, but more important to see me safely home. Perhaps he was suggesting that however important metaphors are, real life is to be valued too.

Crosses still puzzled me, though. Another Barcelona cross showed me something else. There was a huge, huge cross with an enormous figure of Christ on it. He wore a plain black robe and cincture and a large gold crown. His arms reached out past the arm pieces of the cross his feet nearly touched the ground, and he was relaxed, not tortured, in pain, or revealed in any prurient way- just calm and at ease. He, Christ the King, overpowered the transient episode of his death on the cross. He demonstrated his cross, as backbone, supported his life and work. His calm love, caring for people, seeing them from on high, saw the harsh realities regular people have in their lives. He was strong enough to triumph over the cross, any cross, and live on forever, from it.

The images of Christ living after the cross, or living from it, made me briefly curious about the ghastly, suffering figure we've all seen as the standard image. Jesus paired with David and Christ the king, were among many other images beyond the near naked, twisted dead image we've seen so frequently. Now, with the advent of simple crosses from Latin America, with the houses in bright cheerful villages, along a path, and bold, bright flowers trailing all over these with a simple figure of Jesus as a young king, or healthy worker now have reminded me that other images express the power of the cross too.

Again thinking about Jesus alive from the cross, I hear energetic music singing, "I danced on the Sabbath when I cured the lame, The holy people said it was a shame; They whipped and they stripped and hung me high; And they left me there on a cross to die. 'Dance, dance, wherever you may be. I am the Lord of the Dance,' said he, 'and I'll lead you on, wherever you may be, I'll lead you on in the dance,' said he." I add that sound image to: "Nearer my God to Thee, Nearer to Thee! E'en though it be a cross raiseth me, still all my song would be, Nearer to me." Again the personal claim to be changed, raised, saved is with an achingly haunting tune, and I heard it as personal and connected to Good Friday, just after hearing the bishop. But having seen Shaker images of The Tree of life, I also hear "The tree of life my soul hath seen, laden with fruit and always green... The fruit doth make my soul to thrive. It keeps my dying faith alive, which makes my soul in haste to be with Jesus Christ the apple tree."

That refrain of "Jesus Christ the apple tree" returns me to the those images of Shaker Trees of Life. Their branches make a circle over the trunk, burgeoning with round bright fruit. It is not that the Shakers didn't understand the crucifixion, but they expressed the life it brings to us and to all, by showing the tree of life supplanting the Genesis apple tree that caused so much trouble with the exuberance of the tree bearing multi-colored healthy living fruit.

I no more understand the work of the cross and the loving action of God the Father with his son to bring about salvation for all by a tortured image than I am persuaded by Abraham's offer to kill his son, as a persuasive image of a loving Creator or Father image. I get Jesus and David working together. I get Jesus the King overpowering every suffering, evil, and sorrow of humans by his work on the cross. I know I'm there, and want to be even nearer, but I hold on to the brightly colored tree of life, nearly a lollipop tree, with the Lord of the Dance, saying "I danced on Friday when the sky turned black...They cut me down and I leapt up high. I am the life that'll never, never die; I'll live in you if you live in me, I am Lord of the Dance, " said he." Even today he's ready to leap-Good News.

© Katharine C. Black 2 April 2010