Good Friday

Preaching after a reading of the Passion of Christ, whether on Palm Sunday or Good Friday, is always difficult. What more can be said? How can anything match what has just been heard? One can talk about that particular Gospel – pointing out that when John castigates “Jews,” for instance, he reflects the bitter conflict between Jewish Christians and the synagogue hierarchy, not an excuse for a pogrom. This is important, yet it is also analytical, moving us away from the anguish of our hearts into the comfort of our heads. It does not address the Passion as an emotional, gut-wrenching event.

Entering into the emotions of the Passion, imagining oneself there and experiencing all of its horror, is a practice dating from medieval times. The best example is in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola; the most recent is Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of The Christ.” I have never been able to do this. I always end up in despair. Perhaps it was a comforting discipline when a third of the population of Europe was dying from the plague in the fourteenth century, to know that as great as that suffering might have been, God in Jesus Christ had suffered more. But it doesn’t work for me. Even though I know the end of the story, the anguish is too much. And I wonder about someone like Mel Gibson, who dwells so much on torture and death that there is little room for resurrection.

Yet I cannot rush to Easter, much as I would like. The fact remains that Jesus died an excruciating death, whether for our sins or for political reasons (as Crossan and Borg would say). And for the first disciples, his death was the end of hope. We cannot know the power of the resurrection unless we first cross that valley of death, because there is no new life unless the old has passed away. “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” That ministry of reconciliation is the promise that even in the midst of despair there is hope. And hearing that promise, we can kneel at the cross once again, knowing that hope will return in a few short days.