GoodFriday
John 18: - 19:42
GOOD FRIDAY: NOT BEING DEFEATED BY VIOLENCE
In the routine hell of Auschwitz, towards the end of July 1941,
ten men were lined up to be starved to death
in the dreaded underground bunker
as a reprisal for an escape attempt.
One of them cried out,
“My wife, my children, what will become of them?”
A somewhat rhetorical question in the conditions of that time,
and in that place of four million executions.
A thin, battered man, prisoner 16670, stepped forward,
and offered to die in the place of his fellow prisoner.
The second surprise in that brutal place was that his offer was accepted.
So it happened that this 47 year old Catholic priest
was put down into the starvation bunker with the other nine.
To all reports, strange things happened in the next two weeks:
hymns,
expressions of forgiveness,
prayers,
prisoners singing as they died.
When they came to finish off 16670 with an injection of phenol,
for he was the last to die,
they found him propped up against the wall
with a joyful smile on his face.
Forty-one years later Maximilian Kolbe was canonised.
Not merely for the way he died,
but for the way he lived, months before,
as a source of extraordinary hope and strength
for his fellow-sufferers in that hell.
The man he saved was present at his canonisation (Bausch 1998).
oo0oo
Jesus/Yeshuha died because he was publically and brutally executed.
He certainly did not want to die...
Our tradition says with loud cries and tears, he prayed to the One
whom others claimed could have saved him from death.
He died as a result of his passionate, imaginative living.
He died as a result of a decision not to deviate from the
God-Self-Neighbour relationship he continually lived.
It is difficult today to have a sense of the utter obscenity
and degradation attached to crucifixion.
Now, the sign of the cross has become a routine liturgical gesture
as well as a fashion statement. It is ‘in’ to wear one.
Then, it was an obscene thing,
not to be mentioned in the hearing of a Roman.
As a form of execution, it was the ultimate deterrent for the subversive and the slave.
The ultimate way of dealing with anyone
judged to be a threat to the sacred order.
In the name of all the gods of that order Jesus was condemned.
What Jesus said and did and stood for...
collided with Roman imperial religion.
He was killed by the Roman authority, who could not accept
the countercultural effect of his teaching and example:
“loving self, neighbo[u]r and enemy through the passive resistance of turning a second cheek to the smiter of the first, of giving up shirt as well as coat when need demanded, of swearing off grudges as often as it took and a pact among people to treat each other with mutual consideration” (Cook 2011).
This new cloth could not be sewn onto an old garment.
This new wine could not be kept in the old wineskins.
Either that social and religious order, or Jesus/Yeshuha, had to go.
He was executed because what he did and said
was so deeply subversive of the politico-religious order of his day.
Justice had indeed been done!
oo0oo
Some say the season of Lent calls us to ‘reflection’. Others say, ‘repentance’.
With yet others I want to claim the day called Good Friday calls us to ‘opposition’.
To stand in solidarity with others.
To stand against even the church and its theology
where its solidarity has been with the Empire
rather than with the oppressed.
The memory of the one we call Jesus, is dangerous,
subversive,
death-threatening,
life-affirming,
bursting with hope,
and mindful of evil.
Christianity that is true to the life of Jesus
“tells his death as the story of resistance to the Roman Empire, not as the story of how the Empire enacted God's will… The gospels constructed an innovative strategy to resist crucifixion. They rejected the terror that crucifixion instilled and told the story another way, against the grain of historical fact and with the grain of love and resistance” (Brock 2008).
Rita Brock, in her powerful book Saving paradise,
co-authored with Rebecca Parker, goes further:
“Their telling affirmed divine presence in human flesh, in Jesus who showed them how to live, before he died, and revealed love stronger than terror, torture, or death” (Brock 2008).
If Good Friday is to mean anything in our time and our place
“we must break [the] silence whenever violence is used to shame, instill fear, fragment human community, or suppress our work for economic justice, health care, and peace” (Brock 2008).
Traditional theology has taught us:
‘Jesus died so we might live’.
It suggests the torture and murder lamented this Friday is "good."
Progressive theology teaches:
Christians who ground their power in divine love mourn on Friday,
keep vigil until dawn on Sunday, and say with joy,
Jesus lived so that all creation might live.
Notes:
Bausch, W. J. 1998. A world of stories for preachers and teachers. CT: Mystic. Twenty-Third Publications.
Brock, R.; R Parker. 2008. Saving paradise: How Christianity traded love of this world for crucifixion and empire. MA: Boston. Beacon Press.
H. T. Cook. "Responsible Self-Determination", 22/4/2011. <http://www.harrytcook.com/>