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Come to Good Friday

Here is the simple thing that I did. I opened an envelope that contained a hospital bill. It was 19 pages long, an exact tabulation of every syringe, every test, every pill, every process that had occurred. It was the concrete, specific inventory of everything that had happened to my mother. It was the ritual of her last days, a medicinal rosary, one bead after another of failed instruments and procedures. Each one, listed here, rested now in my hand nine years after her death.

Here is the simple thing that I did. I opened an envelope that contained a hospital bill. It was 19 pages long, an exact tabulation of every syringe, every test, every pill, every process that had occurred. It was the concrete, specific inventory of everything that had happened to my mother. It was the ritual of her last days, a medicinal rosary, one bead after another of failed instruments and procedures. Each one, listed here, rested now in my hand nine years after her death.

On a windy afternoon, one in which I could see the clouds racing across the bleak sky as if they were hurrying with message of some impending end, I opened that envelope again and read the macabre poetry of her body’s failure to respond. It was an inventory of 2,500 years of medical progress collapsing on that afternoon. It was a list of procedures without heart. It was the coldest thing that I have ever read. In spring, amidst the blossoms ready to appear, it brought winter back.

Good Friday can do the same. It becomes the sobering pause in our march through spring. In the midst of our long gaze past Easter and into the renewal fires of Pentecost, Good Friday becomes a dark moment before the eventual wearing of the red.

In the Synoptic Gospels the crucifixion is portrayed in catastrophic terms. Darkness falls and graves are opened. Solemn pronouncements are heard. One is not to think that Christ’s crucifixion was unimportant. Life and death are pinned together there. Good Friday, not then nor ever, was intended only to be simply a rest stop on the way to Easter. All of our disappointments, grief and broken dreams are sometimes added to Good Friday. It draws them like a magnet. My own confrontation with the long statement of dying costs could even be taken there. It symbolizes all human finality. In this way, it could hold particular relevance for Presbyterians this year. One could gather up the unending statistics of vanishing membership, add the cross hairs in which we continually aim at each other’s hearts, staple on the shrinking denominational budgets and carry them with us to the cross. Did we ever really have, as medieval theologians would have put it, the habitus of grace within our hearts?

Statistics are ambiguous reporters at best. Scripture itself contains internal tensions about their use. Numbers records that the Lord commanded Moses to count his people, but 1 Chronicles says that Satan brought the idea to David’s mind. Echoing the results of Eden’s sin, the text tells us that the Lord was not pleased. Forgiveness came, but not as quickly as we promise it on Sunday. There is pain. Serious remorse, great lossand costly sacrifice are involved. The truth is that even the best statistics may fail to reveal our loss of trust or identify the pain that grace requires for all.

Good Friday reminds us that spiritual renewal is more costly than we think. With our tendency to draw up budgets and measure things, we put our doctrines of salvation on the shelf until we get our administrative needs supplied. The Atonement, however, holds more power than we think. Collected across the centuries, the images and metaphors for Christ’s death were intended to say more than that he died. They say much about us. Formed in conjunction with our sense of sin, they were forged as sharpened scalpels to lay bare and to remove the scar tissue of our hearts.

We cannot have Good Friday without saying what Christ’s death was intended to resolve. We know the traditional words but we rarely say them very loud. Christ’s death provided the perfect sacrifice, paid the cost, bore the penalty, carried out complete obedience, defeated the devil et. al. Emerging from different historical contexts, some of them might seem to be far removed from people now. In their seriousness, however, they carry deep messages about God’s will for us. Certainly they tell us that God is more concerned about sin, guilt and judgment than is commonly discussed.

The metaphors of the atonement challenge us. It is not easy to integrate them with the nonjudgmental identity of God that we now espouse. Enlightened folks like us, who want to believe in a God who weeps or smiles but never frowns, hardly know what to do with the stern requirements they suggest. Scripture, nevertheless, persists with more stringent demands, “See, I have set before you today life and good and death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking his ways and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it” (Deuteronomy 30:15). God grants true growth if and when he wills. A careful performance evaluation has caught us by surprise. Regular cost of living allowances, in terms of automatic membership increases, are not in the picture.

As challenging as they are, our metaphors for Christ’s work are among our greatest treasures. Drawn in varying ways from Scripture, they are now locked within our confessions of faith. They are rarely proclaimed with the vigor, however, they once entailed. The image of the cross and the interpretations of the atonement are preserved, but as though caught in museum cases. We hardly know what to do with the brutality of Good Friday anymore.

This was not always the case. Medieval mystics received images of the crucifixion into the deep recesses of their hearts. Those in the centuries immediately before the Reformation who participated in the Devotio Moderna absorbed these doctrines effectively and geared them into the renewal of their souls. The later Puritans and the Pietists also found these doctrines to express the power of the living Christ within their lives. Expressions of the atonement thus became in many places the instruments by which Christ continued to work out patterns of holiness in his people. They burned incandescently in what we might call the poetry of our church, our Scripture, our confessions and our hymnody, lighting the hard way home of Christian grace.

We all face adversaries that come across our paths. Those 19 pages of hospital charges had very quickly become an adversary to me, an impersonal symbol of death’s finality. On the human level, however, I did not intend to yield to their winter’s chill. I taunted death as best I could. I lifted up against them, as a weapon of the spirit, in my mind’s eye, the four volumes of poetry that my mother wrote. I fought words with words, their words of death with poetry from life, and I won. How much more powerful our poetic weapons can be when we lift Scripture, our confessions and our hymnody against not only our sins but the statistical predictions of our denominational demise. Held up against, as Eastern Orthodox theologians could write, God’s uncreated light, these metaphors become the x-rays which reveal the broken places in our lives and the resources of grace that are hard at work.

Christopher Dawson was fairly blunt when he said in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture that when the barbarians overran the West, the church confronted them not with a civilizing mission or a hope of social progress but with “a tremendous message of divine judgment and divine salvation” (p. 33). With what are we confronting the barbarism of our time? Is it simply the vague news of God’s graciousness in Christ or is it something stronger and more precise?

Long before our 17th-century Westminster Confession of Faith appeared, the cross had become the focus for English thought. It is at the core of the Western Christian tradition. And what is interesting is how often it expressed victorious power. You can discover it in William Langland’s 14th-century poem, “Peirs Plowman,” where Christ in his death reigns with authority. You find it in the still older Anglo-Saxon poem, “The Dream of the Rood,” in which the cross “wound in light” holds Christ as a victorious warrior. And on the high country Cambrian moors, where an old Roman fort once stood, sixth-century Christians placed there a cross holding the majestic figure of the crucified triumphant Christ. Now known as the Bewcastle Rood, it proclaims that Christ’s authority in death and resurrection ultimately is the greatest force. Christ, not Rome, reigns here now. Lifting up the poetry of our church, we press against the barbarism of the present age with the cross of Christ on Good Friday.

The Puritans gave us yet another idea. They expected to apprehend God’s truth expressed in nature’s ways. Does not nature’s new life now provide the setting for our Holy Week? Easter comes reflected in skies that have been cleansed by the winds of early March; it comes transposed onto the millions of barren branches that are now recovering their leaves. And it always seems to be carried in the blossoms that are now creeping out to try the possibilities of life again. Nature has become the refraction of Christ’s death and resurrection each spring. This is also true with regard to any mountain rivers.

As it sweeps down from its northern source, the wind of spring troubles the river near at hand in curious ways. It frequently blows the surface of the water, appearing to reverse its natural flow. Across the surface it backs up, as if abandoning entirely its ancient course. But if you peer down deeper you see something different. The plants, anchored securely in the river bottoms, reveal another, more original force to be in control. At the bottom, where the current continues to be stronger than the impact of the surface wind, the plants hold fast, yielding to a deeper flow which then holds them securely in its grasp.

One can feel the chill of winter winds in springtime when one walks along the church’s path. Statistical reports appear to tell us of the reversal of its life. If one looks no deeper than these surface changes, one could wonder if our river of life had died. Under the surface of these chilling blasts and shifting waves, however, our lives are held by greater hands. The river teaches what the shifting breeze denies. Our roots are imbedded in long held beliefs, and the beauty of that current will continue to take us where we should go.

Come to Good Friday as if it were a riverbed in which the deepest currents of God will hold us, and our roots grow strong. Come to the profound doctrines that fight the words of death with the poetic words of life. And then behold how, into the statistical intimations of denominational doom, our poetry, our Scripture, our confessions and our classic hymns plunge their own truth. Sharper than the two-edged sword, this word will win. Our accountability and his sovereignty come together at the cross. In poetic terms, as his nails go in ours come out. As he gives up his spirit, so ours is restored. As they cast lots for his simple garments, we are royally clothed. Good Friday comes to us with a goodness that is ultimately powerful and with an exchange unfathomable in its depth. Come to Good Friday, trembling as you walk.

Richard A. Ray is a minister living in Bristol, Tenn.

 

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