April 09, 2004

Good Friday

I maintain two journals… this web log that is available to friends and others (my identity is relatively secret and no names are used in any way that could lead to identification, furthermore no intimate details are given and dates are always a bit foggy) and a personal journal that I write in fountain pen and is full of my more personal meanderings. The only area that the two meet is in the arena of my spiritual life. There is a paradox in that. The spiritual life is not simply a personal journey, but a question of how the soul interacts with souls and with God. It is not the new-age bullshit that makes anything that feels good spiritual. I am of solidly Christian convictions and cannot divorce my spiritual quest from those moorings, nor would I want to. I do, however, find that I feel much like the loyal opposition in my feelings toward the postmodern church. It has cut the moorings and is adrift in a sea of mediocrity and – I believe – has forsaken its first love.

Today is Good Friday. The words of Psalm 22 still define this day for me: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me…” I don’t think that there is an adequate answer to that cry. It is a gasp of desperation and a cry of faith. There is a paradox implicit in that that speaks volumes about the nature of the Christ and the nature of humanity. To say “My God” is to proclaim a relationship, a connection that is still intact, at least from the point of view of the one speaking. The question of being forsaken follows the cry of the lover that has been betrayed by the beloved. That said from the lonely wooden tower of the cross: this image is too powerful in its stark and naked despair for words. Luther understood that in his formulation of the theology of the cross. The Christ event is for me how God transcends holiness by embracing the profane and recreating it into something new. One cannot lose sight of the sheer hatefulness of the act and the intention of crucifixion: it was not to punish a criminal, but to crush hope in others that would rise against Rome. Let us be clear: the Romans crucified Christ, the Gentiles pounded the nails into his arms and left him there to suffer and suffocate in his own blood. How dare we blame Judaism for Roman terrorism and imperialism?

There is so much that is problematic in the cross. There is so much that is beyond sane explanation. I find that most Christians don’t do well with it. Instead they take the way of the theology of glory that made Jesus into something other than a man in pain, suffering a most heinous death in front of those that he loved as well as those who hated him. I do not think that the question is how could it happen. I think the better question is why it does not happen more often. Hitler did it. Sadam Hussein did it. Stalin did it. Pol Pot did it. We do it, too. We dropped two atom bombs on non-military targets in WWII. We have overthrown legitimately established governments to support dictators of our own liking (Sadam Hussein being only one example, supported until inconvenient, then an immoral war is waged to change partners with no regard for the blood shed). We are the Romans. We are the ones pounding the spikes into the arms of the Christ.

Niebuhr spoke of the moral individual in immoral society. He observed that personal morality was not immune to corporate immorality. Such is the nature of power. Such is the nature of the state. We live in an immoral world – dare I say a world corrupted by sin? – and cannot free ourselves. We sin against God in thought, words, and deeds: by what we do and what we do not do. We do not love God, we do not love our neighbors as ourselves. The cross is only the most poignant symbol of this. And we dare to call upon God for our physical well-being, for blessings over our economy and continue to rape the environment – God’s creation over which we are called to be wise stewards – and turn a judiciously blind eye to the horrors promulgated in this world by regimes and individuals that are to our liking and who serve our purposes.

I cannot change the world. Hell, I have a hard enough time changing myself.

But what of the crucifixion on this Good Friday, two-thousand years after the Romans nailed an itinerant preacher to the tree and left him there to die. My favorite hymn for the day is running though my mind, even as I am listening to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: T’was I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee, I crucified thee. Would that I learn how to beat my swords into ploughshares, how to heal the wounds in the broken body of Christ, how to live in love as an act of repentance, to live in joy as an affirmation of grace.

Ah, but I am only a fool…