Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the Soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twines.
From “Auguries of Innocence” ~ William Blake
“But the thing is, you know you can’t have like a light
without a dark to stick it in. You know what I’m saying?” ~ Arlo Guthrie
GOOD FRIDAY
The story of Good Friday is the story of suffering, love, and LOSS. Like all transformative losses, it is only good in hindsight. Like all true paradoxes, the revelation of this oxymoron — Good Friday — only becomes true down the dusty road the women ran after discovering the tomb was empty. But while our life is being turned upside down, shattered, dealt a death blow, that ultimately it might turn out good is the furthest thing from our minds and hearts. In the moment, we are not able to look under every grief and pine. Goodness, let alone joy, is impossible to imagine. So indelible is the pain and sorrow that believing otherwise seems an affront to common sense and basic honesty. As with Jesus’ family, friends, and followers in the midst of the chaos, confusion, and catastrophe brought on by Jesus’ torture and death, our hopes are dashed. Life is sucked out of us. There is a hollow feeling in the pit of our stomach. The world turns very dark, and despair rules the day. All is lost. It’s hard to breathe.
We might cry “Good God” but we would be utterly perplexed whether to end that depth-charge with an exclamation point or a question mark. At such times, borrowing and renovating Lucy’s lament of “Good Grief!” is worth but five cents. And when (well-meaning but grossly insensitive) people come along when we are smack-dab in the midst of the shadow of the valley of death offering their two cents worth, hearing “It’s God’s will” or “God doesn’t give us more than we can bear” or “God chooses those strong enough to handle it,” it is as incongruous and offensive as wishing someone a “Happy Good Friday.” This is why women in labor have been known to throw hard objects at soft-headed husbands because although a bundle of joy may be the end result, child birth, as Carol Burnett once said, feels a bit like pulling your upper lip up over your head.
That we know the trajectory of the story from the distance of two thousand years, that we know and believe in not only resurrection but Pentecost and Ascension, in no way minimizes the excruciating pain of the labor of love that brings good things to life, even when what is being born involves agony and oftentimes or eventually death. Even when what is being born anew is us. Even when what is being born through death is the end of death’s rule.
It is important to remember that the tripartite story of the Paschal Tridduum is one story told in a three-paneled triptych. The extravagant and embodied love shown by Jesus on what we now call Holy Thursday (panel 1) must give us the courage to face not only the loss that we commemorate today on Good Friday (panel 2), not merely our losses and our personal grief, but the suffering of others, especially the most vulnerable, exploited, or marginalized by a dominant culture that’s modus operandi is contrary to the gospel of Jesus and the God of the Hebrew prophets. The triptych not only instructs us that today is not a day to pretend we don’t know the life and lean into the liberation and joy of Easter (panel 3), but also that the middle panel, like the two that flank it, deserves our complete attention, inner participation, and total engagement .
Bypassing Good Friday
The writer Sue Monk Kidd once relayed that a minister friend of hers said that Christians don’t know how to have a good breakdown. For the most part, we don’t know how to have a Good Friday either. Two extreme tendencies help us to see the truth in the blessed tension of the three-hinged panels that teach the sacred journey from love to liberation invariably goes through loss. One tendency is to skip over Good Friday altogether. After all, these proponents say, we are good news people. People of joy! And crucifixions are rather brutal, ugly, depressing affairs. It’s enough to ruin one’s day. On the day of my wedding, when the florist bringing flowers into the church approached the altar and saw the massive crucifix hanging on the front wall, she exclaimed, “Oh, that’s gross!” Yes, and I’m guessing that was the Romans’ point.
And yet, lest I seem smug, one of my biggest regrets in life is what we did with the large banner we had designed and asked a friend to make with a sun on it to complement one of the songs we had chosen for our wedding liturgy and whose title we had printed on the cover of the worship program: “Children of Sunlight.” With all the other more critical details, we had not thought through where we would hang the banner which when brought to the church the day of the wedding was so much larger than we expected. In hindsight, the best choice would have been not to use it. But not wanting to hurt the feelings of the person who had sewn it, and pressed for time with no other option seemingly available in an architecturally challenged space, and (from where I sit now) in youthful naiveté and panicked haste, we hung the giant banner on the one wall that was large enough to hold it– and thus, over the crucifix. It so violates my theology and spirituality (even back then), so symbolically covers up the agony of the agony and ecstasy that is marriage, and so mocks me now as a divorced man, that my face flushes with embarrassment at the thought and admission of it.
After visiting a chapel that the French painter Andre Girard had decorated a woman told the painter, “M. Girard, I do not like your crucifixion. It is so unpleasant.” “Madame,” said the artist, “it was an unpleasant occasion.” This proclivity to avoid what is bad about Good Friday reduces the effulgence of Easter to Easter Lite. Anyone who has ever known real anguish, real failure, real suffering, and real despair knows that Easter means nothing if it doesn’t bring liberation, doesn’t bring LIFE that runs deeper, higher, and wider than the dimensions of death and our own discrepancies.
Being Enamored with Good Friday
If the first extreme tendency is to bypass altogether the agony of Good Friday, the second tendency is to become so enamored with the gory details of it, so stuck on the bloody suffering and death of Jesus that we build a masochistic spirituality out of it, encasing the brutality in an ornate, gilded gold frame which is essentially what Mel Gibson did in his film The Passion of the Christ. When the shadows of Good Friday permanently overshadow the luminosity of Easter, when the breakdown caused by misfortune or betrayal or loss or failure or sin or rupture or disappointment or violence refuses to guide us to breakthrough, when darkness becomes an end in itself instead of a means of grace, then our spirituality is false, un-christian, and impotent. Such a view and way of life is often mistaken for piety but in fact is a charade that actually glorifies suffering and shares nothing in common with the re-creative suffering of Jesus. Such religion is like kissing up to the wrong frog, one that will never awaken or transfigure or bring real life.
The counter-cultural wisdom of Good Friday suggests that it is at our own peril that we ignore, deny, or dodge the all too real passion plays, crucifixions, and death dealings that play out daily in our lives, communities, natural habitats, and world. Just as deadly is the propensity to make a shrine out of suffering and death, even Jesus’ death to which we are permanently linked.
The Indictment is an Invitation
Jesus’ passion and death are stripped of their transformative power if we fail to understand that his crime was the radicalness of his love. A love so incarnate, so extravagant, so nonpartisan that it threatened both the religious and the political powers of his day as it threatens the powerbrokers of our own time. The key to Good Friday is to risk facing into our own complicity, guilt, silence, bystanding, and responsibility for the little and large Good Fridays that are happening right now in our midst, in our neighborhoods, in our towns and cities, in our country, at our borders, in our soil, forests, air, and water, and that we allow to continue to happen without protest or daring the criminality of radical love. The indictment is an invitation. It is a summons — to each of us and all of us, as a faith community, as a nation, and as the earth community — not to detour around the agony in the gardens and the crucifixions that are occurring around us, not to look away but instead to admit to and repent of our complicity in the affliction of others, human and other-than-human, and of the earth, all of whom and all of which are full of God’s glory.
The key to Good Friday, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a martyr at the hands of Nazi mad men, wrote, is to “suffer with God.” To be with God in God’s hour of need. The key is to dare to go dark long and deeply enough when our own Good Fridays come unfairly or unintentionally or unwantedly so that we can experience the extravagant and fierce love of God that first comes into the darkness of our lives as darkness and only later as light. Of this solidarity that comes as divine darkness Wendell Berry writes:
To know the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.*
If we refuse to know the dark, in ourselves, in our community, in our country, in our world, we refuse to know the light. Good Friday invites us to enter fully into the darkness and losses of our lives and of the unnecessary and human instigated suffering in our world and to dare to let the darkness speak, to dare to let the darkness offer the way, the truth, and the life.
The Great Grief Cry and the Great Transforming
I will end with a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke as translated by Robert Bly. It seems to allude to the mystery and meaning of this day, to express the massive darkness of abandonment Jesus felt on the cross, and to capture the sense of impasse and claustrophobic pressure that goes with the sepulchral lives so many are forced into or that we ourselves might know from experience.
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
And no space: everything is close to my face,
And everything close to my face is stone.I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief—
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
Then your great transforming will happen to me,
And my great grief cry will happen to you.**
Good Friday invites from deep within us our great grief cry as we weep with remorse for both our inconspicuous and our blatant refusals to make God’s dream come true on earth as it is in heaven. Good Friday invites from deep within us a great grief cry so heartfelt and piercing that it might move God or the agent’s of God’s mercy to break into our lives and our troubled world with compassion and energizing love. Good Friday invites from deep within us the audacity to hope that “the dark too blooms and sings and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.” If we listen and let the darkness speak when we cannot see our way through, the chosen foolishness of our faith becomes a holy suspicion that Good Friday is the seedbed of new life, and the moving force of the great transformation that was contained from the beginning in God’s original dream and heart’s desire for us and all the earth.
Good Friday to you, friends.
~ Dan
* Collected Poems 1957-1982, Wendell Berry.
** Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, Trans. Robert Bly, #22.
Updated April 2019.