Good Friday, 2024

Pet peeves? Oh, I have plenty.

But I won’t get into all my theological quibbles, or my personal tastes and distastes. I’ve actually overstated things in the title. It’s not click-bait; I know you’re the only person seeing this, dear reader. (Thank you!)

Really, I want to comment on a few things I tend to notice while worshiping in the choir stall—or, “praying twice,” as Augustine put it. I do grow weary of the long, Lenten reveling in ..wallowing in . preoccupation with guilt; but I am also learning to recast some of it as I continue to wrestle with rites and texts and personal connotations, and involvement in choir is helping with that.

To give an example—of a pet peeve and my wrestling with it—there is a lovely little motet we always sing on Palm Sunday, “Drop, Drop Slow Tears,” a setting of a poem by Phineas Fletcher. We sing its setting by Orlando Gibbons. The tune is ravishing; the text, well…

Drop, drop slow tears,
And bathe those beauteous feet,
Which brought from Heav’n
The news and Prince of Peace.

Cease not, wet eyes,
His mercies to entreat;
To cry for vengeance:
Sin doth never cease.

In your deep floods
Drown all my faults and fears;
Nor let His eye see
Sin, but through my tears.

Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Miscellanies, 1633

Fletcher here juxtaposes Isaiah 52:7—

How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
who brings good news,
who announces salvation,
who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”

Is. 52:7, NRSV

—with the story of an unnamed woman who apparently crashes a party to wash Jesus’ feet with her tears, drying them with her hair (Luke 7:36-50; a similar story appears in all four gospels, but in the others, the woman pours perfume over his head). It is a beautiful poem. But. For me, at least, the focus is on the poem’s persona and their guilt, not on the (good) news or the Prince of Peace whose feet have arrived with that news. In the Gospel story, Jesus strongly rebukes the party’s host, who comments, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him—that she is a sinner” (vs. 39; NRSV). That man sees a sinner; Jesus, however, is moved by her intimate act of love and reassures the woman that her sins are forgiven. It’s like he interrupted her singing the above poem somewhere in the middle of verse 2.

See, to whatever depth human suffering goes—whether it’s guilt, or sorrow, or pain, what we’ve done to ourselves or to others, or what others have done to us, or even the general anxiety picked up by paying attention to the world around us—Jesus is quick to dive right down there with us. This is the focal point I’ve been trying to observe this Holy Week.

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We have a great example from him on the Cross—and this relates to the combination pet peeve/misunderstanding I wish to dispel. Known as the “cry of dereliction, it is when Jesus quotes the beginning of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Growing up in an Evangelical tradition, I was actually taught that Jesus really was abandoned by his Father; that, because he was bearing our sins, God the Father could not even look at him, and turned his back on Jesus. [NB: I’m using the gendered terms for God that the tellers of this tale would use.] And the “cry of dereliction” was the proof. Psalm 22 had predicted this and several other elements of Jesus’ passion.

But wait—Psalms are liturgical songs (and as an added bonus, the link above takes you to a page with a chant accompanying the BCP text of Psalm 22). In Jesus’ day, as Jews and Christians do today, Psalms were used as prayers, both in communal worship and private devotion. Often, when I am under duress, I recite parts of Psalm 42 and 43: “Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul? And why are you so disquieted within me? Put your trust in God, for I will yet give thanks to him, who is the help of my countenance, and my God.”

There is no reason to believe Jesus wasn’t doing the exact same thing. Psalm 22 is pretty long, and he was, you know, dying. I think that just as that refrain from Psalms 42 and 43 calls to my mind the whole of both Psalms, Jesus’ heartfelt cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” both expresses the depth of his suffering and reflects a faith that persists through the middle of, and refuses to let go of the end of, that Psalm:

Be not far away, O Lord;
you are my strength; hasten to help me. […]

I will declare your Name to my brethren;
in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.

Praise the Lord, you that fear him;
stand in awe of him, O offspring of Israel;
all you of Jacob’s line, give glory. […]

My praise is of him in the great assembly;
I will perform my vows int he presence of those who worship him.

The poor shall eat and be satisfied,
and those who seek the Lord shall praise him:
‘May your heart live for ever!’

All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord,
and all the families of the nations bow before him.

For kingship belongs to the Lord;
he rules over the nations.

To him alone all who sleep in the earth bow down in worship;
all who go down to the dust fall before him.

My soul shall live for him;
my descendants shall serve him;
they shall be known as the Lord’s for ever.

They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn
the saving deeds that he has done.

Psalm 22:18, 21-22, 24-30, BCP Psalter

To imagine that Jesus’ use of this Psalm in his time of need is a teaching that the Holy and Undivided Trinity was…divided! That God the Father could in any way forsake God the Son! We can split the atom, to disastrous effect. We cannot split God. Nothing can.

The Incarnate God dying on a cross is the furthest thing from any kind of abandonment! It is the culmination of “God with us.” I sometimes joke that we’ll get no satisfying answer to the “Problem of Evil” from a God whose apparent response to human suffering was, “Oooh, lemme in on that.” But in all seriousness, God saw our suffering and could not resist joining us in it. Because God is love—the doctrine of the Trinity points to the deep truth that God is, in the core of God’s mysterious being, relational and superabundant love—God will flow, like water into the deep cracks of dry earth, into every crevice of our pain. Not because God wants to suffer, but because God wants to be with us.

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We see this profound descent depicted in the traditional icon type known as The Anastasis. The Greek word refers to Resurrection; the icon, in symbolizing Jesus’ Resurrection, depicts his harrowing of hell:

Jesus’ billowing robes are actually intended to signify his descent. Here, he has broken the gates of hell (in the words of the Orthodox troparion, “trampling down death by death and on those in the tomb bestowing life”). Death is seen bound—sometimes under the gates, but in this image, on top of them. Keys to the gates scatter like bones into the abyss (one of the few places you will ever see black in an Orthodox icon). Christ has taken Adam and Eve, representing all humanity, by the wrist and is pulling them up out of their graves. Do they seem a bit hesitant? I think the iconographer here has captured that tendency of ours to draw back (as George Herbert described) because we hear our sins’ unceasing cry for vengeance. Jesus doesn’t hear it—or, at least, won’t be swayed by it. He’s here to save. Other saints, such as kings David and Solomon and John the Baptist (the three in halos), seem a bit readier to go where Christ has come to take them. Like the Psalmist said, we can make our bed in the grave, but God will be there, too. “Bidden or not bidden, God is present,” an ancient saying goes.¹

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Our choir this year sang the same Communion motet on Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday: William Byrd’s magnificent setting of Ave verum corpus, a fourteenth-century text. Its words are fascinating as a Communion meditation, but particularly in Holy Week:

Ave verum corpus, natus ex Maria virgine,
Vere passum immolatum in cruce pro homine,
Cujus latus perforatum vero fluxit sanguine;
Esto nobis praegustatum in mortis examine.
O dulcis, O pie, O Jesu fili Mariae,
Miserere mei.

Hail the true body, born of the Virgin Mary,
who truly suffered [and] was sacrificed on the cross for man,
From whose pierced side blood truly flowed,
Be for us a foretaste in the trial of death.
O sweet, O merciful Jesus, son of Mary,
Have mercy on me.

(I’ll admit: I pieced that translation together from several sources and my own judgment, though I’m no Latin expert.)

Notice a few things going on in this text. First, some version of the word “true” turns up a lot. This is because it is referring to the elements of the Eucharist—the bread in particular. Picture the priest holding up the consecrated Host, pointing to it, and saying, “Behold, the Lamb of God…” The intent is the same. The Catholic Church understands the bread and wine to truly be Jesus’ body and blood. [Insert long theological explanation of transubstantiation here…or don’t; I can explain it if anyone is interested.] This bread here? This is the very body that was born of Mary, truly died, etc.

Another thing going on this text is the dual emphases of Jesus’ suffering, and his being Mary’s son. The Eucharistic context, particularly as described above, should give a clue to what this is about; however, it speaks to a theological point going back to the christological debates of the earliest centuries of Christian history. Following the first Christians’ experience of Jesus as a human being walking among them who was killed and then—astonishingly—was back for a minute, generations of Christians to follow reflected on that experience, proclaimed it, preached it, celebrated it in liturgies, and, along the way, realized they didn’t all have the same understanding of what they were professing. They were still trying to figure out Jesus’ exact relation to God. Without digging too deeply into all of this in an already criminally long blog post, there were some who denied Jesus’ divinity, and others who denied his humanity. It’s that second group that concerns us here. Their position, known as docetism, claimed that Christ only appeared to be human. This often went along with Gnostic traditions that saw a stark dualism between spirit (good) and matter (evil).

As the tradition coalesced around the doctrine that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, those two natures inseparably joined but not confused [all fascinating stuff, I promise—seriously!] an increasing emphasis on Jesus’ suffering and death in art, liturgy, and preaching helped to cement the truth of his incarnation in the minds of believers. Here’s the important bit: Christians began to focus so much on his suffering and death because it proved he was human. The same goes for identifying him so closely with Mary. During the christological controversies, bishop named Nestorius started balking at Mary’s title Theotokos, or God-bearer; he thought we should instead call Mary the “Christ bearer,” or Christotokos. That idea was shot down—and he was sent into exile! It’s not about Mary. It’s about Jesus. It was as if the council said to Nestorius, “Hang on…You don’t think her child is God?” When a baby is born, it’s not hard to figure out who their mother is. We know Jesus is Mary’s child. Calling her “God-bearer” is a statement about Jesus: it says what we can’t know only from her giving birth to a baby boy.

And so this Eucharistic hymn tells us that the bread just consecrated is actually that body that Mary gave birth to—you know, Mary, the God-bearer? Well, this bread is the body that was God that Mary bore. Those of us who do believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar but don’t think of it in terms of transubstantiation may not fully come along with the text’s claim about the bread. However, the other point the text makes speaks to us profoundly: The Real Presence we meet in the sacrament—the God we meet in the sacrament—was truly, fully human, literally from birth to the grave.

Oh, and back out of the grave.

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As I’ve been typing this, Good Friday became Holy Saturday, the Sabbath in which God rested and in which God’s human body lay dead in a tomb. Later tonight, I’ll be singing in the dark around a new fire as we affirm the harder part for us Christians to believe in the 21st century: We get the suffering part. But defeating death itself, and rising from the grave? Stay tuned.

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1. That quote apparently comes from the Oracle at Delphi, but has been appropriated by Christians since at least the Renaissance. ↩︎