Good Friday

Human history is a procession, a movement through time and space. Like a river, it has carried us along for millennia. Well maybe not; perhaps it is not so much a procession but is rather more like a wandering, a dispersal. A procession is a deliberate, public movement; a wandering is a scattered, private, and not very purposeful movement. A lack of true deliberateness has marked the human move through time. Ordinary men and kings have all tried to bend the wandering to a purpose, sometimes noble, sometimes cruel, sometimes just trivial. Where are we supposed to be going? Are we there yet? Freedom, so basically misunderstood all this time as merely a power to bend the movement of life to our immediate aims, wants and strivings. We decide where to go and when we have arrived, fearing deep inside ourselves that there really is nowhere to go, and we can never really get there.

The redemption, though, is surely a procession, a deliberate movement through place and time that is at the same time a display, a making known. People get lost in a wandering; people find themselves in a procession. We end Holy Thursday with a procession of the Eucharistic specie from the Altar which has just served as a backdrop for the Washing of the Feet, and which immediately after offered its flattened surface for the sacrificial supper. The procession went to the Altar of Repose, where the disciples wait and pray a while with the Lord. Some might have fallen asleep. Where is He going? And are we there yet?

Salió a la noche acompañado

por los que se habían alimentado,

(y pronto se durmieron los sustentados

hasta la venida de los soldados).

Con un beso traicionado,

Él ya se había regalado,

con su cuerpo al toque dado;

antes que el manto se lo hayan arrancado,

Él mismo libremente se lo había quitado

en sangre-seña de amor licuado.

But the procession resumes on Good Friday with the Passion itself. The Lord moves deliberately; his disciples, start to wander. The Stations of the Cross are also a deliberate movement. Their public nature displays to the eye what the mind and heart is invited to take in. Some people follow Jesus in the procession, others wait for him at particular points on the road. As we follow step by step, we enter more deeply into the identity and mission of this One. Pontius Pilate stops the procession in order to show Him to the people: Behold the Man. Yes, a man, like all men, beaten and bloodied by a cruelty both anonymous and clearly authored. Everyone and no one has mocked this man. Everyone and no one has judged him. The procession moves on. Again Pilate takes him out to show him to the people: Behold your king. The same One, only more humiliated, laughed at and rejected than ever. The display is more intensely revealing because it is meant so sarcastically; a mockery turns into an announcement. Every man is a king, and a king shows himself a man, when he is sovereign over his decisions and acts. When the procession stops, Jesus utters the words: It is finished.

Con su último aliento dado,

enardeció la tierra por cada lado,

engendrando en ella un gran temblor.

Noche fecunda de pasión vaciada,

ofrenda entera que no preserva nada,

riega la tierra desde el monte sagrado,

corre torrente desde su costado.

The Fathers of the Church and Saint Thomas all linger over the deliberateness with which the Lord gives himself over to death. No one takes my life from me, I give it freely. This much of the divine prerogative the Word made Flesh retained in Himself, the power to hold death at bay until He decides to let it take Him. And if this prerogative found a suitable expression in the human nature of the Son, than we learn in this procession that we too can retain sovereignty, be men and kings, even when the jaws of the lion approach. He retains sovereignty throughout, even at the moment of death, so that we can recover sovereignty at every moment of life. He has bent the movement through time and place to a different way. Our freedom is not so much about making life subject to our power, as it is a gift by which we donate ourselves to the Maker of life.

And when it is finished, the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, He was heard because of his reverence. Heard by whom? The Father hears the giving over, and receives the gift. The procession will take up again, but like all things that touch the human, it will take a little time. If death is a dead-end of rubble that blocks our way further through the procession of life, and if history is a chronicle of our race’s vain efforts to either knock through it or pretend it is not there, then the Cross is the battering ram that confronts its balrog-ferocity and opens the passage-way to the Father’s House. Didn’t you know that was where we were going? We are almost there. We can wait here until the third day.

The freedom of God, and the freedom of men: We are kings and queens in the sovereignty of Christ. We know this, because God the Son has entered the human wandering and changed its direction forever; He has turned into a procession.  Amen.