Good Friday: The Grief of God

Good Friday:  The Grief of God

‘God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all’

I find texts such as this difficult.  On the face of it these texts give an image of a God who is cruel and uncaring, to say the least.   How do they ‘fit’ with the passages that emphasise God’s abiding love affirmed throughout Israel’s history and manifested in Jesus?

Jesus stands in the line of the prophets of Israel understood themselves to have been sent to the people by God.  Abraham Heschel[i] wrote

The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man’s fierce greed….  Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world.  It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man……

Man is rebellious and full of iniquity, and yet so cherished is he that God, the Creator of heaven and earth, is saddened when forsaken by him.

I find it difficult to believe that Jesus’ death was ‘pre-determined’ in his sending but I do believe there was an ‘inevitability’ about it in the context of a world shaped by broken humanity in which fear, domination and division work together to keep the powerful powerful at the expense of everyone else.

In Jesus’ sending, God has more hope and trust in us than we have in ourselves.  In the final days of his life Jesus tells the parable of the vineyard (Lk 20:9-19; Mk 12:1-12; Mt 21:33-46) in which the tenants systematically kill the servants sent by the owner until finally they kill the son.

He had one left to send, a son, whom he loved. He sent him last of all, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’

“But the tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ ⁸ So they took him and killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. (Mk 12:6-7)

This parable appears in all three synoptic gospels and in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.  It is an insight into Jesus’ self-understanding as sent by God and his acceptance of the inevitability of the outcome of his identity, actions and words.  And as with Jesus’ predecessors the prophets, God rages, grieves and forgives[ii].  God is no passive spectator in Jesus’ life or in ours.

In Jesus, every heartbeat, every act and every cell in his being, God was showing and offering God’s own reconciling, healing and love for people.  Not just humanity as a theory, but humanity in each and every person.

There is always freedom:  freedom to take the step and respond to what Jesus was offering to become free from fear; and the freedom of Jesus to stay faithful to his call as one sent from God no matter the consequences.  When these two freedoms collide, there is an ‘inevitability’ about execution.

The jeering words for Jesus to come down off the cross if he is truly the son of God are Johannine irony at its best.  Both God and Jesus are bound by their truth, for to come down from the cross would mean to use the controlling power that comes from fear.  It would be the ultimate lie.  This is the final fidelity of Jesus and of God to us, God’s beloved creation.  So, God ‘spare his own son’ because God did not spare himself.  God and Jesus are in this together.

This is God’s grief:  that the beloved one sent in seeking and faithful love is dead and rejected; that God’s beloved people (not just the Jews, but all people) are so blind as to forsake this faithful God for the false god.

However, God’s grief is not sterile.  God’s grief is grounded in compassion and creativity and fidelity.  Jesus rising is the fidelity of this sending:  God who remains faithful to Jesus and to all creation; and Jesus who lived his humanity with such fidelity that we glimpse the final outcome for all of us.

The resurrection is not a ‘reward’ for Jesus’ good work.  The resurrection is the manifestation of identity - Jesus so human that the community ultimately recognised him as divine.  We also come to know who we are in our most true identity.            

In Mary and in the women who ‘watched from a distance’ we see God’s grief and God’s fidelity.  In Jesus’ words of forgiveness we see God’s astounding forgiveness – and the offer again, not only of healing, but of a union between God and humanity that finds its expression in the empty tomb.

 

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[i] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets, Vol. 1, Harper Collins, 1962, p. 5

[ii] In this parable the perpetrators are threatened with ejection and/or death.  This too is part of the prophet’s rhetoric.  This is what their actions deserve, but God ‘repents’.

The early Christian community perhaps interpreted the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem as the result of the Jew’s rejection of Jesus.

Good Friday "...and he breathed forth his spirit'

Good Friday – ‘…. and he breathed forth his spirit’

Today we celebrate the crucifixion of Jesus. We are able to do this because we know he rose from the dead.

However, we need to step back a little and remember that Jesus died, really, absolutely died. He did not appear to die. He did not go into his trial, torture and execution with the thought ‘It will all be o.k. because I will rise again’.

Jesus died.

He died just as truly as every living being died and will die.

We must not forget this.

If we forget this, then his whole life and his Rising will be gutted of its power and deep meaning.

Neither must we allow our knowledge of his Rising let us stray from the fact that he did what we will all do – he died.

Think of Jesus: a man in his prime, abounding in vitality, seized by his calling, afire with God, strong in love, passionate and tender. Everything to live for. Jesus was not someone with a death wish. The gospels tell us that he would leave a place because of death threats such as happened at Nazareth when the townsfolk wanted to harm him.

Jesus would have known that powerful people wanted him silenced. His own predictions of the passion, while partly the work of the evangelists, seem to me to be grounded in Jesus own sense that this is how his life and ministry may end.

When the final betrayal came, there was something more important for Jesus than saving his own life. That was the consistency of his conduct with the truth of God that he embodied. He was faithful.

Jesus’ attitude to his death was no philosophically detached resignation. He grieved for his impending death; he grieved for those he would leave; he grieved that people did not understand. He begged God to relieve him of this…. this ending. In the end he went to betrayal, incarceration, torture and death in the darkness of faith that holds on when all outward signs have gone, when everything appears lost.

As we will all do one day he surrendered himself to the final detachment – he surrendered all who he was, all he had done, all he loved into the hands of God.

His life dimmed, went out.

Jesus died.

To the world, it was an end. To be rejoiced over or to be grieved over depending on which ‘side’ you were on.

The friends and family who had abided with him, the women who had watched with him and an emboldened secret follower did what was necessary for decent burial. Others fled in bewildered fear.

We know, and they were to know soon that something happened, something so outside their experience that we have been trying to understand it ever since. To say that Jesus rose from the dead does not in any way take away the very human and real fact that he died.

Jesus remains dead.

He lives now, not as we do, but in a completely new reality, more intimate with and in creation than the limitations of a human body could previously allow. If Jesus’ human body is not alive in this new dimension, then nothing about him is.

Theologies that imagine the Resurrection as a collective experience of the disciples or as ‘inspiration’ or in some way diminish the physical reality of Jesus Risen, to me miss the whole point. Jesus, in the passing over of his death has drawn together creation that poured forth from the heart of God at the very beginning, and carried it with him into the heart of God. There is now something new within creation. And that is Jesus, more intimate, more present, more subversive.

In the end, our words fall short of the mystery of Jesus’ death and rising. I think it is no coincidence that one of the most frequent images associated with Jesus’ life is the pietà. This image resonates with our human experience of grief and loss. We mourn, we grieve, we remember, we do all those loving human things that cherish the person who had died.

So today, with the liturgy let us gaze upon Jesus. He had to die, as we all will die. Let us not diminish the enormity of this. Yet it is precisely here, in Jesus final act of surrender, that God is most fully shown as unfailingly faithful, life giving, cherishing creation.

As Jesus' death was consistent with his living, so will our death be.

We know now that death is not the end.