Brunswick Baptist Church
Good Friday reflection
Isaiah 53:1-12, John 19:13-30
For many, perhaps even most, Christians, Good Friday is the most important day in the Christian calendar. Easter Sunday, Christmas Day, Epiphany, Pentecost – all significant observances; each with its own rich meaning – but Good Friday taps into a deep root within the human spirit as it depicts in a raw and brutal way, experiences of injustice, of violent death and of gut-tearing grief. The cross is the great archetype of human suffering, and crucifixion is the metaphor used by Christian believers and unbelievers alike, to describe their most painful experiences of betrayal and abandonment.
Mark’s Gospel has the most seemingly despairing end to the crucifixion with the cry of the God-forsaken Jesus, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’. If that was all that we had to base our understanding of Good Friday on, no doubt there would still be some comfort in knowing that the Messiah of God had the same kind of experience that we have when we are driven to the edge of despair.
But even the cry of the God-forsaken Jesus must be understood as a first century Jew would understand it, i.e. as a direct quotation of the first verse of Psalm 22. And every devout Jew would know that the psalm begins by describing the worst experience of alienation and self loathing – ‘I am a worm and not human, scorned by others and despised by all the people’ – but then crescendos into one of the great hymns of praise of all time. ‘For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted: he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him. From you comes my praise in the great congregation. My vows I will pay before those who fear him. The poor shall eat and be satisfied: those who seek him shall praise the Lord’.
The cry of abandonment of Jesus, like the dark opening of Tschaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony (6th), leads on to affirmations of praise, like the symphony’s grand triumphant climax.
Good Friday is a wonderful opportunity to express the grief and pain of rejection, and of great sorrow, and I can imagine that for many bushfire victims who have lost loved ones as well as homes; and for survivors of the L’Aquila earthquake in Italy, this Good Friday will express exactly how they are feeling – abandoned by God.
But that is not where the story ends. Even without the astonishing claim that ‘Christ is Risen’, the biblical message is that death and suffering are never the final word in the human story. Despair and hopelessness are never understood to be the appropriate or inevitable responses to injustice and violence, not even death on a cross.
Take the ‘suffering servant’ images in the book of Isaiah:
He grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.
Sounds very like the early stanzas of Psalm 22. Here is a natural perception and description of a suffering human; ugly, disfigured, repulsive. And because he is ugly and doesn’t fit the categories of what we call attractive and successful, he is despised and rejected. This week we have seen the gaoling of the last of five men convicted of setting fire to Irving Plotkin, a Rosebud man suffering from schizophrenia. As if his affliction wasn’t enough, Plotkin was despised, tortured, treated with contempt by these ordinary, bored youths. Doused with petrol in his own home, set alight and left to die. And yet, as I read the reports of his reaction to his tormentors, Plotkin did not seem to despise them. The story of Plotkin, the story of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, and the story of the crucifixion of Jesus, all bear within them testimony of our human capacity to inflict suffering on our fellow humans, but also our human capacity to forgive.
And herein lies the mystery of suffering as we find it in the crucifixion and in the suffering servant. Their suffering was not a cause for self pity; their suffering was redemptive. Listen to the next few phrases from Isaiah:
Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Notice the change in understanding of the writer. He was one of those who judged the object of scorn as being struck down by God, but then something happened, and he could see that this seemingly pitiful creature was in fact the servant of God, and the mediator of God’s grace to others. He had a conversion in his understanding of affliction and suffering.
Redemptive suffering; it sounds like an oxy moron, surely suffering is destructive and to be avoided at all costs. That’s why we have Medicare and take out medical insurance – to avoid suffering. That’s why many advocate euthanasia as a merciful way of bringing unendurable suffering to an end. And yet there is a clear implication in Isaiah and in the Gospels that suffering can be redemptive. When Jesus posed the conundrum to the disciples that the one who wanted to save his life would lose it and the one who lost her life for his sake and the Gospel’s would save it, wasn’t he saying ‘don’t run away from the suffering of the world’? Don’t protect your life by turning your face from injustice and oppression. Take up your cross day-by-day whatever the cost, and as you engage the struggle and pain of others, you will discover a new quality in life, liberated from the need for security and protection, for there you will discover God.
Jenny and I had the privilege this week of sitting with a young woman from Kinglake who lost house, car, everything, in the bushfire. She said the experience had changed her attitude to life. She wanted to live more simply, have fewer things, and to focus on what really mattered in life – family, friends, relationships. She also observed that when warehouses of donated clothing, furniture, white goods, toys, were set up in bushfire areas, it wasn’t the people who had lost everything who rushed in to get what they could – they had no place to store things. It was the people who hadn’t lost anything who rushed in to get as much as they could. It reminded me a of a saying of Mother Theresa – it’s not the poor who complain, it’s the rich. Those who would save their lives will lose them, but those who lose their lives for my sake and the Gospel’s will save them.
Can the loss of houses, health, family, neighbours, friends possibly be redemptive? I can’t answer that one because I have never experienced it, but I have observed people whose losses have been much greater than mine who have transcended those losses, not by denying them, but by meeting them with courage and with deep faith.
I remember from my teenage years a woman that Jenny and her family used to visit in Mt Royal as it was then. Her name was Ada, and Ada was struck down with a dreadful arthritic condition as a teenager and confined to bed – her body shrunk to the size of a child’s, and she suffered great pain. Ada was one of the most peaceful and wise souls I have ever met. She had a sharp mind and would look after the affairs of others in the hospital like Millie, who had the body of a woman and the mind of a child. It was difficult for a young bloke as I was then, not to look on Ada and Millie with pity and to think that their lives had been wasted. But Ada inspired countless people to live their lives more selflessly, more in the way and the spirit of Jesus, to lose their lives in serving others. She was the one who experienced life to the full as Jesus promised, and she was filled with the spirit of God. Her suffering was indeed redemptive because she chose to focus, not on her own pain and disability, but with compassion on those in her tiny world of Mt Royal.
This Good Friday, let us reflect on how we look upon those who suffer. Do we despise and reject them, turn our faces from them because they are not attractive and just maybe make us feel a little guilty for our good health and energy. Or do we, even just a little bit, recognise that they are special in the sight of God, and that they just may be one of the suffering servants of the Lord?