Good Friday: Into the Vortex

Good Friday. As he leaves the upper room, the Gospels suggest, Christ allows himself to fall into a swirling vortex of cause and effect over which nobody can have an
y control. The King of the Jews gives himself up into the hands of his enemies. He surrenders to an overwhelming chain of events.
The disciples, the priests, the procurator, the soldiers all think at different times that they are driving the story, but they are wrong. Nobody fetches up in this story where they want to be, but the faith says that everybody ends up where they need to be.

Good Friday is a good day to explore Rachel Mann’s new book, Dazzling Darkness. It’s beautifully written, easy to read but not an easy read. Rachel bears profound personal testimony to her adventures, struggles and falls on the edge of gender, identity, and illness. She tells the story with severe realism. She embraces faith in community not as the resolution of all doubts and loss, but as a state of being lost and found all at once, work in progress.  Her narrative does not blink at the tragic dimension of living on the outside, but embraces it in the hope of a better resurrection.

The edge, the liminal zone, is where that resurrection happens — not the reversal of death, because the most identifiable thing about Jesus’ risen body are the scars, the marks of embracing not evading death, of having been sucked into the vortex and out another side that is infinite.

It may be that what makes organised institutions of faith difficult for so many people today is not their eternal tendency to take themselves too seriously — something Jesus experienced, at whose hands he suffered. That’s always been part of the mix.

But the punters have rumbled the fact that neat, Pooterish, God-in-a-box Moralism, however convinced it may be of its own consistency and worth, is a poor substitute for life in all its fulness. Part of that fulness is loss, pain and uncertainty, as well as hope, beauty and joy.

This is a book to read and re-read. I have a bad habit of underlining potentially helpful sections of books I read on the Kindle. I found myself underlining most of some chapters of this one. Rachel’s a poet as well as a philosopher by instinct and training, and it shows. So I leave the last word for today
to her:

In Jesus Christ, God embraces human life and shows us — in the dark night of rejection, of unjust violence, of the loss of his friends as they run away, and most particularly in the Cross — the mystery of hope and love. And most of all of forgiveness....
If the Christian life is about participating in the Divine Comedy, the actual living of it so often has the character of tragedy. And in the tragedy lie the pity, the hope, the weight, and, sometimes, the beauty.

Note 1: American Gothic Christmas by GarRobMil of the Independents

Note 2: Kindle users need to download Rachel's book as a MobiPocket edition from here, then transfer it directly by wire (i.e. as a private publication) to their reader.

Good Friday: Redemption Song

Good Friday — Here is a poem by Les Murray, which explores why Jesus died and how all his persecutors, friend and foe, could actually be redeemed:

Easter 1984

When we saw human dignity
Healing humans in the middle of the day

We moved in on him slowly
Under the incalculable gravity

of old freedom, of our old freedom
under atmospheres of consequence, of justice

under which no one needs to thank anyone
If this was God, we would get even.

And in the end we nailed him,
lashed, spittled, stretched him limb from limb.

We would settle with dignity
for the anguish it had caused us,

we’d send it to be abstract again,
we would set it free.

*
But we had raised up evolution
It would not stop being human.

Ever afterwards, the accumulation
of freedom would end in this man

whipped, bloodied, getting the treatment.
It would look like man himself was getting it.

He was freeing us, painfully, from freedom,
justice, dignity — he was discharging them

of their deadly ambiguous deposit,
remaking out of them the primal day

in which he was free not to have borne it
and we were free not to have done it,

free never to torture man again,
free to believe him risen.

Good Friday is a day to address St Paul’s teasing question to the Galatians, “who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Christ was publicly portrayed as cricified?” to ourselves, and dedicated followers of some contemporary fashions:

1. Sincere attraction to Pharisaism (as in Galatia)
   
   
2. Excluding Jesus from the public square (even though he started out there)
   
   
3. The auld liberal Protestant habit of severing a lovable mop-haired Jesus (of History) from the Pauline Christ (of faith)
   
   
4. The notion that human dignity, rights and equality are somehow, in themselves, a threat to the real Jesus Christ
   
   
5. The folly that Christianity is a religion, rather than a process of personal and social renewal.
   

Good Friday: Edwin Muir.

The Killing

That was the day they killed the Son of God
On a squat hill-top by Jerusalem.
Zion was bare, her children from their maze
Sucked by the dream of curiosity
Clean through the gates.
The very halt and blind
Had somehow got themselves up to the hill.
After the ceremonial preparation,
The scourging, nailing, nailing against the wood,
Erection of the main-trees with their burden,
While from the hill rose an orchestral wailing,
They were there at last, high up in the soft spring day.
We watched the writhings, heard the moanings, saw
The three heads turning on their separate axles
Like broken wheels left spinning.
Round his head
Was loosely bound a crown of plaited thorn
That hurt at random, stinging temple and brow
As the pain swung into its envious circle.
In front the wreath was gathered in a knot
That as he gazed looked like the last stump left
Of a death-wounded deer's great antlers.
Some Who came to stare grew silent as they looked,
Indignant or sorry. But the hardened old
And the hard-hearted young, although at odds
From the first morning, cursed him with one curse,
Having prayed for a Rabbi or an armed Messiah
And found the Son of God. What use to them
Was a God or a Son of God?
Of what avail For purposes such as theirs?
Beside the cross-foot,
Alone, four women stood and did not move
All day. The sun revolved, the shadows wheeled,
The evening fell. His head lay on his breast,
But in his breast they watched his heart move on
By itself alone, accomplishing its journey.
Their taunts grew louder, sharpened by the knowledge
That he was walking in the park of death,
Far from their rage. Yet all grew stale at last,
Spite, curiosity, envy, hate itself.
They waited only for death and death was slow
And came so quietly they scarce could mark it.
They were angry then with death and death's deceit.
I was a stranger, could not read these people
Or this outlandish deity. Did a God
Indeed in dying cross my life that day
By chance, he on his road and I on mine?