Good Friday - April 10, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Good Friday - April 10, 2020

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42

No audio recording is available for this sermon.

Most visual art aspires to create something for the viewer who is the other. The art is for the viewer. We look at a painting, for example, and enter into the world it presents to us from the safe and objective distance of outside. The boundaries of time and space are fixed and familiar because I know as a viewer I am not in the presence of the actual Mona Lisa, I am not really among Monet’s water lilies or gazing at Van Gogh’s starry night. I look at their beauty, but I can only look and imagine.

The photo below, Christ on the Living Cross, 1420-30, by the Master of Saint Veronica, is doing something quite different. This depiction is one of many of a similar motif of Christian art that changes the nature of observer and observed, transcending the categories of time and space, and makes the event, the crucifixion, of a different category than historical memory.

Christ on the Living Cross (ca.1420-30)

We are not just looking into this scene. For the artist the cross is a present reality, and thereby explicitly Eucharistic. The chalice is the one chalice that receives from the side of Christ the one flow of blood and water that with the bread of Christ’s flesh makes the Church. The crucifixion is an eternal now, which is exactly what the Church says about the Holy Eucharist. Christ is risen, yet ever crucified.

The artist is shifting the artistic relationship from for to with. It is good and right to say that Jesus died for us. He is subject and we are object. His death is a gracious self-offering and atonement on our behalf. But Jesus also dies with us. With is about relationship, presence. With makes us participants in the action. With is the preposition of empathy, of being on the same side, of close association. With is about joining in, being together. The painting places the dying Jesus with us and we with him at a particular moment in the story.

John alone among the Gospels recounts the piercing with the sword and the flow of blood and water. This is John doing what John does – lifting the ordinary physical to the level of cosmic metaphor. This mere blood and water are no ordinary blood and water. In both the Matins and Vespers hymn for Lent B in our Breviary, reference is made to the sword-pierced side. The lyrics evocatively state what is birthed in that moment:

He endured the nails, the spitting, vinegar and spear and reed;
From that holy body broken blood and water forth proceed;
Earth and stars and sky and ocean by that flood from stain are freed.

Is it surprising that the whole cosmos shudders at this mystery? Golgotha is the second Big Bang of creation. Behold the majesty of God’s greatness. The uttermost evil and cruelty that could be inflicted on flesh and muscle and nerve becomes the occasion and revelation of God’s greatest glory. The event of deepest sorrow and pain gives life and light and movement to all things. The cross is the foundation and fountain of the world. It holds the stars in their courses, moves every heartbeat. The word became flesh, one of us, while retaining his divinity, with the same weariness in his bones, the same hunger in his gut, the same thirst in his throat, the same craving for oxygen in his lungs, with the same affliction of mind such as ours, with the same awareness that his continued embodied existence is beyond his control. At Vespers we sing:

Where from that wound deep in his side, by cruel lance torn open wide
Both blood and water, flowing free, have washed away iniquity.

Baptism now joins into the dance of images. From the depth of the desolation and despair of the cross break forth the springs of eternal life in Baptism and Eucharist. This blood and water continuously flow. All the water of baptism comes from the side of Christ. All the blood of the Eucharist comes from the side of Christ. Christ gave compassion and mercy, he gave wisdom and judgment, he gave of himself to all, and yet he gives more.

Christ does not just tell us about life, but his very life is poured out onto our lives. In the trampling down of death by death, Jesus’ very flesh itself is the answer to the question, “is hope lost?” In John, the cross is the glory, the apocalypse, the exaltation, the undeniable truth of the presence of life. Crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are one glorifying, simultaneous moment in which dying is also always rising and ascending, and rising and ascending are also by the one who ever bears the marks of the nails and the scar of the sword. Life arises out of this blood and water, out of the absolutely certain sign of death. A life of self-giving love gives in its last gift the seal and promise of eternal life. This free flow, which flows still, is the source of all life.

Behold his broken body and his spilt blood! Do not think it is over there, away from you, long ago, that you are safe from it, that you can hide. No, the Lord draws, drags all things, even us, to himself on the cross. His shattered arms stretch East to West, his limp body North to South.

The days of Holy Week have coincided with the greatest number of deaths from the coronavirus pandemic. Physical, financial, and spiritual suffering has become very real for very many. Our distance from family, friends, and guests is felt in an absence and silence thrust upon us – less retreat and more vacuum. Today we as a community have decided to refrain from receiving Communion from the Reserved Sacrament in a break from our custom and in remembrance of the sick and dying and those who mourn and in solidarity with those who are not able to receive communion right now. We are praying for you. To our guests, we miss you. We await our joyful reunion. We need, we call upon Jesus who is with us and suffers with the suffering and dying in these days.

Receiving Communion has been such an unquestioningly central part of our lives that in its very regularity I too often take it for granted or allow the lukewarm boredom of repetition to creep in. While our daily liturgical rhythm has not much changed until today, may the absence of Communion be more than a blank space in the liturgy, but awaken us and enliven us to its mystery and change our hearts so that we may desire and receive its gift of grace ever more deeply – with ever more gratitude, wonder, commitment. In whatever way God begins to direct the evil of this virus toward the good - within us, our community, the larger church - however God prompts us to participate in and witness to what transformation may come, may we know Jesus with us and watch close to the wounded, torn, broken side from which comes our life and keep the Crucified One ever before our eyes. Amen.