Seeing in a New Light

Good Friday. Fr Gregory Murphy preaches on the appalling extent of God’s love.

In the great three-act drama celebrating our salvation (the Mass of the Lord’s Supper; the Memorial of his Passion; and the Vigil of the Resurrection) I am usually struck by the numbers attending being highest on Good Friday afternoon then tailing off at the Vigil, the climax of the celebration. That attendance pattern seems, somehow, slightly perverse. The Friday liturgy is somewhat spatchcocked, comprising the reading of the Passion from John’s gospel, the veneration of the Cross, and a Communion service.

The veneration of the Cross would have seemed unimaginable to Jesus’s contemporaries. The cross – a gallows post to which the condemned prisoner dragged the cross-piece before being nailed to it and enduring a slow and painful death – was regarded with horror and disgust, this punishment being reserved, in the main, for slaves, rebels and bandits. Indeed, it is probably only in the four accounts of the Passion of Jesus that we find a description of the process of crucifixion focusing on the condemned: there seems no other such historical record extant. That we venerate an image of an instrument of torture, then, must imply we see it differently; see it, in short, as an example of the love shown us by the God who is love, and that love being vindicated in the Resurrection.

We can trace this process in these accounts of Jesus’s excruciation. Mark’s, the first, is stark: Jesus dies alone, abandoned, amid the jeers of his enemies, reviled even by the brigands crucified beside him. Matthew closely follows Mark, but subtly insists that Jesus fulfils the scriptures, quoting psalm 22, Jesus’s last words, which begins with abandonment ‘My God, My God, why did you abandon me?’ – but finishes in a prayer of confidence and trust in God. Luke has three groups accompanying Jesus: the women of Galilee (at a distance) and Simon of Cyrene (as in Mark), and the women of Jerusalem. Then Jesus’s prayer: ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do’, and to the repentant thief ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’. John’s story of Jesus’ Passion, which we hear today, in contrast, shows Jesus as being in control of events, reigning from the tree. In his account, Jesus carries his own cross; he is crucified attended by his mother; his mother’s sister, Mary of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. Jesus, seeing them with the disciple he loved (perhaps the author of the Gospel, some suggest Lazarus), says ‘Woman, look – your son’ then, to the disciple ‘Look – your mother’ then hands over the Spirit ‘It is finished’ (or, ‘perfected’). Then, while the legs of the brigands crucified alongside him were broken, to hasten their death, the soldiers find Jesus already dead, and pierce his side with a lance, releasing water (symbolising Baptism) and blood (symbolising the Eucharist).

We venerate the Cross, then, because an instrument of torture and death has been transmuted into an instrument of love and life, only shown in the light of the Resurrection on Easter day. But this transmutation took time. In the first century of Christianity there were no images of the Cross – rather one might picture Christ the good shepherd, for example. When these images did appear, after 400 (when Constantine had abolished crucifixion as a punishment) Jesus (as in John’s account) was depicted as serene, reigning from the tree. Then the 10^th century early English ‘Dream of the Rood’ gives the Cross a voice in praise of the burden it bore for our salvation. The first realism in art comes in with Duerer and the Christ of St John of the Cross in the 16^th century.

In the Thomist tradition, God is pure act, no potentiality. God is love, constantly making love to us, making us lovable, as Samuel Crossman’s 16^th century Passiontide hymn has it ‘love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be’. The mystery of the Cross is the mystery of the appalling extent of God’s love for us, Jesus laying down his life for his friends (and enemies), a love we are called to emulate. That is why we dare call this Friday ‘Good’.

Readings: Isaiah 52:13-53:12 | Hebrews 4:14-16,5:7-9 | John 18:1-19:42

Image: detail from Albrecht Duerer, Adoration of the Trinity (1511), via Hans Ollermann (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)