Brent Was, Candidate for Holy Orders, Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts
Year C, Good Friday
Ten years ago Sunday, back on Easter morning 2000 I experienced the call to ministry. As with most of my life, it was all rather dramatic.
I had never spent much time thinking in religious terms, it was all very opaque to me. But then I found myself walking through the Prado, Madrid’s great art museum, with room after room of the bloodiest, goriest, most horrific paintings of the crucifixion. So many of them. No one gets the blood of Good Friday like the Spaniards do.
I saw these pictures which were so horrible, and I had no idea what to do with them. I was disgusted, confused, and desperately fascinated. Like driving pass a car crash, I did not want to see it, but something inside of me had to. Praise the Lord. As terrible a spectacle as it is, we all need to see it, to face the facts, to not deny our Lord and Savior another witness.
All of this is confusing: Good Friday and His death; Holy Saturday and His descent to the dead; and the dark before the dawn of Resurrection on Easter; all of it is so confusing. There is nothing Good about it, but it had to be this way. To call it Good is to say, “I am glad my mother suffered so much giving birth to me.” We are not glad, but it does not change the fact that it had to be that way. It is the nature of things.
To live, things have to die. That is simple ecology. And in Christ is the fullness of all Creation, the seen and the unseen, the spirit world, the soil under our feet, the air in our lungs, the songs in our ears, all of it; in Christ is the meta-ecology of Creation. For all of it to live how could be other than that something that is alive in all ways must die to feed the world? In some way, in some way that we cannot put to words, it had to be that way. It is the nature of things. That is what those Spaniards were painting, the bold and sticky truth about the world.
Our life happens in a world fertilized with the Blood of the Lamb. Christ the Lamb, the Son of God is our king and high priest; and our teacher, our spiritual director, our friend; and He is our advocate, standing for God on the side of sinners, standing for God on the side of the oppressed, the downtrodden, the tired, poor and huddled masses across the world. My God, my God, why did you forsake him? Why did he have to die so, so, so badly? Why do so many die so badly? Maybe it is because the ones who are most forsaken are the ones most like Christ, that is the ones most loved by God.
There is a lot of horror in the world. A lot of suffering. Death is hard, it sometimes does not go well, it sometimes is horrible, and it is always, always, always inevitable. Death and taxes… and, and… the love of God. No matter how dark the night, no matter how bad Good Friday is, we can hold in our hearts the knowledge that God holds us in Her arms, cradles us in His lap, tells us every little thing gonna be alright. But first dearest, we have to do this. AMEN
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