Some years ago, I heard a Good Friday sermon in which the preacher mused about how the carpenter Jesus may have attempted to ease his pain by admiring the wood of his cross. "Nice bit of wood this is. I bet it would make a great desk." It was all rather Pythonesque (think Life of Brian).
Here we are, following Jesus, and we've arrived at that time of the Church Year called "Holy Week". Tomorrow is Palm & Passion Sunday.
What always startles and shakes me about being a Christian is this very week. It's that time of the Year when we say shocking, scandalous, scalding truth, say outrageous, even sacrilegious things about God. Our church culture is too polite to heckle and jeer, but if we were honest about this week, in the way I think we should be honest about this week, we'd do what I always want to do: Walk out on Jesus by sometime next Thursday night.
Let's start with some of the shocking truths about this week.
First up: Jesus' cross. We'll say that our redemption was achieved by Jesus suffering more horribly than anyone else. And while it's true that crucifixion is a brutal, horrible -- so-bad-we-invent-a-word-to-describe-its-horrible-brutality (excruciating) -- it is a state execution following military torture interrogation -- his was only one of thousands crucified every year in order to bolster up the Pax Romana. In fact, there are accounts of gibbets lined up for miles down the Appian Way.
Then, of course, there's the Inquisition, followed by Auschwitz and the Gulag, followed by the killing fields of Asia, the tribal slaughter in Rwanda, the mass graves in the Balkans, and most recently the suffering and deaths of uncounted lives in Afghanistan and Iraq and Gitmo.
It is impossible for me to use the cold calculus of pain in regards to all those.
Jesus' crucifixion is evidence that his death was nothing special. It's the way the cold machinery of a violent world works with chilling efficiency.
It's hard to worship the cross for me. It's like kneeling at the concrete-slab base of an electric chair. And every time I do it -- especially in Holy Week -- my faith and faithfulness just melt away in the face of so much death. It's impossible to shout Palm Sunday's victorious chants on Friday.
What about courage? Surely there's that?
But is there?
Every year, by Thursday night, my faith and faithfulness are so scared, so cold, that I can't bear to watch what happens. So I run, silent and afraid into a very cold night, just like those first disciples.
Surely, we think, Jesus faced his death with more courage? But believe you me, that amounts to just "special pleading". And the first Christians knew it. It's why the New Testament is so hesitant to sensationalize the cross. As pagans were quick to point out, rather smugly, Jesus sweating blood in Gethsemane, and crying out in agony on Calvary, compares rather unfavorably with the great philosopher Socrates on death row, calmly drinking the hemlock as he reminds a friend -- his last words -- to remember to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the god of heath. For Socrates death was the moment of release, for Jesus a time of despair.
The cross is so difficult a thing to embrace, in fact, that it's a cause for stumbling, a "foolishness" in the world of Roman "wisdom". Best not be too quick to cite it as the location where something big happens. Because the world just looks in disbelief. If we're honest with it -- if I'm honest with it -- so do I. Every time. By Friday, all I can do is cry. There's no victorious shouting then.
And, of course, there's the nonsense that it was evil men -- especially "the Jews" -- who crucified Jesus. It's just self-serving propaganda! Nothing bestial killed Jesus. No, it was the cold efficiency of government mixed with religion. The state in all its glory and religion at its most awesome killed Jesus: Not the mob but the upholders of public order, not the wicked but the standard-bearers of morality. Yes, the trial was conducted with unseemly haste and the evidence was selectively marshalled, but the defendant incriminated himself, confessed even, so (if you like) there were no grounds for appeal. For Jesus did undermine a religious system based on law and cult, and Jesus did threaten a political regime based on violence and retribution. Jesus acted with freedom and broke the rules, embracing the dirty, the deviant, and the dangerous. And Jesus prophetically unmasked the mighty pretensions of the local procurator and publicly subverted Caesar's claim to lordship. Jesus really did force the hands of Caiaphas and Pilate and leave them no choice but to get rid of him. Better that one man die than that the entire social order be at risk -- the tried and trusted scapegoat principle. No doubt about it, this peasant troublemaker from up north profoundly threatened the status quo. He had to go.
That's something we Christians seem to miss these days. Jesus wasn't crucified out of some divine plan. He was crucified because that's the way secular order works. Prophets of peace get killed because we're a violent lot. Sure, God was busy doing something this week, but it wasn't because Jesus had to die. Jesus had to die because we said so. Heck, even I say so. Every time I buy into the notion that safety and security of the status quo matters more than peacefulness and kindness.
What shrinks my faith of Good Friday is that that very faith is what pushed Jesus off the planet. In a concerted effort to tell God to "shove off this mortal coil", we kill him.
So: Every Holy Week I forget about the suffering of Jesus, the courage of Jesus, the wickedness of it all. Because what stands in clear view to me isn't the dying of Jesus -- it's not the trial or the cross I see. No, it's a man and his corpse. A cold, rigid body, laid out on a slab of rock. Already showing signs of decomposition.
All those pictures of a victorious, white-flowing Mediterranean garb, long-locks of hair, blue-eyed Jesus? Dead!
The word that haunts and evil kills my faith shouts out from the very ground that received his body and blood: Finished!
I'm thinking of Hans Holbein's painting, "Body of Dead Christ in Tomb".
The Russian author Dostoevsky saw the painting, in a museum in Basel, stopping on his way to Geneva, and forever after it haunted him like a nightmare. He describes it in his great novel The Idiot. The character Prince Myshkin says: "Why some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture!"
That's what happens to me every year. I lose my faith.
I lose my faith in God every Holy Week.
For as the French mystic Simone Weil insisted, there's a kind of atheism that is purifying, cleansing us of idols. I lose my faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. I lose my faith in the god who is but the product of my projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. I lose my faith in the god who is there to hold my hand, solve my problems, rescue me from my trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the "machine god", wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. I lose my faith in the god who confers upon me a privileged status that is safe and secure. I lose my faith in the god who promises health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. I lose my faith in the god with whom my conscience can be at ease with itself. I lose my faithfaith in the god who is the bandage, not the wound. I lose my faith in the god who always answers when I pray and comes when I call. I lose my faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the "Father who art in heaven" -- this week he is to be found in hell -- with his Son.
I've never read anyone put this more honestly than Bonhoeffer. We must recognize, he wrote from prison, "that we have to learn to live in the world 'as if God were not here'. And this is just what we do recognize -- before God! God himself compels us to recognize it ... God would have us know that we must live as men and women who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us ... Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross" -- and then down from the cross and into the grave. "He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us". God a Super-Power? That god is a demon, the Devil.
If that God is the Lord, it's time for a regime change. That's what this week is all about.
So yeah, this is the week I lose my faith.
As with life, so with faith: Only those who lose it will find it.
Or, well, may find it.
Faith is a risk, and discipleship demands that we learn to live with insecurity and uncertainty, setting out on a journey without a map, with companions who are as lost as we are, following a leader who is always way ahead of us, beckoning mysteriously, "Follow me!", and then vanishing just as we arrive. God is mystery, ineffable mystery, naming a reality that we know, but the more we know, the more we are forced to un-know and rethink everything we thought we knew.
If all this sounds like foolishness, it is! I'll be the first to admit that following Jesus into Holy Week isn't all that brilliant. It doesn't settle every issue or solve every problem or provide answers to every question.
I'm supposed to be a preacher, so I'm supposed to make God understandable and make sense. I'm a theologian, so I'm supposed to increase the faith. I'm supposed to have some good news.
But this week?!?
Good luck.
This week no one can help you. Come Friday, not even God -- especially not God -- can help you. And come Saturday, God himself is lying in a tomb. Emptiness. Zero. Nothing. But might it be a pregnant emptiness, a significant zero, a silent nothing that yet says everything?
For that, it's best to wait till Easter for an answer.