Amongst my most important possessions are three Stations of the Cross which were gifts from Sandy Stoddart the Scottish sculptor. The 13th Station is The Deposition, the taking down of Jesus from the cross. The reverent care of the hand holding the "sacred head, sore wounded", the upreaching embrace of Mary Jesus' mother, and the nakedness of Jesus with all the implied vulnerability, fill this image with pathos and unutterable loss. The rope suspending one arm of the dead Jesus, his arm drooped vertical and helpless even to help himself is eloquent of the kenosis of God, and the power of redemptive love.
In her Autobiography, The Joy of the Snow, the novelist Elizabeth Goudge writes movingly and honestly about her horror of Good Friday, and how when she was younger she wished that the sufferings of Jesus could be removed from the story. The urge to pass quickly from Good Friday to Easter Sunday seems natural, to skip past those year long hours of anguish and humiliation and dying and darkness to the sunlight and joy of resurrection morning, is understandable, and wrong.
Jesus prayed with all the passion of a heart large enough to embrace the world, "Father if it be possible let this cup pass from me." No escape from Good Friday, no fast forward past the pain, the abandonment and the revolt of holiness from the engulfing evil. "He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us, that we might become in him the righteousness of God." No one has mapped the contours and fissures of sin that run through the whole creation and every human heart with more precision than Paul; and no one has worked out with a clearer, more passionate mind, what sin did to the heart of the Triune God. When Jesus cried, "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?" that cry of dereliction reverberated into every verse in the New Testament that says "God was in Christ", "Christ died for us", "making peace by the blood of the Cross", the "mystery of the ages."
It took a poet of George Herbert's genius to parse the tragedy of the Cross. His poem The Agony is utterly Pauline in its combination of moral seriousness and theological wonder. The transition from Good Friday to Holy Saturday, with Easter Sunday not yet in view, is a compelling account of the suffering of God, the broken hearted emptiness of a heart poured out in a love which chooses to confront and enter into the places of deepest despair and most enduring darkness. This is the God whom Christians claim is with us in our darkest times and places; "though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me..." Holy Saturday is for those times and places in our lives where hope has vanished, loss seems fixed and final, depression has settled with the dead weight of a future empty of joy. Oh Easter Sunday is coming; but we say that from this side of that first Good Friday and Holy Saturday. For now it is a sign of our human hunger for hope, that we wait with the hopeless, grieve with the sorrowful, weep with the bereaved, and like the two figures in the panel above, hold with reverent care and willing embrace, all those who suffer without hope of a different future.
Herbert, a 17th Century metaphysical poet, is one of the great New Testament theologians. Though he would hate the slippage of English style in the phrase, Herbert "gets it". The mystery of iniquity alongside the greater mystery of love, and both of them entangled in the fatal tragedy of Gethsemane and Calvary.
The Agony
Philosophers have measur'd mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk'd with a staff to heav'n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.
Who would know SIn, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein.
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.
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