[Propertalk] Good Friday

[Robert P Morrison]

Our Deacon is preaching on Maundy Thursday. Here's what's getting towards the Good Friday homily.

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY  	            GOOD FRIDAY
ISAIAH 52:13 – 53:12			         2nd APRIL, 2010
HEBREWS 10:16-25	                                                     PSALM 22
JOHN 18:1 – 19:42

	“Gideon Klein’s amazingly assured essay (a String Trio) served as a prelude to his murder in Hitler’s gas chambers. Days after completing it (in 1944), he was packed off to Auschwitz and killed. Klein’s Trio, which was written in (Terezin, sometimes called) Theresienstadt concentration camp, only occasionally allows sadness to seep between the cracks:” 1
	“Gideon Klein was just 23 years old when he arrived in Terezin, …” He helped organise the prisoners’ surreptitious musical events, “(b)ut even more invaluable was his indomitable passion for music, which sparked life and hope into the hearts of many a despondent musician and audience member.”  2
	I was struck by the comment “only occasionally allows sadness to seep within the cracks”. 
	After His arrest, His abandonment by His closest friends, His trials, first in a court of His fellow countrymen, then in front of the cold, impersonal, sadistic occupying forces; after His long heavy, hard walk to Golgotha, Jesus is hung on a cross to die, eventually, of asphyxiation. It wasn’t supposed to be pretty. It wasn’t supposed to be easy. It definitely wasn’t supposed to be quick. It was to be – and proved to be, in all but one respect – the opposite of these.
	Everything possible that could be done to humiliate Jesus WAS done. This was no way to treat a dog, even the scavenging animal of Jesus’ day. There was a message there. “Don’t step out of line.” Don’t challenge the authorities.” “Don’t try to raise the spirits and hopes of those who don’t have power or choice.”
 	But God couldn’t work under those conditions. God DOESN’T work under those conditions. If anything, God does precisely what those who have the control and the power DON’T want to happen. God, no matter what, addresses those who seem to be at the beck and call of those who have even the slightest belief that they have authority. Even more so, God addresses those who are made to seem SO insignificant that others don’t even give them a second thought. They’d ride over them in the street and treat them with no more concern than a speed bump on the way to some self-important function.
	So Jesus became such a speed bump to the Romans – both someone to be flattened and cursed as the shocks and suspension of life’s vehicle were jarred by running over Him; AND someone to lay down, to fix firmly before the entire populace as an obvious warning. “Stay in your place. Don’t speak until I whip you and talk to you. Then get out of my way.”
	The problem was, Jesus lived His life for ALL, as if EVERYone mattered, and everyone’s concerns were HIS concerns.
	And that simply wouldn’t do – not in an empire dependent on people knowing their place.
	Oh, the Roman Empire WAS great! There was a pretty high culture – music, dancing, plays, athletic competition, lavish festivals and spectacles. There was even peace – Pax Romana, it was called. If you did what Rome and her minions wanted, then they protected you against all-comers. But if you threatened any of the stability, any of the least little law; if you suggested that people could and should think and act out of compassion; if you hinted that everyone was equal in the Creator’s eyes, and that all were “endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights” 3 ; if you accepted this as personal liberty “given … by the Author of nature, because (it was) necessary for his (or her) own sustenance." 4 - something about which we here claim to know a little – but if under the so-called Pax Romana you tried to assert any of these beliefs, you were smashed – not like a mosquito. That would be too quick and relatively painless. You’d be smashed on to a cross and left to hang, sometimes for days, the butt of all sorts of ridicule and fear.
	Yet, what happened with and through Jesus? In spite of everything humiliating and agonizing, Jesus reached out from the cross, as that wonderful Prayer Book Collect reminds us 5.
	There’s so much in the Passion Gospel, but one of the things that continues to live with me from year to year is Jesus’ behaviour and attitude in the intensity of His suffering. Even when the pain seemed unbearable, when the loneliness – the absence of friendly, empathetic faces – was incredibly devastating, when the worst thing imaginable happened to Him – He felt that God had abandoned Him – even when the pain to His body, His mind, and His spirit seemed unbearable, He turned to others. He turned specifically to two others who were going through separation agony with Him. Jesus turned to His mother and to His special friend John, and commended them to each other, knowing that they’d be able to provide the support that each needed in order to get through hardship and chaos.
	That phrase – He “only occasionally allow(ed) sadness to seep within the cracks” – seems to sum up Jesus’ approach to life. He used sadness, He used darkness, He used terror, He used abuse – as occasions to meditate and act upon love. Somehow, He was about to work alongside the pain. He didn’t set it aside. He lived it. He allowed it to fill His whole Being, and, no matter how incredibly bad it was, He used that as a means to reach out, first to Mary and John, and then to each one of us.
                         That’s where Jesus’ stretched-out arms started, so that they can continue to reach out to us, and give consolation to us as we’re faced by our challenges and our frustrations and, yes, in our own way, our agonies.
                         Gideon Klein, whom I described a few minutes ago, was Jewish. Although I can’t be sure, unfortunately I’d guess that much of the Christianity to which he was exposed seventy years ago can’t have been very charitably expressed to him. Yet, despite that, “his indomitable passion for music,” through which I believe God was reaching out to nourish and strengthen him, was shared with others similarly in-human-ly imprisoned so that both he and his music “sparked life and hope into the hearts of many a despondent musician and audience member.”
                         THIS is the crucified Jesus speaking from His cross, from which the “madness of the whole world, the joy and the pain of the whole human race, were (and continue to be) locked together…”. 5
                        And THIS is the crucified Jesus whose Body that Friday of Fridays was laid in the tomb.
                       In all the pain we feel this night, even as our hopes seem dashed, may we think of that Love which still speaks peace; may we struggle to reach out to others; may we allow ourselves to dream of hope.


NOTES:

 	Rob Cowan: review of Jacques Thibaud Trio’s recording of Klein’s Trio, Schoenberg’s String Trio, Op. 45, and Villa-Lobos Trio. Gramophone, October 2009, page 81. 
2	http://www.interdisciplinary.neu.edu/terezin/music/klein.html  
3	Declaration of Independence as originally written by Thomas Jefferson, 1776. ME 1:29, Papers 1:315 http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff0100.htm 
4	Thomas Jefferson: Legal Argument, 1770. FE 1:376. Op. cit 
5	B.C.P. page 101, et al.
6	“The Ending of a Beautiful Dream” in “The Original Jesus” by Tom Wright. Eerdman’s, Grand Rapids, Michigan © 1996, page 11.




--
Robert P. Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban,
P.O. Box 1556,
Albany, Oregon, 97321

541-921-1076 (cell)
541-967-7051 (church)