In the book, Night, Elie Weisel describes an execution that occurred in Auschwitz while he was a prisoner of the Nazis. Two men and a boy were condemned to be hanged and the entire prison camp was forced to watch. The two men died quickly. Because of how light the boy weighed, it took thirty minutes for the noose to kill him meaning the boy suffered, slipping in and out of death for a horribly long amount of time. Behind Weisel, a prisoner questioned: “For God’s sake, where is God? He writes that in his mind he heard a voice answer, ‘Where is he? This is where. He is hanging here on this gallows…’”
That is as good an image of Good Friday as we are likely to come across. Where is God when the bombs and missiles are killing women and children in a war? On the cross with them. Where is God when storms and earthquakes and tornadoes and floods are destroying peoples’ homes and livelihoods? On the cross with them. Where is God when children who are abused or neglected or abandoned are not given the care that they deserve? On the cross with them. Good Friday is God’s taking responsibility for the world that God had created. God had intended this world to be a place of life, of love, of joy. Instead all too often we find instead pain and suffering and misery. But God is not an absentee landlord; God does not leave us alone to fix up our messes. Instead God shared life with us when Jesus walked the dusty roads of Galilee, the noisy streets of Jerusalem, and right up Calvary’s hill.
There is a school of thought that God is something like a giant clock maker. God wound up the clock and then stepped back and let the world run (or better run down) according to some kind of pre-determined plan. Remember the scene in The Color Purple when Celie decides to stop praying because God is “glorying in being deaf,” not caring about the plight of poor, black women. The crucifixion puts the lie to that way of thinking. God cares for creation, cares for it so much that God became part of creation in the person of the Son of God made flesh. God cares for creation so much that Jesus emptied himself of divinity and embraced humanity even to the point of death on the cross.
The Epistle to the Hebrews looking back on the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane says that Jesus offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard. He was heard but he was not saved from death. His death was central to the plan of God. During his life Jesus brought healing and even raised the dead. The death of Jesus teaches us that there are certain wounds, certain harms that cannot be healed, cannot be fixed; they can only be transcended, transformed, made into something new. Have you ever seen a crucifix that had a skull at the bottom of the cross? That refers to an ancient tradition that Golgotha was the site of Adam’s burial and that the blood of Jesus seeped down and washed over the bones of Adam. The sin of Adam was not expunged but the cross made us into a new creation – not the original plan of God but a better, more grace-filled plan where we as human beings join with Jesus by sharing his divinity.
As we reverence the cross today we should bring all that we are going through so that it can be transcended. We nail ourselves to the cross trusting that since Jesus was tested in every way that we are we can join our suffering to that of Jesus and we will, like him, receive mercy from the throne of grace. Suffering does not get the last word. “It is finished,” said Jesus. Suffering is finished and we are glory bound.
