Good Friday
2 April 2010
There is a collect that we use regularly at Morning Prayer and it goes like this: “Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.” That phrase, “walking in the way of the cross,” is so familiar to us, but it occurred to me this week that I was a little vague about its content. What does it mean to walk in the way of the cross? To think for a while about it seems like a good thing to do on Good Friday, the Day of the Cross preeminently among all other days.
The “way of the cross” implies that there is a certain kind of pattern, a style, of life that corresponds to the Cross and that the Christian, walking in it, experiences life and peace that are not available any other way. Notice that the phrase is “the way of the Cross,” and not something else. By this I mean, it would be possible to conceive of a manner of life that owed its existence to the Cross but did not resemble it in any way. Sometimes Christians have thought of the sacrifice of Calvary as paying the penalties of their sins and freeing them up to live a way of life that does not look at all like the self-sacrificial life of Jesus, let alone the extreme self-sacrifice of the Cross. I suppose that the contemporary “prosperity gospel” is the most egregious example of this way of thinking. No, the phrase seems to imply that there is a correspondence between the Cross and the way of life of the Christian.
A recent book tried to bring out the radical quality of this correspondence this way: “God's love and forgiveness are ruthlessly unforgiving powers which break violently into our protective, self-rationalizing little sphere, smashing our sentimental illusions and turning our world brutally upside down. In Jesus, the law is revealed to be the law of love and mercy, and God . . . a helpless vulnerable animal. It is the flayed and bloody scapegoat of Calvary that is now the true signifier of the law. Which is to say that those who are faithful to God's law of justice and compassion will be done away with by the state. If you don't love, you're dead, and if you do, they'll kill you. . . . Imitating Jesus means imitating his death as well as his life, since the two are not finally distinguishable.” [Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, p.22-3] Now it is the author's point to be as disturbing as possible, to upset the complacency of his readers—and he says a lot of outrageous things in his book. But it is true that we have tamed and domesticated Jesus and the Cross, sometimes to the point at which our brothers and sisters of the earliest Church would hardly recognize our portrait of him.
St Paul says something similar at the end of the Epistle to the Galatians: “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!” Earlier in the letter he put it this way: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
There is every reason to think that St Paul meant these expressions in a very realistic way. Like the other disciples of Jesus, he had given up pretty nearly everything in order to follow Jesus in his apostolate. For Paul, then, being crucified to the world seems to imply having no stake in it, owning nothing which would compromise his belonging to Christ and his ability to take off at a moment's notice in his missionary work. It meant a kind of abandonment that, to our ears, seems heroic and quite beside the point. We admire such folk—take St Francis, for example—but they certainly are not role models.
But if we think of St Paul's physical dispossession of all that he owned in order to be a wandering missionary and apostle as the meaning of his walking in the way of the Cross, then I think we err. Abandoning all to follow Jesus' call in his life was his way of being crucified to the world and the world to him, but there is something deeper here. Paul did not expect others to sell their possessions, give the money to the poor and go off somewhere on a mission or to a mountain top to await the Lord's return. He was talking about a different kind of dispossession, a different kind of crucifixion. The author I just quoted went on to say this: “Given the twisted state of the world, self-fulfillment can ultimately come about only through self-divestment. That this is so is a tragedy in itself. It would be far more agreeable if we could achieve justice and fellowship spontaneously, without having to die, personally and politically, to our selfishness, violence, possessiveness, and urge to dominate. But at least this death is in the name of a more abundant life, not some masochistic self-violence. For the Gospel, there are two kinds of life-in-death—the living death which is hell, and the abundance of life which come from being able to surrender one's self-possessiveness.” [p. 24/5]
I have explored all kinds of different expressions over the years in order to tease out the meaning of what it means to be crucified with Christ, to share in the Cross, to walk in the way of the Cross. But here is what we are talking about in a nutshell: self-fulfillment through self-divestment—walking in the way of the Cross in order to find it the way of life and peace. Why should this be so? It is because self-interest is our chief problem: that which we have a stake in we tend to be protective of. The more stakes we have, the more we can become consumed to protect what we have. That is the danger of wealth, but wealth only magnifies our basic human problem of pride: that irrational preference for one's own self, as C. S. Lewis put it. A person who is wrapped up in that irrational preference finds it difficult to love disinterestedly. For that is the whole point of Jesus' teaching: the abundant life is the life that is spent in loving—first of all, God, then the neighbor—indiscriminately and without thinking of what one gets out of it. But fear of loss and self-protectiveness rob one of the ability to love and frustrate God's will for us.
When St Paul said that the world had been crucified to him, he did not mean that he hated the world, but that for the first time he could truly love it—love it as God loved it and for God's own purposes, since he had no other purposes or direct stake in it for himself. That is, whatever God gave him to use or enjoy he could. But he had no need to create an identity for himself in the things he owned—his identity was based on the new creature he had become in Christ. He could also give things up if need be, and not feel as if he had been treated unfairly. And the result, in Paul's case, was a man full of joy—his letters ring with it. He walked in the way of the Cross and found it to be the way of life and peace.
But he also understood better than most what it means to be alive and to live in peace. Life for Paul is what it was for Jesus—a sharing in that relentless love of God which created and now was redeeming the world. The author I quoted before said, “God's love and forgiveness are ruthlessly unforgiving powers which break violently into our protective, self-rationalizing little sphere, smashing our sentimental illusions and turning our world brutally upside down.” We don't often think of God's love as a ruthless power. But George MacDonald did. He was an amazing 19th author whose writings were a source of inspiration to C. S. Lewis and others. Here is what he says about God's love: “When we say that God is Love, do we teach men that their fear of Him is groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more. But there is something beyond their fear—a divine fate which they cannot withstand because it works along with the human individuality which the divine individuality has created in them. The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear, coming out with ten-fold consciousness of being, and bringing with them all that made the blessedness of the life the men tried to lead without God.” MacDonald goes on to talk about how the process by which divine love consumes this old self so that the new person God wants it to be can emerge, is not always pleasant. If love is like a fire, the process is sometimes like a kind of burning—kind of like a cross, perhaps. But as MacDonald puts it, “Escape is hopeless. For Love is inexorable.” [The Consuming Fire]
It is amazing how much like Thomas Merton George MacDonald sounds. Merton talked about the false self that we try to become which must be allowed to die so that the self God knows can come to life. And what is the chief problem with that false self? It cannot love rightly as God desires. Its own desires for itself are mixed up in any kind of loving it can achieve. As Merton put it: “I who am without love cannot become love unless Love identifies me with Himself. But if He sends His own Love, Himself, to act and love in me and in all that I do, then I shall be transformed, I shall discover who I am and shall possess my true identity by losing myself in Him.” [New Seeds, p.63] Or, in a slightly different way: “If I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him I was meant to embody, I shall be full of His actuality and find Him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere. I shall be lost in Him: that is, I shall find myself. I shall be 'saved.'” [p. 37]
The “life and peace” part, then, have to do with being freed up to love as God loves and with his own love as manifested on the Cross and poured into us through the Spirit. It is a kind of loving that is disinterested, that is, detached, lacking self-interest. It is the kind of love the New Testament calls agape—a love not based on my desire or need but directed towards the good of the one I love. To love like that is life and peace—life, because that is what God is, sheer outflowing if inexorable Love; peace, because to love like that is to be in harmony with what is—to live in reality and not illusion.
Most of us are not yet completely adept, perhaps, at this life. Our walking in the way of the Cross is sometimes faltering and our love still not divested of self-interest. The truth is that this is going to take some time—and maybe we will not be finished by the time of our departure from this temporal phase of our existence. The main thing is to keep in the process—not to let the frustrations and pains and sufferings of the present time confuse us or detract us from continuing to walk in the way of the Cross.