But Jesus as wholly man at the same time that he is wholly God is as impossible as St. Paul’s conception of a spiritual body. But on these two absolute contradictions I build my faith.
We still want corroboration of scientific proof behind what we believe. But if something can be proved, then we don’t need faith in order to believe in it. I don’t need faith to believe in any of the lab experiments we did in high-school chemistry; they are in the realm of provable fact. And when we depend too much on provable fact we blunt and diminish the human talent for faith.
Little worth believing in is scientifically provable. In literal terms, God can neither be proved nor disproved. That the result of living according to the Beatitudes is happiness does not lie in the realm of provable fact; yet when I look at the people I know whose faces are alight with joy, no matter how terrible their outward circumstances, I can see in them poverty of spirit, the comfort of mourning, purity of heart—all those characteristics which, put together, are a description of Jesus of Nazareth:
who died on a cross, publicly, between two thieves, on Good Friday. A failure. In worldly terms, a complete washout, the original non-achiever.
That, too, is part of the blessing we are offered if we call him Lord. Death.
I doubt if it is given to the human being to understand completely the blessed passion and precious death, the mighty resurrection and glorious ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ. I know that I do not understand. But I also know that it has nothing to do with the angry, unforgiving God who so upset my young friend. If the basic definition of sin is lack of love (that love without which all men are dead in the sight of God, as Cranmer wrote in one of his collects), then an inability to forgive is lack of love, and if God is unable to forgive us then he is lacking in love, and so he is not God. At least, he is not the God who makes glad my heart.
So why the crucifixion, then, if it was not to appease the anger of God?
When Christ, the second person of the Trinity, became, in Jesus, wholly man, he had to experience death for us, just as he had to experience being born, and breathing, and eating, and eliminating, and sleeping, just like all mankind. But why on the cross? Why despised and rejected by the majority of the Jews, his people, forsaken by most of his friends? Why a total failure?
And here again I bump headlong into God’s failure vs. man’s success, and man’s success is worth nothing, in comparison with the glorious failure of God.
Experience is painfully teaching me that what seems a NO to man from man’s point of view, is often the essential prelude to a far greater YES. The Noes which have been said to me may be as small and inconsequential as the opportunities given me for peacemaking, but they are mine. During the two years when A Wrinkle in Time was consistently being rejected by publisher after publisher, I often went out alone at night and walked down the dirt road on which Crosswicks faces, and shouted at God; ‘Why don’t you let it get accepted? Why are you letting me have all these rejection slips? You know it’s a good book! I wrote it for you! So why doesn’t anybody see it?’
But when Wrinkle was finally published, it was exactly the right moment for it, and if it had been published two years earlier it might well have dropped into a black pit of oblivion.
Another No which was the prelude to a Yes came way back when I was working in the theatre. I knew early that I was to be general understudy and have a couple of walk-on roles in Eva LeGallienne’s and Margaret Webster’s production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. A young actor in whom I was intensely interested, and who had already made a name for himself, was being considered for the role of Petya Trofimov, the student who is Chekhov’s mouthpiece, and I was certain that my friend was going to get the job and my love life was going to be assured. When I went to the first rehearsal he was not there. Instead, I saw a tall thin young man with black hair and great blue eyes who was introduced to me as Hugh Franklin, and I was not pleased.
I think it was after the second rehearsal that Hugh asked me out for a bite to eat; this was at three in the afternoon. It was three in the morning when I unlocked the door to my apartment in the Village. I cannot imagine what the past thirty-plus years, the greater part of my life, would have been, had Hugh not played Petya.
But of course the real example which makes all our little stories pale is seen in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. He begged in agony that he might be spared the cross, and his father said No to him, and this No was the essential prelude to the Yes of the Resurrection. This No was necessary for the defeat of death. In dying, as a mortal, Jesus defeated the power of death. Death is often brutal, but death does not win. The sting has been removed. The victory of the grave is turned to defeat.
So Good Friday is good because it is the defeat of death.
In a Good Friday sermon Alan talked about the human desire to play God. We all have it. The trouble is that we want to play at God rather than be like God. We forget that playing God, if we take it seriously, involves a love so great that it accepts the cross.
It is difficult for us to hear, and even when we hear, it is difficult for us to understand.
The disciples heard, but they didn’t understand, otherwise they might not all—all except John—except the women—have run away from the horror of Good Friday.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.
We aren’t persecuted very much nowadays, we Christians, at least not overtly. But in point of fact there is a good bit of sub-rosa persecution, ridiculing if not reviling. In children’s books death and sex used to be taboo. Now death and sex are ‘in,’ and Christianity is the new taboo; other religions are appreciated, Buddhism, Hinduism, the pre-Christian Druidism; Christianity is not tolerated. And not only in children’s literature. It has been made taboo by those who do not understand it and who are terrified by its wider and wilder implications, and so take refuge in sarcasm and supercilious arrogance: of course we intelligent people don’t need God and we certainly aren’t interested in the cross. Only those poor creatures who aren’t strong enough to manage on their own go in for the false promises of religion.
On the other hand, self-sufficient intellectuals who can’t stand Christianity are far too often given a vicious travesty of what Christianity is about by the various Christian establishments. If I want to find a Christian, I look not to the ecclesiastical success as much as to the lame, the halt, the blind, who come to church, because only for us do the promises have any meaning.
One time in London, after I had come from the Holy Mysteries, I wrote:
How very odd it seems, dear Lord,
That when I go to seek your Word
In varied towns at home, abroad,
I’m in the company of the absurd.
The others who come, as I do,
Starving for need of sacrament,
Who sit beside me in the pew,
Are both in mind and body bent.
I kneel beside the old, unfit,
The young, the lonely stumbling few,
And I myself, with little wit.
Hunger and thirst, my God, for you.
I share communion with the halt,
The lame, the blind, oppressed, depressed.
We have, it seems, a common fault
In coming to you to be blessed.
And my fit friends, intelligent,
Heap on my shoulders a strange guilt.
Are only fools and sinners meant
To come unto you to be filled?
Among the witless and absurd
I flee to find you and to share
With eyes and ears and lips your Word.
I pray, my God. God, hear my prayer.
From city streets and lanes we come.
I slip unto you like a thief
To be with you, at peace, at home,
Lord, I believe. Oh, help my unbelief.
Perhaps we must accept our brokenness and not try to repress it before we can affirm the goodness
of Good Friday, and all that it promises. We are all broken, we human creatures, and to pretend we’re not is to inhibit healing. It is people who consider themselves whole who tell me that the Christian promises are false, but as I look at these ‘whole’ people I see that they are in fact less ‘whole’ than some who admit their brokenness.
Are these promises by which I live false ones? If so, I want to discard them immediately. But I don’t think that they are. Perhaps they are called false by the people who, underneath, are afraid they are only too true: Good Friday. The Cross. Death. Judgment.
I’m afraid, too. I think we all are. But we are given the grace to move beyond the fear because this is not all of the promise.
Those who look down condescendingly on us struggling Christians call the rest of this promise pie-in-the-sky and hope to demolish it by ridicule. The blessedness of being persecuted does indeed promise us heaven, and we’re not very good about heaven. The problem with all that is promised the Christian, and it’s all spelled out very clearly in the Beatitudes, is that it’s too good to be believed. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the world of provable fact and technology-turned-into-technocracy. And much of the time the Christian establishment is no help to us hungry sheep. I’ve been shocked at the number of clergymen of all denominations who either ignore the Resurrection or deny it—thereby relegating Jesus Christ to the status of merely a good rabbi—in which case he was wrong about himself, the disciples were wrong about him, Paul was wrong about him, and we’ve been worshipping a false god for nearly two thousand years.
Often we have indeed been worshipping false gods. The Christian establishment does not always remain true to its Lord. Like the stiff-necked Hebrews we, too, turn aside to our own equivalent of the altars of Baal. I was utterly appalled by a book endorsed officially by the Episcopal Church for use in high-school age Sunday School classes which equated belief in the Resurrection and our own everlasting life as ‘no better than superstitious belief in ghosts.’
I stand with Paul here. When we deny the Resurrection, we are denying Christianity. We are no longer the Church; no wonder the secular world is horrified by us.
It is not easy to have the courage to stand up and publicly be counted as Christians, when we know that our Christianity is going to be misunderstood and reviled. It is not easy to stand firm in our faith in heaven, our faith that Good Friday is good because it was not the end of the story, but was followed by the glory of Easter.
Christians are often accused by the secular world of being so hooked on heaven that we consider what is happening in this world unimportant, that we couldn’t care less about battlefields and slums and insane asylums; we ignore the poor; we turn our backs on racial injustice; we do not even consider the plight of the lame, the halt, the blind. Throughout the past two thousand years there has far too often been more than a modicum of truth in this accusation, because a great deal of the time Christians are simply not Christian at all.
But if we look at the record of concern for poverty and weakness and suffering, that of the atheist is by and large worse than that of the believer, because if you take seriously the glorious promise that God created all of us to live forever, then what we do here and now matters far more than if this life were all, and at the end of our mortal span we’re snuffed out like a candle—so why not eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
If we look back throughout history, the record shows quite clearly that societies where man is god have far less concern for human life than those which believe in God’s loving concern for every iota of his creation. Alexander the Great, Tiberius, Hitler/Mussolini were big on causes and small on people. I could list some Americans in my lifetime, but because they are in my lifetime, more water needs to flow under the bridge before I can see with any objectivity.
The Church that went along with Hitler was not the Church. The Church was in the concentration camps. To a Christian, no human being is expendable, and we cannot justify trampling on people now by promising them pie-in-the-sky by-and-by. When this is tried, it is simply not Christian. Our record is horribly smudged, and not for a minute would I pretend that it isn’t.
If at death we are to be judged on this life, then what we do here and now matters enormously. It may be of ultimate import whether or not we give a thirsty child a cup of cool water, whether or not we feed the hungry stranger who comes to our door. St. John of the Cross said, “In the evening of life we shall be judged on love.” So if, when we die, Christ looks on us with love in his eyes, and we are able to respond with love, then we know heaven. But if he looks at us with love and we respond with fear or hate or indifference, then we know hell. If I have denied bread to one hungry stranger I could have fed, that slice of pie is going to taste bitter indeed.
We can’t consider heaven as a result of the cross without considering the other possibility, hell, and we’re as bad about hell as we are about heaven.
In the Western Church, we jump directly from Good Friday to Easter Day, with Saturday a vague blank in between. But in the Eastern Church, Great and Holy Saturday is one of the most important days in the year.
Where was Jesus on that extraordinary day between the darkness of Good Friday and the brilliance of Easter Sunday? He was down in hell. And what was he doing there? He was harrowing hell, or to put it in simpler words, he was ministering to the damned.
Christian graphic art has often tended to make my affirmation of Jesus Christ as Lord almost impossible, for far too often he is depicted as a tubercular goy, effeminate and self-pitying. The first ‘religious’ picture I saw which excited me and stretched and enlarged my faith was a small black and white photograph of the fresco over the altar of the Church of the Chora in Istanbul; a few years ago it was my privilege to visit Istanbul and see this fresco for myself.
The Church of the Chora is now a museum, but when we went there on a chill morning with the smell of the first snow in the air, it was empty. As we stepped over the threshold we came face to face with a slightly more than life-size mosaic of the head of Christ, looking at us with a gaze of indescribable power. It was a fierce face, nothing weak about it, and I knew that if this man had turned such a look on me and told me to take up my bed and walk, I would not have dared not to obey. And whatever he told me to do, I would have been able to do.
The mosaic was preparation for the fresco over the altar. I stood there, trembling with joy, as I looked at this magnificent painting of the harrowing of hell. In the center is the figure of Jesus striding through hell, a figure of immense virility and power. With one strong hand he is grasping Adam, with the other, Eve, and wresting them out of the power of hell. The gates to hell, which he has trampled down and destroyed forever, are in cross-form, the same cross on which he died.
GREAT AND HOLY SATURDAY
Death and damnation began with my body still my own,
began when I was ousted from my place,
and many creatures still were left unnamed.
Gone are some, now, extinct, and nameless,
as though they had never been.
In hell I feel their anxious breath, see their accusing eyes.
My guilt is heavier than was the weight of flesh.
I bear the waste of time spent in recriminations
(“You should not have.…” “But you told me.…” “Nay, it was you who.… “).
And yet I knew my wife, and this was good.
But all good turned to guilt. Our first-born
killed his brother. Only Seth gave us no grief.
I grew old, and was afraid; afraid to die, even knowing
that death had come, and been endured, when we
were forced to leave our home, the one and only home a human man
has ever known. The rest is exile.
Death, when it came, was no more than a dim
continuation of the exile. I was hardly less a shadow
than I had been on earth, and centuries
passed no more slowly than a
single day.
I was not prepared to be enfleshed again,
reconciled, if not contented, with my shadow self.
I had seen the birth of children with all its blood and pain
and had no wish ever to be born again.
The sound, when it came, was louder than thunder,
louder than the falling of a mountain,
louder than the tidal wave crashing down the city walls,
stone splitting, falling, smashing.
The light was brutal against my shaded eyes,
blinding me with brilliance. I was thousands
of years unaccustomed to the glory.
Then came the wrench of bone where bone had long been dust.
The shocking rise of dry bones, the burning fleshing,
the surge of blood through artery and vein
was pain as I had never known that pain could be.
My anguished scream was silenced as my hand was held
in a grip of such authority I could not even try to pull away.
The crossed gates were trampled by his powerful feet
and I was wrenched through the chasm
as through the eye of the hurricane.
And then—O God—he crushed me
in his fierce embrace. Flesh entered flesh;
bone, bone. Thus did I die, at last.
Thus was I born.
Two Adams became one.
And in the glory Adam was.
Nay, Adam is.
My young friend who was taught that she was so sinful the only way an angry God could be persuaded to forgive her was by Jesus dying for her, was also taught that part of the joy of the blessed in heaven is watching the torture of the damned in hell. A strange idea of joy. But it is a belief limited not only to the more rigid sects. I know a number of highly sensitive and intelligent people in my own communion who consider as a heresy my faith that God’s loving concern for his creation will outlast all our willfulness and pride. No matter how many eons it takes, he will not rest until all of creation, including Satan, is reconciled to him, until there is no creature who cannot return his look of love with a joyful response of love.
The Irrational Season Page 11