Good Friday:                                       The Rev'd James Ross Smith

Celebration of the Lord's Passion           April 6, 2007

Genesis 22:1-18; Psalm 22:1-21;           Solemn Rites

Hebrews 10:1-25;

John 18:1-40–19:1-37

Elie Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, wrote his first book shortly after the end of the Second World War.  # 1 Its English title is Night. It's not a long book. Perhaps it would be unbearable if it were. In Night Wiesel first tells the story of the years before he and his family were sent to Auschwitz . He then puts into words that which is unspeakable: the all-too-human inhumanity, the coldness and cruelty of his captors, the demonic tortures of the camps, the brutal and methodical genocide. One of the book's strengths is that Wiesel rejects the role both of victim and of hero. He doesn't shrink from telling us about his fears, his weaknesses, his will to survive, what he perceives as his failures, his betrayals, his guilt. Do not misunderstand me: there is no neurotic self-laceration here. Wiesel indicts the torturers for pushing their captives to the extreme and beyond. Still, he is not afraid to look at himself and to try and tell the truth. He wants, he needs, to tell the truth. He is a witness.

 

In the introduction, Wiesel says that it wasn't easy to find a publisher for the book, that in the postwar period there was little desire, or will, to hear such a story. He writes, “My manuscript was rejected by every major publisher, French and American, despite the tireless efforts of the great Catholic French writer and Nobel laureate, François Mauriac. Apparently because of Mauriac's part in seeing that the book was published, Wiesel asked him to write the book's foreword. Mauriac agreed to do so. In his essay, Mauriac talks about meeting “The young Jew who came to interview me on behalf of a Tel Aviv daily newspaper,” # 2 of his customary wariness with journalists, and of his surprising and immediate connection with Wiesel; of being “won over” from the first moment, of his growing trust, of his own unaccustomed frankness as he told Wiesel about his own life under the Occupation, of what he knew and what he didn't know – not an easy subject – of his wife's coming home one day in a state of agitation to tell him that she had just seen “cattle cars filled with Jewish children” at a Paris train station. He writes, “I believe that on that day, I first became aware of the mystery of the iniquity whose exposure marked the end of [one] era and the beginning of another.” Mauriac then says that Wiesel had listened to all this and had said, finally, “I was one of those children,” and that he had then gone on to tell him about his experiences in the camps. After listening to the story, Mauriac says, “And I, who believe that God is love, what answer was there to give my young interlocutor whose dark eyes still held the reflection of the angelic sadness that had appeared on the face of [the] hanged child [whose death Wiesel had witnessed, the sight of which had made him lose his faith.]” (Wiesel writes in Night: “My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone, in a world without God, without man.”) Mauriac goes on, “What did I say to him? Did I speak to him of that other Jew, this crucified brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world? Did I explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become a cornerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfathomable mystery in which the faith of his childhood was lost? And yet, Zion has risen up again out of the crematoria and the slaughterhouses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its …dead. It is they who have given it new life. We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to him. That is what I should have said to the Jewish child. But all I could do was embrace him and weep.”

 

I find Mauriac's words stunning, astounding, embarrassing. They make me feel uneasy and guilty. I want to run away from them. I want to embrace them. They make me sad. They give me hope.

 

First, there is Mauriac's audacity in introducing a book about the Holocaust with such frankly religious, indeed, such Christian language. Second, it seems that for him there was no running away: if he was going to take Wiesel's experiences seriously, he had to talk about his faith, as well as his doubt. Third, Wiesel includes the foreword not only in Night' s first edition, but also in its latest edition, published with a new translation in 2000. That is an act or respect, magnanimity, to be sure, but it is also an act of hope, and thus an act of profound graciousness, and of reconciliation. Moreover, these two writers, who believe in the power of language, both understand that language is limited. Some things cannot be explained. Words cannot change history or make evil go away. Sometimes there can only be tears, an embrace, a response, no matter how fractured and incomplete; sometimes there can only be determination, action, courage, deed: you get the book published, you welcome the stranger, you show hospitality, you listen, you tell the truth, you bear witness, you confess your sin, you admit that there is mystery; you admit that you've messed up, you try to do better, you ask for forgiveness, you forgive and forgive again.

 

The French Catholic writer's words are embarrassing because they are foolish. They are foolish the way the cross is foolish. They are unwise the way the cross is unwise. They are a scandal because the cross is deeply scandalous.

 

There have always been great Christian thinkers who have talked about God using the language of philosophy, the language of abstraction; and of course one is glad that they have done so – they have shown that Athens and Jerusalem have something to do with each other.

 

But the greatest of those Christian thinkers have always understood, have always believed, that, for us, God is not an abstraction. God is revealed on the cross: the Logos, the Word of God, the eternally begotten Son is the crucified and exalted one. To start with God is to start at the foot of the cross with Mary and the Beloved Disciple, witnessing the blood and the water, entering into the mystery of the blood and the water, dying and rising with the crucified and exalted one; eating his flesh and drinking his blood, gifts of his presence, the tools that chip away at us, making us more Christ-like, reshaping our recalcitrant selves in the form of a cross.

 

On Good Friday we read John's Passion, which forces us to deal with the Evangelist's anachronistic and bitter language about “the Jews,” late first-century language born out of conflict between Jewish-Christians and their brethren. But we must read John to remind ourselves that this is a Good Friday. The Evangelist reflects on the story of Jesus and sees that the criminal is a king, the cross is a throne, that the exaltation, the resurrection, the ascension all begin on the cross. Not because Jesus' death wasn't real, but because it was real. It was bloody, painful, sacrificial, ugly. It was the execution of an innocent victim. But the Jesus who is so much in control in John's Passion, restraining his disciples, turning his trial into Pilate's trial, carrying his own cross, creating relationship, creating church, breathing out the spirit of his presence onto his disciples and into the world, even as he dies, really dies, tells the other side of the same story which Mark tells. The cry of dereliction tells one truth. Jesus lifted up on the cross, already the exalted one, tells another. They tell one truth in different ways.

 

I didn't grow up with the old rugged, Protestant hymns that talk about the blood of Jesus, of being washed in the blood of the Lamb; and so hymns like that still have a kind of power for me. Their language is somehow always new and shocking. There's a hymn, “In the Cross of Christ I Glory,” that works on me in that way. The words of the hymn go like this, “In the cross of Christ I glory, towering o'er the wrecks of time; all the light of sacred story gathers round its head sublime. When the woes of life o'ertake me, hopes deceive, and fears annoy, never shall the cross forsake me: lo, it glows with peace and joy. When the sun of bliss is beaming, light and love upon my way, from the cross the radiance streaming adds new luster to the day. Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure, by the cross are sanctified; peace is there that knows no measure, joys that through all time abide.” # 3

 

This is foolish language, foolish talk. It is not wise. But it says what John says: stand at the foot of the cross. That's where you have to begin. That's where you'll see the face of God. That's where death dies and life begins. It's where we leave our sin and begin – again and again and again. # 4

This is foolish language, but if we didn't believe it, why else would we wake up, greet this day, and call it good?

 

Copyright © 2007 by James Ross Smith

# 1 Elie Wiesel, Night, new translation by Marion Wiesel and with a new preface by Elie Wiesel ( New York : Hill and Wang, 2006). Wiesel wrote the book in Yiddish. It was first translated into French and then into English. First published in 1958 as La Nuit by Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris , France .

# 2 François Mauriac in Wiesel, Night, p. xvii

# 3 John Bowring (1792-1872): The Hymnal 1982, Numbers 441 and 442.

# 4 I found the following books useful as I prepared to preach the Triduum: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (Ressourcement / Retrieval & Renewal in Catholic Thought), translated and with an introduction by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990); James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998); Jean Daniélou, S.J., The Bible and the Liturgy (University of Notre Dame Liturgical Studies III) (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press); Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., Seven Last Words, new edition, (London: Burns & Oates, 2004); Sandra M. Schneiders, Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel , revised and expanded edition, with a Study Guide by John C. Wronski, S.J. (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003). (Schneiders' book is really quite brilliant. Her approach is, first of all, “historical-critical,” but she manages to summarize, assimilate, digest, and evaluate several decades' worth of critical work on John, not just for its own sake, but in order to make the historical work available for reflection on the theology and spirituality of the Fourth Gospel.) See also, David F. Ford, The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House Co., 1997) and Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Ford is an Anglican and is, at present, Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge . He received a Master's degree in Sacred Theology (S.T.M.) from Yale's Divinity School . See also Samuel Wells, Power and Passion: Six Characters in Search of Resurrection ( Grand Rapids , MI : Zondervan, 2007). Wells is an Anglican and was ordained priest in the Church of England. After serving as a parish priest for fourteen years, he came to the United States . He is the Dean of the Chapel at Duke University and Research Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke Divinity School . Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, chose Power and Passion as his official “Lent Book, 2007.”