Good Friday is the most somber and dark day of the church year. Tonight we gather to remember the cruel and gruesome death that Jesus suffered on the cross.
The cross has become such a ubiquitous and over-used symbol that we Christians often become desensitized to the brutality and terror it represented to people in the first-century Roman Empire. For many of us, a cross is something comforting, even beautiful, something we cast in gold or silver and wear around our necks as a fashion accessory. It denotes our Christian identity to others, and perhaps reminds us of Christ's love and sacrifice for us. In the cross, we see a message of love and forgiveness, informed by Christian theology about the meaning of the cross. But to others, it may carry a different message.
Many of you remember Valarie Kaur, the creator/writer/producer of Divided We Fall, the documentary I'm working with that many of you saw at the Omaha Film Festival back in February. Valarie spoke at our first Wednesday night Lenten series and at the 10:30 service the following Sunday. She shared with us a bit of her experience growing up as a Sikh girl in California in a town full of many Christians, Christians who tried very hard to convert her to Christianity. She spoke of family friends performing exorcisms on her, telling her that every time she was confused or distraught over her religious identity, it was the devil speaking to her. By the end of her childhood, the image of the cross struck fear in Valarie's heart. To her, the cross meant judgment, hate, condemnation.
In early versions of Divided We Fall, Valarie included some of this discussion about her views of the cross in the narration of the film. I remember vividly a conversation we had one day last fall, sitting outside a café in Cambridge, when I told her how incredibly sad and painful it was to me to think that the cross, a symbol that meant so much to me spiritually, had been for her an object of fear and judgment. I was in tears as I spoke to her of what the cross meant to me, a symbol of God's love for us, of God's willingness to die for us. She assured me that she had made her peace with Christianity by now, that through other Christian friends she had made in her college years, she no longer saw the cross only as a symbol to be feared. We left it at that.
Several months later, I was sitting in the pews at St. James Episcopal Church for the Good Friday services, and as the enormous stark wooden cross was brought forward, I suddenly had a moment of revelation. The cross was for Jesus the same thing that it had been to Valarie in her childhood -- an object of judgment, of hate, of condemnation -- an object that struck fear in his heart and the hearts of all who were dear to him. After all, the cross was an object of execution! The modern equivalent would be if we all went around wearing miniature electric chairs around our necks! I think we lose sight of that in all the sentimentalizing we do to the cross. Ironically, my Christian faith and experience had actually blinded me from fully understanding the gravity, the horror and fear, of what Jesus experienced that dark Friday in Jerusalem. On some level, those who have experienced the cross as condemning or hateful are actually closer to understanding Jesus's own experience of the cross than are we Christians who see the cross as comforting or beautiful. It was only through my relationship with a Sikh woman and through seeing my faith through HER experiences that I was able to reach a new level of depth in my own Christian spirituality.
On that Good Friday at St. James, as I knelt at the foot of the life-sized wooden cross, as I pressed my hand against the bare, rough wood, I thought about not only the rejection, hatred, and violence that Jesus experienced that day, but the rejection, hatred, and violence that Valarie and so many others have experienced and are still experiencing today. In a single moment, I felt the weight of both the historical event of Jesus's crucifixion and the ways in which we continue to crucify Christ today, whenever we preach a gospel of condemnation, of hate, and of judgment, rather than a gospel of reconciliation, forgiveness, and redemption. My dear Sikh friend, perhaps unknowingly, had given me one of the most profound Christian spiritual insights I had ever experienced.
It was something along these lines that I was hoping for when I planned the Wednesday night Lenten series this year. By asking people of other faiths to reflect on the traditional Christian stations of the cross, I was hoping that all of you, too, might gain new insight into your own faith through seeing it through the eyes of others. That through others' experiences, you might come to feel a deeper sense of connection with God and with others, that you might come to feel a profoundly sacred human solidarity with others in the experience of suffering.
The interfaith stations project was deeply moving for some of our contributors as well. Valarie herself reflected on the experience, "I discovered that the themes of suffering, sacrifice, and service defined not only the Christian story but the human story - and the way I understand my own life experience. Here I remember the central tenet of the Sikh faith - beneath all husks and labels, humanity is one. Even across the sheer range of human experience, we are bound together by a shared humanity."
What allowed us to connect with the contributors who wrote meditations for the stations out of their non-Christian faith experiences was our shared humanity. As we read their reflections on the universal human themes of the crucifixion -- deep-seated patterns of suffering, cruelty, injustice, and death -- we were able to connect to them on a human level, even when our theologies or beliefs may not agree.
But the connections, at least for me, were not merely human or secular, but profoundly spiritual. The mystery of the incarnation that we proclaim as Christians is that it is precisely in the human that we find the divine. Thus, connecting with someone on a human level IS connecting with them on a spiritual level! I have a quote by Hadewijch of Antwerp, a 13th century Dutch poet and Christian mystic, tacked on the wall in my bedroom that says, "We must love the humanity in order to reach the divinity." This, to me, is one of the central messages of Christianity. In Jesus, the human and the divine are no longer separate. Humanity is fused with the very nature of divinity.
Jesus was indeed human, a particular historical figure who lived at a particular time in history, and his death was an historical event that happened under the Roman Empire around the year 33 AD. But for Christians, Jesus is also the cosmic Christ, the eternally begotten son, one aspect of our Trinitarian God, a God whose very nature is to be found in and with the human. Christ did not just live and die in the first-century AD; he lives and dies continually in our world today. As Christians, we are called by our baptismal vows to "seek and serve Christ in all persons." Every time we fail to see Christ in another person, we crucify Jesus again. Every time our eyes are opened to the Christ in those around us, we feel the power of Jesus's resurrection again.
In our interfaith stations, we confronted hate crimes, poverty, religious persecution, loneliness, abuse of power, suffering and the forces of destruction. Valarie wrote in her depiction of the first station that those who killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man in Arizona murdered 4 days after 9/11, were afraid of him because they did not understand him, because "they could not see the divine in him." Every time we cannot see the divine in someone, every time we are complicit in the suffering of others, even by our inaction -- by those "things we have left undone" -- we crucify Jesus. Our hardness of heart continues to nail Jesus to the cross. "Crucify him!" we all yell together with the crowds of the Passion narrative on Palm Sunday and again during our liturgy tonight.
On Good Friday, we must own our complicity in the violence and suffering of the world. But we do so confident in the mercy and forgiveness of God, for despite the horrors of the cross, despite the human capacities for cruelty, inhumanity, and violence, the message of the cross is ultimately a message of forgiveness. Even as he hangs gasping for breath on a cross, Jesus prays for his executioners -- "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." I can only imagine that Jesus continues to pray this same prayer on our behalf, as we muddle through the world often unaware of how our own actions implicate us in the literal and metaphorical executions of our time, both as a society and as individuals.
The cruelties of this world are difficult to face head-on; it is human nature to close our eyes to situations that seem beyond our control to change, to refuse to see what seems beyond hope. But through his suffering on the cross, Jesus brought the divine into the most gruesome and unbearable aspects of the human experience. Through his Passion, we know that even in the darkest of pain and suffering, even in rejection, betrayal, and violent death, there is the possibility of redemption. And through his resurrection, we know that for the Christian, nothing is beyond hope.
Gracious Lord, may we live our lives in the full knowledge of the forgiveness, hope and redemption of the cross, in the name of the One who forgives even his executioners and reaches through his wounds to transform suffering, Amen.
