Orpheus Failed

Propers: Good Friday, A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Death.

There’s no escaping it. There’s no avoiding it. The wages of sin are death.

This isn’t a threat, by the way. I’m not into scared-straight sermons. If anything, it’s axiomatic. Death isn’t a thing; it isn’t a skeleton with a scythe. Death is not real in and of itself. Death is simply an absence, a void, the lack of life. And life is so much more than biology. Life is union with God, union with the Good and the True and the Beautiful. God is the Source of life—He is Life itself—and the Source of our being, because He is Being itself.

Sin is separation from God, separation from life and being and truth. Thus, the wages of sin are death. Pull away, and we make a void. That void is our death.

It’s the thing we all face, yet the thing we all hate. No one escapes death, yet we treat it as the most unnatural thing in the world—and in a sense it is. Our yearning for immortality, our inborn abhorrence of death, even a good death, makes a sort of sense. It points us toward a greater reality, a greater destiny. Yet we can’t seem to make it there. We can’t figure out how to fill the hole we’ve cut through the heart of the world, the chasm that separates us from Life.

In ancient Greece, one of the most infamous cults was that of the Orphic Mysteries. And this was based upon the myth of Orpheus, whose music was said to be unbearably sublime. No one was immune to his charms, not even the animals or the rocks. His wife Eurydice, whom Orpheus loved with all his heart, would dance ecstatically to her husband’s music—until one day her dancing led her to tread upon a viper, which sunk envenomed fangs deep into her flesh.

Thus did the joy of Orpheus turn to sorrow, and his mourning into song. And the sadness of that song shook the very heavens, causing the powers of earth and sky to weep, until the gods of Olympus impelled him to journey to the underworld to bring his beloved Eurydice home again, alive again. And his music charmed the dog that guarded Hades’ gate. And it charmed the Lord and Lady of the dead, who gave him permission to lead his wife’s soul back to life.

Their only condition was this: that Orpheus could not look back, could not look upon his beloved, until they had returned to the light of day. He must play and lead her back to life, never once glancing back until their journey was complete. And as he ascended, playing his heavenly tune, doubt began to gnaw at him. He feared that Hades had deceived him. He feared that his wife was not behind him.

And so as Orpheus reached the threshold of the portal back to life, he could hold back no longer but turned—only to catch one fleeting glimpse of Eurydice’s spirit, before she vanished back into the darkness. Orpheus failed.

His was the height of human art, the height of music, the height of beauty. His was all the skill a man could muster in heart and mind and hand. The very powers of nature bowed before him—yet he could not save the one he loved. Not from death. Not from the grave. None of us can.

Such would be the story of all humankind, had not another come forth to face death, to free His beloved from the tyranny of the grave. This One did not seek to charm death with gentle notes, but to seize it in a death-grip, to pull it in upon itself, nothing upon nothing, thus to fill that bottomless chasm torn by our sin full now to bursting with the Breath and Blood and Life of God!

Make no mistake: this is what Good Friday is. This is not the nameless execution of one more would-be Christ, the routine elimination of a troublemaker who sought to disturb the ruling might of Rome. No! For this Man, this hapless victim, this so-called Christ, is in fact the God of all Creation come down swaddled in the flesh! He is Being itself walking about on two legs. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the Light of the world born into darkness.

And what do you think happens when you drop infinite Being into nothing’s abyss? What happens when unlimited Life falls headlong into the depthless halls of death? What happens when a Light that is the Source of all light that ever was or is or even could be now blazes forth into the very heart of darkness?

It is a paradox! Life embraces death; Being embraces nothing; and the nothing ceases to exist! Because there is no darkness where there is Light. There is no death where there is Life. There is no hell where there is Christ! He defeats it, He crushes it, He harrows it, for it is as nothing before Him! The whole kingdom of Satan is a lie, and it scatters like roaches before the Light, like shadows before the Sun. Christ has conquered death and hell! And He has found Orpheus and Eurydice waiting for Him to come.

It looks to all the world as though Satan has won, because the Son of God came to save the human race, and for His trouble we nailed Him to the Cross like a gutted stag in a tree. We were His beloved, and we pulled Him down to death. But the devil has no idea what he has swallowed down this night. And Hades, dear Christians—well, Hades doesn’t have a prayer.

Behold the Cross with which He conquers hell.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.