The Ten-Mile Scream

Good Friday, by Colvin David

Propers: Good Friday, AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

The following is a reflection on the Crucifixion by Andrew Klavan.

There is a Zen story about a master named Yantou. Bandits raided his monastery and murdered him. The people said they could hear his dying scream for ten miles around. He was so enlightened, so awake to life, that he suffered at a more intense level than the rest of us.

Jesus died a bad death, beaten, tortured, slowly killed. But there have been worse deaths. There can always be worse. What made this death the worst of all was that it was his—the death of the Word made flesh—and he experienced it at the highest intensity possible.

Waiting for his arrest in the garden, he fell on the ground in terror. He sweat blood. He was in an agony of fear and sorrow. He prayed he would not have to drink from the cup of his own martyrdom.

But he was sent not just to live but to perform life. And life is a tragedy.

We don’t understand that word very well anymore, the word tragedy. Especially in America, where no one ever explained to us it was the central rule of physical existence. In America, as William Dean Howells is supposed to have said, what the public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending. We want to believe that a bad outcome can always be avoided, and when it can’t be avoided, we tell ourselves it could have been if only we had gone another way.

That’s now how things work. Tragedy is an inevitable conflict of imperatives. It is what happens when a person does what he must do, right or wrong, and, right or wrong, must suffer for what he does. Once the machinery is set in motion, there is no stopping it. To live is to die. To love is to grieve. To think is to suffer. To speak the truth is to set yourself at daggers drawn with the world.

Jesus was the truth and had to speak the truth, and the world was the world and had to kill him for it: that’s tragedy. He wasn’t betrayed by an act of evil. He wasn’t murdered by a villain. He would not have avoided dying had he been born among another people or in another time. He was the living truth. The religious had to kill him because they were religious. The leaders had to kill him because they were leaders. The people had to kill him because they were the people. The law had to kill him because it was the law.

That was what it was like to be the truth in the world. That was the tragic nature of the experience. It still is. It would happen all the same this very day.

More than likely, you and I would be in the crowd, screaming, “Give us Barabbas!”

At the Last Supper, he told his disciples, “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”

Then he went out into the garden.

In the end, when he was hanging nailed to the cross, he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It was—like everything he did—both entirely itself and entirely a sign. In this case, it was both a statement of complete despair and a declaration that his despairing death placed him within the psalm that described it—Psalm 22, which begins with the words he cried.

The psalm foretold what would happen to him. “I am  … scorned by mankind and despised by the people … I am poured out like water … my heart … is melted within my breast … they have pierced my hands and feet … they stare and gloat over me … they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.”

But it also tells of God’s saving grace and how future generations “will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!”

His despairing death confirmed he was the fulfillment of the hope of Scripture.

But who would live the Logos life if this were all there was?

Jesus said, “Take up [your] cross and follow me.” But who would do it? Why would you? If this tragic world is all there is, why would anyone? A life of truth and beauty, radical love and radical honesty, is a life of joy, but it’s also a life at odds with the way of the world. At some point, it will put you in opposition to governments, churches, radicals, conservatives, and the ever-self-righteous mob. Whoever sits on the throne of the day will come to despise you.

You may get lucky. It may happen that your particular nature and its fulfillment in your particular slice of history won’t lead you to the hemlock or the cross, the scourge or the fire, the show trial or the public shaming or the unemployment line.

But become as a little child again, become perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect, love your enemy, judge not, live in truth, and some sacrifice—some loss of achievement or pleasure, friendship, community, fame, wealth, or glory—is sure to come. Why do it, unless you are betting that the joy of your wholeness and authenticity is the expression of a greater joy that lies beyond mere life and time, a joy eternal in the presence of a beauty divine?

If you do not believe that life is more than life, it would be madness to do anything but seize the day and live from pleasure to treasure. Better to kowtow to the money men and make your pile. Better to kill an inconvenient unborn child and live unfettered. Better to silence your opponents and seize their fortune than to live in mutual freedom. Better to ditch your promises to your spouse and have a sweet new affair. Better to trade your integrity for success and its trappings. Better to keep your head down and your mouth shut in times of danger.

To choose instead the tragedy of love is to proclaim with your whole life that this kingdom of heaven within you is a kingdom that never ends. When your cross looms in front of you, it won’t be enough to “act as if there were a God.” You will have to believe, or you will crater.

You don’t have to know when history will finish, you don’t have to know who is saved and who is damned, you don’t have to know the number of the psalms or the names of the apostles or the rulebook that governs the counsel of heaven. But you do have to know what the Logos looks like when it lives on earth and you have to have faith that it lives on forever even after it has been put to death.

The resurrection was like everything else Jesus did: itself and its meaning. He really rose from the dead, and, rising, he showed that the Word speaks the body into existence and that if the body speaks the Word, it becomes part of its endless creation and will be spoken into life without end.

The resurrection tells us that when the flesh becomes the Word, the Word will become flesh again, in a new body, incorruptible. The resurrection says to us: heaven and earth shall pass away but the Word will never pass away.

Therefore, become the Word.

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