April 10, 2009 - Good Friday, Year B (RCL)
It’s Good Friday evening, and we’re now in
a kind of in-between time.
This afternoon, we waited for three long hours
as Jesus hung on the cross;
slowly dying,
speaking
an occasional word.
And then three o’clock, and the moment
when Jesus
breathed his last breath.
And the earth groaned, and the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom, and graves split open.
And then the soldiers
poked a spear into Jesus’ side,
and it was clear
that he was dead.
And they took his body down from the cross
and carried it carefully, though care no longer mattered, it was as broken as it would ever be,
they carried it away
and laid it in the tomb.
And then
it was silent.
That silence
is perhaps most memorably captured in the words of literary critic of George Steiner:
“There is one particular day in Western history about which neither historical record nor myth nor Scripture make report. It is a Saturday. And it has become the longest of days. We know of that Good Friday which Christianity holds to have been that of the Cross. But the non-Christian, the atheist, knows of it as well. This is to say that he knows of the injustice, of the interminable, suffering, of the waste, of the brute enigma of ending, which so largely make up not only the historical dimension of the human condition, but the everyday fabric of our personal lives. We know, ineluctably, of the pain, of the failure of love, of the solitude which are our history and private fate. We know also about Sunday. To the Christian, that day signifies an intimation, both assured and precarious, both evident and beyond comprehension, of resurrection, of a justice and a love that have conquered death. If we are non-Christians or non-believers, we know of that Sunday in precisely analogous terms. We conceive of it as the day of liberation from inhumanity and servitude. We look to resolutions, be they therapeutic or political, be they social or messianic. The lineaments of that Sunday carry the name of hope (there is no word less deconstructible).
But ours is a long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, of the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless.
George Steiner, Real Presences (Faber & Faber 1989), last two pages.
We wait
in silence.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2009