Good Friday
Often in looking for some symptom that might supply us with a key to what’s wrong with our world, we survey the larger tendencies of human nature – greed, selfishness, distrust, suspicion, quickness to take offense, to strike back, to stigmatize others – when all the while something quite simple, down amid the ordinary experiences of everyday life, offers us the clue to what’s universally wrong with us – all across the globe.
For example, I’m thinking of a scene, indeed of a lyric from the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel in which Julie Jordan – pondering her relationship with Billy Bigelow – wonders what’s impeding her speech and thereby jeopardizing their relationship. She thinks she’s in love with Billy, but she’s not too sure of it, the reason being: she can’t express it. Her love has become stuck in her throat, can’t break through the limits of her usual language. The right words elude her so that she doubts her love.
And in her frustration she sings: If I loved you (and I’m not so sure about that – because) If I loved you, Time and again I would try to say All I want you to know ( to hold nothing back, let my language blossom, reveal to you all that I am). (But I have trouble doing that.) – because If I loved you, Words wouldn’t come in an easy way, Round in circles I’d go, Longing to tell you but afraid and shy, I’d let my golden chances pass me by. And she anticipates what would happen: Soon you’d leave me, off you would go in the mist of day, Never, never to know (given my impediment) how I loved you – if I loved you.
I said I thought this – Julie’s little, isolated crisis is one of universal experience – illustrating our basic human problem: we have difficulty expressing our love – speaking it, allowing it to blossom in other than standardized words and images, in indirect ways, in a whole-hearted way. When it comes to love, we all suffer a speech impediment – as did those mutes or stutterers whom Jesus cured in the Gospels, releasing their tongues, turning them into potential poets.
On the other hand, we are quite outspoken, loquacious when it comes to expressing ourselves about other things than love. What was it Jesus said to people who were touchy about whether the food they ate was kosher or not? It’s not what enters one’s mouth that defiles a person; but what comes out of the mouth . . . evil thoughts, murder, lust, theft, lies, blasphemy. These are what defile a person, not eating with unwashed hands.
I don’t know about you – and in my case maybe it’s just my age – but whenever I turn on the TV or my car radio I wonder why I do it – what comes out is noise – be it music or speech. Loud, breathless, incoherent, meaningless.
Talk about speech impediments. We speak chatter, jargon or in a higher bracket abstractions, legalese. Indeed one wonders whether we speak to be understood or to conceal things behind a veil of small talk – reluctant rather than ready to reveal who we are.
Many a theologian over the past fifty years thinks that the language we speak is the very handicap Jesus came to remedy – that the mission of Jesus was to set up an elocution program directed by the Church to teach us how to overcome our speech impediments, our inability to express the love bottled up in us as it was in the Julie of Carousel. (The Sermon on the Mount was big part of the program. Remember his method: You have heard it said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies . . . that you may be children of your heavenly Father who makes his sun rise on the bad and the good and his rain to fall on the just and unjust.)
Jesus comes as the Word of God made flesh – and what can the Word of God be but a word of universal grace, of genuine, trustworthy, everlasting, healing love – contagious, making us capable of all those things Julie couldn’t do: so that time and again I would actually say all I’d want you to know; so that words, poetry would come in an easy way without my being afraid and shy, never letting golden chances of true conversation pass me by; ever, ever, always able to let you know how I love you.
I mean, consider Good Friday. We focus on the scourging, the physical blows, the nails and crown of thorns, the cross as the instruments assembled to torture Jesus right out of our world. But it’s really our language, what we say, that executes him and us – in bits and pieces:
Then Judas Iscariot went to the chief priests and said, “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?” And they paid him thirty pieces of silver.
Surely it is not I, Lord?
Though all may have their faith in you shaken, mine will never be.
Even though I should have to die with you, I will not deny you.
The man I shall kiss is the one; arrest him.
This man said, I can destroy the temple of God and within three days rebuild it – literally.
I order you to tell us under oath before the living God whether you are the Messiah, the Son of God.
He has blasphemed! What further need have we of witnesses? You have now heard the blasphemy.
Is this the way you answer the high priest?
What is your opinion? They replied: He deserves to die.
Prophesy for us, Messiah: who is it that struck you?
You too were with Jesus the Galilean. I do not know the man.
We found this man misleading our people; he opposes the payment of taxes to Caesar and maintains he is a king.
Then what shall I do with Jesus called Messiah? Let him be crucified. Why? What evil has he done? They only shouted the louder, Let him be crucified!
Away with this man! Release Barabbas to us.
Crucify him, crucify him.
If you release him you are no friend of Caesar.
They mocked him, saying “Hail, King of the Jews.”
He saved others; he cannot save himself.
The revolutionaries who were crucified with him kept abusing him in the same way.
Jesus died under a barrage of language, the language the human race has been stuck with ever since Cain said, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and Cain’s great, great grandson said, “I will avenge myself 70 times 7 times” – and so as far back as we can remember – language lethal in its suspicion, fear-ridden, the noise, the rhetoric of the simple-minded.
And so it’s appropriate for us to be stunned into silence on Good Friday – for in burying Jesus, the Word of God, the gracious spirit of God made flesh, we have buried our own capacity to speak words of grace, of genuine, honest love; buried the poetry we were born to speak; made of our world a place ranging from indifference to violence – except that the Word made flesh, the Word warm like flesh, tenderness, will resonate among us again by Easter Sunday – to begin his elocution lesson anew, coaching Simon Peter three times – and successfully – on how to say “I love you.”