Good Friday, 10 April 2020 - churches closed
He is a man just like us. And that he has experienced such terrifying trauma, of body, mind and spirit, frankly, terrifies us. Because if it could happen to him, it could happen to us.
I could be talking about Boris Johnson, for whom we pray along with all those hundreds of thousands of others across the world struggling with Covid-19 today. But you know I’m talking about Jesus. For this is Good Friday - the ‘good’ in it being that this is the one day in the Church calendar when we must cease avoiding the reality of the trauma of life, the trauma in his life and in ours; this is the one day when we must approach the cross with our eyes and hearts open - embracing the trauma, whilst searching for wisdom.
We are, all people across the world, today in trauma. A psychological trauma - all of us affected by the actual, or threatened, death by a sickness which some of us are witnessing directly, and all of us are hearing and seeing reported. [1] Our anxiety levels are high as we are forced to confront the threat full-on. Normally we tend to avoid or deny unpalatable truths in our lives, but here and now, with Covid-19 an omnipresent threat, this is not an option.
And we feel the threat: not only to our bodies, but to our basic assumptions about the world and our place within it. Our trauma reaches into the depths of our beings.
The psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman defined trauma as something that does violence to our core beliefs:
- our belief that the world is safe;
- our belief that we can cope with what life throws at us; and
- our belief that this life has meaning and purpose.
Approaching the cross, how could Jesus believe that the world was safe, with the crowds turning against him and the Jewish and Roman authorities circling for the kill? And, faced with the crucifixion we call coronavirus, how can we believe that our world is safe any more, when even our dearest loved ones could be carriers of that which could kill us?
Approaching the cross, how could Jesus believe that he could cope with what life was throwing at him, with all his friends and supporters scattered, in flight in response to the trauma of his arrest and trial; with his own physical strength drained and his spirit at the lowest ebb, praying in Gethsemane, praying without hope, for this trauma to be taken away? And in our world turned upside-down and inside-out, we wonder each morning how we will cope, today, with our anxieties and fears, with our grief and our anger and our angst, we’re tormented by questions of how we will pay the bills, of how we will survive as a family or a business or - dare I say it - even as a church?
And, approaching the cross, how could Jesus believe that his life still had any meaning and purpose, when all he had taught, all he had fought for, the beautiful vision of the Kingdom of God bringing healing and life to a broken world, all that felt abandoned; and The Father for whose sake he had done all this, felt so distant, so silent, so equally powerless in the face of the trauma? And how can we believe that our life still has any meaning and purpose when all that we have built over years - family, business, church, community - we have to abandon now for the sake of the unpalatable science of survival which demands our isolation and distancing?
Good Friday is not a day for blithely saying, “What does not kill me makes me stronger”; nor is it a day for looking on the bright side and saying, “It’ll all be over soon.” Today is a day for embracing the trauma, and searching for the wisdom which may be found therein.
Not only can wisdom help us deal with trauma; indeed, wisdom is a quality which can emerge from trauma. Wisdom, in bringing our thoughts and feelings together; wisdom, in recognising our human limitations; and wisdom, in recognising and managing the uncertainties in life.
The wisdom of the cross, our Good Friday wisdom, is to be found in the subversive notion that “What does kill me makes me stronger.” On Good Friday, we face unpalatable truths about human nature, including our own, our tendency to distance ourselves from that which makes us uncomfortable, to crucify that which we fear. On Good Friday, with genuine sorrow we lament the loss of One who to us encompasses all that is loving and good; and our sorrow leads us to reflect on these things, to search for wisdom to carry us through this trauma, to bring us to a place where we may find ourselves gifted with a spiritual resilience.
If we come to Good Friday in a time of the coronavirus, with a heart of faith, however faltering that heart may be, however shrunken that faith, then we can and will find wisdom herein.
Jesus went to the cross, in faith in the Father, albeit a faltering faith, as shown by his troubled prayer, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But this very prayer, which is in fact Psalm 22, a Psalm of David, opens up space for Jesus to remember that all that he is, is due to the Father’s creation, care and love. Can we picture Jesus quietly reciting the entire Psalm in his head, whilst he hung there at the last, reaching the point the Psalmist reached in saying, “For [God] did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him”?
If we come to Christ in faith today, recognising and accepting our human limitations in the face of what we cannot control, then we open up space to discover that our well-being is not based in our circumstances, nor our achievements, or our inherent qualities, but in Him. With Paul we can say that His grace is sufficient for us, even He whose power is made perfect in weakness. Even him who we leave, just now, hanging, praying, on that cross.
Notes
[1] The psychological insights underlying this talk, and the progression of its argument, are based on Joanna Collicutt, Global trauma: Made perfect in weakness. Church Times, 3 April 2020, her fine exposition of that subversive notion that “What kills us makes us stronger.”
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