In defence of "Good Friday religion"

What does the Cross mean after Easter?

The words “lived experience” nowadays put me on guard, not just because they are overused and hackneyed – reason enough for caution – but because they tend to be deployed by those who want to make an assertion impervious to reason and to criticism, generally about themselves or a “community” they profess to represent. It is the favoured weapon of those identitarians for whom any notion of universal truth is an oppressive infringement of whatever personal “truth” has been sanctified by their in-group’s internal imprimatur. It is used, in short, to assert without justification the validity of multiple truth-claims, however logically irreconcileable, and to base upon these claims a panoply of identities.

The Christian Church, on the other hand, has until very recently maintained that there is a unifying identity accessibly via a single truth, with the potential to encompass all sentient beings, whatever subordinate identities they might also inhabit: human or angel, woman or man, Jew or Greek, slave or free. Indeed. Christians around the world have just spent the several weeks contemplating it, during Lent. It is, in a word, the Cross.

But once Good Friday is over and the season of the Resurrection is in, where does the Cross fit into to our collective, Christian “lived experience?” Is it like the Buddhists’ “finger pointing at the moon,” a skilful means which can be discarded once one has realised the truth it indicates? Do the Resurrection and its concomitant festivities eclipse the Passion and the Cross? Now that we are in Eastertide, can we not forget about Good Friday for another year?

The pile of rhetorical questions, as you can no doubt tell, leans towards a resounding “nay,” and for two reasons. First, the Cross and the Resurrection are inseparable from one another, and indeed from the Incarnation, Transfiguration and glorious Ascension of Our Lord. Each event illumines the others. And second, the Cross marks a spiritual path which we walk in Lent but does not end on Easter Day.

It is natural for us to separate the Cross and Resurrection from one another, because they are temporal events and we are bound by time. Our round of Holy Week services began in ancient Jerusalem so as to mark the passage of Our Lord’s last earthly times in our own time. Widening the scope of the Church Kalendar beyond Holy Week to the whole year, we move sequentially through the events of the Annunciation, Incarnation, ministry, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension of the Lord and the advent of the Holy Spirit. We experience them as discrete and sequential episodes.

However, the extraction of individual instances from what is utlimately one unified movement of salvation can lead to some misleading exaggerations of one aspect over others. Most notable is the tendency prevalent in the Western Church since the Middle Ages to extract the Cross from the overall scheme of redemption and focus on it either by sympathising with the pain suffered by Our Saviour, or by reducing it to a juridicial analogue. The focus on Our Lord’s Passion has yielded riches of religious art, devotion and solidarity with the suffering, not least in the Cross-centred works of the Franciscans and the thought of Luther, and the focus on God’s justice has rightly called into question our own. Still, isolation of the Cross from the greater span of salvation history risks obscuring what is “Good” about the Friday Our Lord died: not His pain and suffering, but His triumph over the Devil, sin and death. The Resurrection is already there, concealed, within the Crucifixion.

So, while I am not drawn to the common Protestant preference for empty crosses, it does seem to me (in a rare moment of pro-Vatican II sensibilities) that when we unveil the Crucifix on Good Friday, it is not so much to pity the body of Christ bloodied and beaten, as to adore His Body victorious in glory. Analogously, whether we feast upon the Body of Our Lord from the reserved Sacrament on Good Friday or at the Mass on Easter Day, in neither case do we consume the dead flesh and blood of a corpse – we are not engaging in ritual cannabalism. The Eucharist is sacrament of the ever-living flesh and blood of Our Lord’s Heavenly Body, as foreshadowed to the the disciples on Mount Tabor and revealed to them ascending into the glorious cloud over the Mount of Olives. An apt place, for hidden in the olive is the oil that fuels lamps, cleanses skin, binds bread and flavours food, though it reveals its full potential only when crushed. Likewise, the divine lamplight was hidden, always, in the flesh of the Incarnate Lord, and is hidden now in bread and wine, but whether we see it or not, it is always there. To stop at the darkness of Our Lord’s suffering and dwell exclusively on that is a failure of perception. It is like pitting the olive and trying to chew the stone.

So, to the spiritual path of the Cross, which we are to walk just as much in Easter as in Lent. For by this Way we descend, like Our Lord descended, not to dwell in the depths of darkness forever, but into to ascend into light. Easter gives meaning to Good Friday, and Good Friday to Easter. We cannot have the one without the other; nor is the one straightforwardly sequential from the other. As long as we are in this world, we will always be in the darkness. The trick is to see the light hiding in plain sight, eternal life in dead wood, “heaven in ordinary.” And so in prayer we descend into the depths of our hearts, however wooden, dark, calcified or thorny. We seek to unite the head with the heart, to lower our reason into the plenitudinous void of the imagination. Just so the Divine Logos was conceived in the empty womb and buried in the virgin tomb. But He did not remain in either of those emptinesses. Nor should we. Like Him, led by Him, we descend into emptiness to find the fullness of life.

Contemplation is a great part of this descent and ascent; penitence is the key to its gates. The English Book of Common Prayer of 1662 is sometimes criticised for its overly penitential tenor. General confession is offered, at least officially, at every service of Mattins and Evensong. The rite for Holy Communion situates the general confession in the centre of the rite, so that prompted by God’s Word in Scripture, one is driven to one’s knees before receiving the Sacrament; yet the rite also begins with a penitential recitation of the Ten Commandments, and the Prayer of Humble Access recited by the priest after the Sanctus is likewise penitential in tone. Such devotions have been derided, often by Anglo-Catholics, as symptoms of a “Good Friday religion.” To which I would reply in the affirmative, with qualification: there’s nothing wrong with Good Friday religion, as long as the Cross remains an icon of the Resurrection. Penitence is utterly necessary in the Christian spiritual life, precisely because it is replete with the joy of absolution. If we cling to the Cross, it is not to be anchored to the earth, but to climb the ladder into Heaven with angels taking our weight. The roots of the tree spread downwards only that the limbs may reach for the sky and bloom.

To thirst for life and reach out for it is a sign of health. The growing contemporary thirst for death, alas, is a morbid sign of sickness. If the Cross gives shape to the Christian identity, then all other identities we inhabit must be measured against its potential for fecundity and life. In our daily interactions, we need to be aware of what brings us life and joy, and what rising up from our innards leaves in our mouths the rotten aftertaste of death.

The Cross is the Way of Life and Truth, not “my truth” or “your truth,” but the Truth, absolute and unqualified. It is the measure of all things. But to experience it, you have to live it.