Newsgroups: bit.listserv.christia
Date:         Fri, 17 Apr 1992 10:16:42 EDT
From:         JEK@NIHCU.BITNET
Subject:      Good Friday and shared troubles
X-To:         CHRISTIA@ASUACAD.BITNET, BSTUDY-L@UTARLVM1.BITNET,
              IVCF-L@UBVM.BITNET

Some observations on Good Friday morning,
beginning from an unlikely starting point.

       There is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre called Morts sans Sepultre
  (The Living Dead -- literally, The Unburied Dead: one English
  translation calls it The Victors.) I have not seen or read it
  recently, but part of it goes something like this: The scene is the
  attic of a house in France during the Second World War. In the attic
  are a half-dozen prisoners, captured members of the resistance. It
  is night, and the next morning they will be taken out one at a time
  and tortured for information. None of them has any information of
  value, so they need summon no will power. There is nothing to do but
  wait, and then suffer, and then die. But now the attic door opens
  and the soldiers throw another man in. He is the leader of the
  resistance for that region, but the soldiers do not realize this. To
  them he is simply someone caught out-of-doors after curfew, and so
  they are detaining him for the night and will release him in the
  morning. Now the other prisoners are in a different position. Now
  they have an active and mot merely a passive role to play in what
  awaits them. They tell the leader, "Don't worry. We will hold our
  tongues." He begins to says, "I thank you, for myself, for the
  Resistance, for France. Your courage and your sacrifice will not be
  forgotten." Suddenly, one of the others, his fiancee, says, "Oh,
  shut up. Nothing you have to say could possibly mean anything to us.
  I am not blaming you. It is not your fault. But the fact is that you
  are a living man and I am a dead woman, and the living and the dead
  have nothing to say to each other. Tomorrow you go out that door to
  freedom and life, and I go out it to torment and death, and that
  fact puts an impenetrable barrier between us. I do not hate or envy
  you. I simply do not see you as a meaningful part of my universe.
  Now go sit down over there, and leave me to talk and hold hands with
  my brothers and sisters, the people with whom I shall be dying in a
  few hours."

  It occurred to me, when I read this, that an important reason for
  the Crucifixion is the breaking down of precisely that barrier
  between God and us. Without it, many of God's demands on us would be
  simply infuriating. Consider a driver seated at the wheel of a car
  as his associates try to push it out of a mudhole. He keeps saying
  to them:  "Push harder! Put your backs into it! Don't give up. You
  can do it if you try. Oh, come now, you can do better than that.
  Keep at it. Two or three more good pushes and you'll have it out."
  And so on. They may remind themselves that it is essential to have
  someone steering, and that it is therefore unreasonable of them to
  resent his being where he is, but they would be other than human if
  they did not feel an overpowering urge to pull him out of his seat
  and send him sprawling face down in the mud. Note how different it
  would be if he were himself standing thigh-deep in the mud, shoving
  the car with all his might and gasping out encouragement to his
  fellow pushers. He might be saying exactly the same things as he was
  saying behind the steering wheel in the first scenario. The
  difference is that by getting into the mud and pushing with the
  others he has earned the right to say them. In just this way, God,
  by taking human nature upon him and living in poverty and dying in
  shame and torment, has earned the right to ask us to bear our
  burdens willingly. By forgiving those who have wronged him, he has
  earned the right to ask us to forgive those who have wronged us.

  I have a friend with terminal cancer. What can I, with no comparable
  problems, find to say to her? I could say, "Keep smiling. There is
  nothing so self-destructive as self-pity, you know. So hold your
  head high, and face your fate unflinching, remembering that death is
  the shared destiny of the race." Perfectly true, but the normal
  response would be to hit me with the handiest blunt instrument. If,
  on the other hand, I pat her on the shoulder and say, "There, there,
  poor dear, I know just how you feel," that would be equally
  infuriating, because she is dying and I am not, and the plain fact
  of the matter is that I don't know how she feels, and we both know
  it. But Christ is in a different position. He can make
  non-negotiable demands, just as an officer can order his men to
  charge a machine-gun emplacement, provided that he himself leads the
  charge. On the other hand, he can offer comfort without sounding
  smug. He can say: "My daughter, you are going into the dark, and you
  are terrified. I know the feeling, for I once walked alone into that
  same darkness, and I was terrified. But you need not walk it alone.
  I have been there before, and I know the way, and what lies beyond.
  Come place your hand in Mine, and we will walk it together."

       An English chaplain in the First World War, Studdert-Kennedy,
  gave an address to his fellow-chaplains in which he said
  (approximately):

            The one thing that you absolutely must do as chaplains is
       to go into the line with the men. The Army does not require it.
       As far as regulations are concerned, you are free to stay out
       of the trenches, well behind the front, and minister to the men
       before they go into combat and when they come back out for
       brief intervals. But if you do that, you will do no good at
       all. There is no way that you can talk about the meaning of
       life and death to a man who is facing death and knows that you
       are not. But if you go into the line with the men, if you get
       shot at and shelled and gassed along with them, then they will
       listen to you. And it doesn't matter whether you are eloquent.
       The fact that you are there with them when you don't have to
       be, doing your Master's business, will tell them something
       about your Master. Of course, taking this advice means that you
       may be killed. So be it. The more chaplains that die in the
       trenches doing Christ-like deeds, the better. Most of us will
       preach far better dead than alive.

       In those terms, we may say that God has paid his dues, has
  earned the right to talk to us about suffering because he has
  endured it with us. He endured not only physical pain, but the
  torments of doubt and uncertainty and fear. In the Garden of
  Gethesemane, waiting for the soldiers to come and arrest him, he was
  clearly in great distress of mind. Some people think that this shows
  a character flaw -- that a truly great man, or a truly wise man,
  would say, "I never worry about things I can change, and I never
  worry about things I cannot change," and so would not have been
  bothered by the prospect of torture and death. I reply that a man
  who did not let such things bother him would have very little to say
  to the rest of us.

            The beginning of the Passion -- the first move, so to
       speak -- is in Gethsemane. In Gethsemane a very strange and
       significant thing seems to have happened.
            It is clear from many of his sayings that Our Lord had
       long foreseen His own death. He knew what conduct such as His,
       in a world such as we have made of this, must inevitably lead
       to. But it is clear that this knowledge must somehow have been
       withdrawn from Him before He prayed in Gethsemane. He could
       not, with whatever reservation about the Father's will, have
       prayed that the cup might pass and simultaneously known that it
       would not. That is both a logical and a psychological
       impossibility. You see what this involves? Lest any trial
       incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope --
       of suspense, anxiety -- were at the last moment loosed on Him
       -- the supposed possibility that, after all, He might, He just
       conceivably might, be spared the ultimate horror. There was
       precedent. Isaac had been spared: he too at the last moment, he
       also against all apparent probability. It was not quite
       impossible...and doubtless He had seen other men crucified...a
       sight very unlike most of our religious pictures and images.
            But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and
       the consequent tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps
       he would not have been very Man. To live in a fully predictable
       world is not to be a man.
            At the end, I know, we are told that an angel appeared
       "comforting" Him. But neither "comforting" in sixteenth-century
       English nor "ennischuon" in Greek means "consoling".
       "Strengthening" is more the word. May not the strengthening
       have consisted in the renewed certainty -- cold comfort this --
       that the thing must be endured and therefore could be?
            [CS Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, chiefly on prayer, New
       York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964, p 42]

       By enduring suffering, Christ does two things. First, he
  enables us to hear him when he speaks to us with authority about
  doing our duty even when it involves suffering. Second, he enables
  us to hear him when he speaks words of encouragement and comfort.
       In one section of Thomas More's "Treatise on the Passion,"
  Christ is represented as saying to a prospective martyr:

            Art thou terrified? Do thy knees fold under thee? Then put
       thy hand in mine and walk with me, for I have trod this road
       before thee. In Gethsemane, I too was alone and afraid. I also
       sweated and shook. I also choked back the scream of terror. I
       also felt helplessness and dread. The man of stout heart, who
       will walk whistling to the stake with a firm step and a merry
       countenance, hath a hundred glorious martyrs in whose steps he
       may tread, but thou, poor, weak, trembling silly sheep, think
       thou it sufficient to follow only after me.

In Thy footsteps, Lord Jesus. Amen.
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