A Good Friday Meditation on an Unlikely Text
This meditation was written by James Kiefer, an old friend of mine. I’ve posted it to the church e-mail list every Good Friday for the past several years; this time I’m mounting it on my blog, which is a bit less ephemeral.
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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 say, “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. (more…)
