By Sarah Dylan Breuer

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Lectionary Reflections for Good Friday (A)
Readings for Good Friday, Year A, Mar. 25, 2005

• Isaiah 52:13-53:12
• Psalm 22
• Hebrews 10:16-25 or Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
• John 18:1-19:42

The Gospel according to John shows Jesus as dying on the Day of Preparation, an important part of his presentation of Christ as our Passover, the pivotal point in the liberation of God's people. I've always loved Passover and its observance, and I'm grateful to Rabbi Alexander Schindler for an insight that profoundly shapes my view of its significance: Mitzrayim, the Hebrew name for Egypt, means "the narrow place." In Passover, God leads us out of the narrow places.

The Passover liturgy instructs us to say, in the first person, "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor" (Deuteronomy 26:3-11). The story of our Exodus, as God leads us from "the narrow place," goes back to Abraham, our wandering spiritual ancestor. When humanity sees the gods as beings as thirsty for human bloodshed as we are at our worst, when parents are poised to sacrifice their sons and daughters to appease the world's powers, God's voice speaks as it did to Abraham when he loomed over his bound son Isaac, and God says, "Stop it! That's enough!" God goes with us to that dark and narrow place and leads us to a wider place, a wider vision.

The Passover liturgy instructs us to say, in the first person, "When we were slaves in Egypt" (also Deuteronomy 26:3-11). When humanity sees power merely as domination and treats difference as a reason to subjugate others, God raises a prophet to say, "Enough," to lead us out of the "narrow place" of slavery.

Not that we always hear these prophets. Our history is full of times when we sacrificed our sons and daughters to all kinds of powers and causes, trading lives for what is far less precious than life. We have enslaved peoples captured in wars, from colonies, or by poverty and debt, practicing slavery in legally enshrined and more subtle de facto ways. We have experienced how, when we treat human life as cheap, our own lives seem worthless. We found as we enslaved others that our greed had enslaved us. We tried to protect ourselves from death by killing, from violence by violence, from pain by wounding others.

But amidst all of our score-keeping and fantasied and practiced revenge, and in the person of Jesus, God meets us in our dark and narrow places and says, "Never again."

The Cross is such a dark and narrow place. The Romans who invented it were renowned for their ingenuity in using natural forces and simple materials to accomplish incredible things. Water flows downhill; build the right kind of channel for it, and you've got an aqueduct to bring water for an entire city. Place stones cut at the right angle upon each other in the right way, and you've got an arch held together by gravity at least as much as by mortar.

And Romans used that ingenuity to engineer a form of torture that even now has hardly been matched. It was diabolically simple, cost-effective, and highly visible as a public deterrent to those who would oppose the might of Rome. Rulers like Pontius Pilate didn't hesitate to use it. During the Passover season, as Jerusalem became clogged with pilgrims remembering how their God liberates slaves from their oppressors, Pilate lined the roads with hundreds of crosses, each filled with a living tableau of how narrow and dark a prison we can make of our imagination when we set it upon wounding others.

In the person of Jesus, God came to that dark and narrow place, to that Mitzrayim. In Jesus' arms, stretched out on the Cross, God showed us the wideness of God's mercy. The judge of the nations was stripped naked and violated with a shameful death, and he said, "That's enough. Never again. It is finished." Not with a decisive blow back to put his tormentors to shame, but with words of healing, of reconciliation, bringing together the human family with his last breath.

It's a dark place we visit on Good Friday. But we need to bear witness there. We need to visit the dark and narrow places, to open our hearts not only to the hungry, the homeless, and the oppressed, but to the contemptuous, the persecutors, the oppressors. Because the dark places in our hearts are populated by all of these; we scorn and despise and persecute and try to kill in others what we most fear in ourselves.

That spiral of shame and violence is hopeless -- or it would be hopeless, but Jesus put an end to that. There is freedom for slaves and slavers alike through the one who became as a slave to all, as we discover in this dark place. All scores were settled in the refusal of this one to settle the score. There's a wideness in God's mercy, as we discover in the midst of our Mitzrayim, our narrow places. The darkness and the fear and the pain and death itself have been cast out, and we are freed to live and love as one people, God's beloved children. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.

"It is finished."

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Sarah Dylan Breuer is director of Christian Formation St. Martin's-in-the-Field Episcopal Church in Severna Park, Md. She maintains a website with a lectionary commentary series and a blog, and works throughout the church on issues of liturgy and faith. Dylan may be reached by email at dylan@sarahlaughed.net.