Dear Reader,
When Nietzsche declared “God is dead”, he sounded less like a prophet and more like that friend who upon looking at the sky shockingly declares its blue. According to Nietszche the Enlightenment had done away with our need for religious belief and thus “God”, or at least our idea of him, was now dead. Free from God’s oppressive reign humanity was now free to roam beyond the walls of religious dogmas. However, every Good Friday I’m reminded that Nietzsche’s assessment was a little behind the times. The shocking claim of the Christian story is that humanity had already killed God, that in Jesus of Nazareth God suffered the ultimate rejection, death by execution at the hands of the creatures he created.
Of course, none of this is shocking. What other fate, except death, befalls those who come into contact with the human creature. God, our planet, one another—it seems we do our best work as race when we hold another under our sword. Violence begets violence, murder begets murder, and for all out innovation the cycle continues, one bloody path paved through the eons of history.
In my tradition, Good Friday is observed both to recognize the sacrificial nature of God and humanity’s propensity for violence. In reliving the crucifixion we recognize that our violence, the violence we commit against ourselves and others, is the same violence that nailed Jesus to the cross. Its in confessing this we recognize that in order to break the cycle of violence, violence itself must be upended and robbed of its power. Death has to die.
But we to must suffer a similar death. We must die to the dehumanizing patterns of violence we perpetuate on one another by recognizing our complicity. We are both the soldier with the hammer and the one on the cross. By dying like this we participate in the resurrection life of God, God suffers our violence, endures it, and overthrows it. In this death the pattern of violence is upended and death itself loses its coercive power over us. For the first time in human history violence begets peace.
Yet we are still left to wrestle with the reality of death. For all the talk of its defeat, violence is still a reality. It all to easily informs how we move through the world and we as a people have gotten way to good at justifying its presence. Thus every year Good Friday comes around to free us again from the grip of violence and death. Every Spring Good Friday turns the corner of winter to remind us that there is another way, that the cycle of violence can indeed end with us, that is only if were willing to follow in the footsteps of Christ and die in the name of peace.
GOOD FRIDAY
Death comes in many forms: I once saw a hawk
pluck a small dog from my neighbor's yard.
The Somme saw men huddled in trenches.
Nowadays its children buried under rubble.
I wonder if the river Styx is ever backed up due to traffic
or if heaven's gates ever get so full they forget to let the Christian in:
Surely on the cross, when God looked away,
the son found his mother and for a moment
wished his life had gone the other way.