Friday Takes: Way of the Cross Edition

Flannery O'Connor on Forgiveness, The NYT on Jesus, The Guardian on Women, The Great Divorce on Art, Mercy, Holy Week Reflection, Song of the Week, Read the Comments

File: "Crucifixion" de Franz von Stuck.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

I know it’s Friday, for sure, and a good one at that. I have a lot to do today—church twice, errands, cleaning, a thousand things. The nicest of them all is that I have to water all the pots of flowers I’ve bought for the altar for Easter. It’s always a strange contradiction, to both veil everything with black while accumulating masses of flowers, to endure the long Good Friday Litany and then arrange everyone’s Easter outfits, to contemplate the greatest sorrow the earth ever endured—the death of the Lord Christ—and yet feel so relieved and happy that he was willing to do it so that I wouldn’t have to.

Yesterday, not to distract myself, but to get off of my aching feet for a minute, I snatched the chance to read and watch various items that lovely people have sent me over the last couple of weeks. I thought I would pass some of them along to you. There’s lots of interesting stuff out there!

one

Flannery O’Connor’s hundredth birthday passed by recently. I kept seeing people posting about it in various online spaces. I will confess, I am not a Flannery O’Connor connoisseur. I read one of her short stories a long while ago and found it too dark and troubling for my delicate sensibilities and propensity to nightmares. This is one of those cases wherein I know I *ought* to be able to read and love something that is objectively good and worthwhile, and therefore feel guilty about it all the time, and yet, there we are, I’m just not the right sort of person. Is this a good moment for me to blame God for “creating” me this way?

Nevertheless, I do like reading other people about Flannery O’Connor and liked this article very much from the Substack, Something to Consider. Particularly this bit:

We are not a forgiving society. Every day forgotten sins are dredged up and shown for people to gape and be appalled at, old wounds continue to fester and deteriorate into gangrene. With hard, dead hearts we walk about, never forgetting or forgiving any wrong done. I hear the gossip. I see it in the papers and online, men and women unwilling to forgive, incessantly arguing about the same things, never able to reach any conclusion other than how wicked the other side of any argument is.

Without realizing it, many of us can live that way. Life is busy. We don’t have time to stop and talk with others, only enough time to toss rhetorical grenades as we bustle on by, hitting our wounds again and again to remind ourselves of the pain other people caused.

It isn’t until death approaches in its untimely way do we stop to consider what our actions have brought about, why we chose to harden our hearts instead of forgiving or asking forgiveness from our brother or sister, mother or father, wife or husband, or someone we once called friend.

Isn’t it sad that we don’t really know how good we have it until we don’t have it anymore? Like, there are real benefits to living in a basically Christian society—public mercy and forgiveness being one of them. Which leads me to my next link…

two

Somehow, I missed this awful piece in the New York Times about Jesus. It goes like this:

On Sunday, in cities around the world, Christians begin Holy Week by celebrating Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem for the final time before his death and resurrection. To mark the day, Christians recreate Jesus’ procession, often starting outside churches and winding down sidewalks and city streets waving palm branches.

Celebrations like this often miss an uncomfortable truth about Jesus’ procession: At the time, it was a deliberate act of theological and political confrontation. It wasn’t just pageantry; it was protest.

The writer explains that Pilate was actually entering Jerusalem on the same day at the same time from the other direction, a “factually”* I had never heard before—does anyone know? Did that really happen? Anyway, sure, I guess, whatever, call it a protest, because it doesn’t matter, everything else the writer says is complete bunk. Like this:

Jesus’ procession should be seen as a parody of imperial power: a deliberate mockery of Roman spectacle and a prophetic enactment of a kingdom built not on violence but on justice.

Let me rewrite this, the way people do now:

“Jesus’ procession could possibly be seen as a parody of imperial power: a deliberate mockery of Roman spectacle and a prophetic enactment of the Kingdom of God of which he, Jesus, is the full and complete embodiment, built upon himself and his own mercy which he accomplishes by enduring the just wrath of God once for all upon the cross.”

Anyway, here’s another terrible bit:

The next day, Jesus walked into the Temple, the heart of Jerusalem’s religious and economic life, and flipped the tables in the marketplace, which he described as “a den of robbers.” The Temple wasn’t just a house of prayer. It was a financial engine, operated by complicit leaders under the constraints and demands of the occupying empire. Jesus shuts it down. This is what gets him killed.

Jesus wasn’t killed for preaching love, or healing the sick, or discussing theology routinely debated in the Temple’s courtyards, or blasphemy (the punishment for which was stoning). Rome didn’t crucify philosophers or miracle workers. Rome crucified insurrectionists. The sign nailed above his head — “King of the Jews” — was a political indictment and public warning. Like with the killing of the prophets before him, the message sent with Jesus’s death was that those who demand justice will inevitably find themselves crushed. Sound familiar?

Actually, it was the will of God to crush him for our iniquities. The Romans and the Jewish Sanhedrin, spurred on by the crowd, all worked together to put Jesus on the cross. We are all implicated because, had we been there, we would have participated because we are all sinners.

So no, those who “demand justice” don’t inevitably find themselves crushed because that’s not what was going on with the Son of God upon the cross. God was absorbing his own just wrath against wicked people, making it possible to forgive them and do away with their sins forever. The sense of familiarity is because we hear the story so many times, over and over, except not often enough, I guess. Imagine encountering the cross and thinking that your political inclinations are there justified. Oh wait! Everyone does that:

We, too, live in the shadow of empire. Ours doesn’t speak Latin or wear togas, but its logic is familiar. Our economy prioritizes the 1 percent and puts corporate profits over worker dignity. Our laws enforce inequality in the criminal justice system, education and health care. Our military-industrial complex would be the envy of Rome. We extract, exploit, incarcerate, and we call it “law and order.”

I don’t, as usual, approve of the word “we” because this person is taking the Holiest Week of the Christian year and making it about modern day American politics. He’s perpetrating an act of Religious Nationalism—not Christian Nationalism, but an accumulation of Progressive feelings about the world—while accusing others of doing the same. Meanwhile, the cross of Christ, which, when a person looks to it for salvation from eternal death, does have implications for every sphere of life, is nevertheless not about the military and the state of American healthcare.

And just like in Jesus’ day, political leaders defend this arrangement while religious leaders bless it. As the French writer Frédéric Bastiat warned, “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” That was true in first-century Jerusalem. It remains true today.

Since the 1980s, movements like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, and more recently, the New Apostolic Reformation, have not challenged the empire but rather sought to commandeer it. The Seven Mountain Mandate urges Christians to seize control of key sectors of society, including government, business, education and media. This is not a movement seeking to interrogate or challenge the injustice of empire. Quite the opposite. It is an ideology — a hunger for power and dominion — cloaked in pious language and baptized in the logic of empire. This is Christian nationalism in a nutshell.

I went over to the New York Times to see if there was anything there about Good Friday. I didn’t look very hard—just scrolled around—and didn’t find anything and so came away again. This person, it seems to me, is swinging wildly in every direction, without pausing to consider anything substantive or useful. I will skip over the part where he blames President Trump for everything that’s wrong with the world.

Waving palms on Palm Sunday connects us to justice, public life, discourse and action. We cannot remain silent on behalf of those who genuinely cry out “Hosanna … Save us.” At some point, we have to make a choice about the Jesus we claim to follow. Either he didn’t care about the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed — in which case we’ve built our religion on a hollow figure. Or he did care, deeply, and we’ve chosen to ignore that part because it challenges our comfort, our politics and our priorities.

Scripture’s power isn’t in magic or miracle, but in its witness, of people who loved boldly, acted justly, spoke truth to power, resisted empire and hoped defiantly in the face of despair. It is deeply relevant to modern life. The Resurrection, which Christians celebrate one week from Sunday, is not the reversal of Christ’s crucifixion. It is its vindication. It declares that even when the empire kills truth, truth still rises. That even when justice is crucified, it does not stay buried. The Caesars among us don’t get the final word.

Sure whatever. Hopefully the New York Times won’t get the final word either.

three

The Guardian staggering under the blow of discovering that Trans Women Aren’t Women:

In a decision that delighted gender-critical activists, five judges ruled unanimously that the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 did not include transgender women who hold gender recognition certificates (GRCs).

The judgment could have far-reaching ramifications and lead to greater restrictions on the access for trans women to services and spaces reserved for women. It prompted calls for the UK’s laws on gender recognition to be rewritten.

The UK government said the ruling brought “clarity and confidence” for women and those who run hospitals, sports clubs and women’s refuges.

That’s precisely what everyone hopes, Dear Guardian, that there will be far-reaching ramifications that keep men out of women’s spaces. Trans women aren’t women.

That affected policymaking on gender in sports and the armed services, hospitals, as well as women-only charities, and access to changing rooms and women-only spaces, he said. However, trans women still have equal pay rights as women, and could have the right to be treated as women in some situations.

I find it astonishing that a man “could have the right” to be treated as a woman in some situations. I know that’s been the usual way for nigh on a decade, but it amazes me every time I hear it.

Hodge, the deputy president of the court, said it believed the position taken by the Scottish government and the EHRC that people with gender recognition certificates did qualify as women, while those without did not, created “two sub-groups”. This would confuse any organisations they were involved with. A public body could not know whether a trans woman did or did not have that certificate because the information was private and confidential. And allowing trans women the same legal status as biological women could also affect spaces and services designed specifically for lesbians, who had also suffered historical discrimination and abuse.

This, just to sum it all up, is a wonderful interview. I love the social awkwardness, the unwillingness of the actual woman to put up with this anymore.

four

A lovely person pointed me to this clip:

I didn’t know that it had been a thing to make The Great Divorce watchable, but now I’m going to go find them all. Also, sadly, I must take the warning to heart—in a world that has lost most of its knowledge of beauty, having traded it for the meager rations of content production, it is too easy to turn every moment of every day into yet more content. I was much struck by this, during Tenebrae, looking at the diminishing light, wondering if I should take a picture, and then it suddenly dawning on me that, because I was sitting right there, looking at it, I didn’t need to take a picture. I didn’t have to blog about it either, and yet here I am, doing just that.

The strange thing about Jesus is that, though I cannot see him, yet he is so close, so real, so alive in the most uncomfortable kind of way. How clever of him not to appear for a livestream, or we would all lose our minds and try to make a buck and make ourselves famous.

five

I wish the New York Times guest writers, especially if they are clergy, would read the collects appointed for today. Here’s one of my very favorites.

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the Cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.

Amen.

Of course, that’s the trick, the strange and shocking reality, that there is no way to glory, to life and peace, apart from suffering, but because we—all of us—couldn’t bear it, God came to bear what should have been ours. It isn’t about justice, not right now. It is about mercy, about not being held to account, about not having to die. I always complain about being on the ‘Death and Suffering Plan,’ but for today, at least, I’m grateful that it’s actually the ‘Life and Peace Plan.’

six

I was on the radio with John and Kathy yesterday, talking about Holy Week, if you want to give it a listen. The whole thing is great, but I come in at the 53-minute mark.

seven

Here’s what we sang last Sunday, and I’ve been listening to on a loop:

Read the Comments below the line! May God richly bless you this holy day and throughout the weekend.

*Factually: a new word I’m inventing today, to ‘splain’ someone with ‘facts’ and ‘logic’ in such a way as to entirely miss the point.