Essendon Baptist Community Church 2023
Theme: ‘Once for All’
Readings: Matthew 27:27-34 and Isaiah 53:4-6
Reflection / Intro. to Prayer of Confession:
Good Friday should come with a trigger warning… graphic violence and torture.
You make it part of your Easter to come to church with your family. You hear the bible read and like the co-opted bystander in the story, Simon from Cyrene, the violence is thrust upon you like a cross, in your face, and with weight! And the trauma counsellors are right when they say ‘The body keeps the score’.
Have you ever chosen the wrong movie for the kids. You thought it was good, and it ended up being too violent and as you turn it off or over you think. Why? Couldn’t the creator have done it another way?
William Temple once mentioned people who reject faith saying ‘I can’t believe because if God looked at the world and its violence and suffering his heart would break’. He replied that Christians point to the cross and say ‘It did break.’
In a violent world of real pain, could you really worship a God who is immune?
The cross shows us God is not the cause of violence, but endures it. Whose desire was, and is, and will always be to be with us. Who’s vulnerability in being open to violence means they are also open to the possibility of a loving relationship with creation, you and me. A power dynamic sadly reflected to us in the tragic epidemic of what we describe in our society as (Good Friday trigger warning) intimate partner violence.
Processing their own trauma of what they went through, witnessing what happened to Jesus at this event, his followers looked back to the Hebrew Bible and the prophet Isaiah we heard read who said by his stripes we are healed. But how?
I’m about to watch a movie with images of this cross carrying passage we’ve heard read that leads us into a prayer of confession in video form called ‘The Weight of Sin’ created by Travis Reed from The Work of the People, created to be played alongside Johnny Cash’s version of the Nine Inch Nails song ‘Hurt.’
We’re only doing the instrumental in church today, not the lyrics of the song, to minimise the trauma triggers. It’s a song Trent Reznor wrote in a time of deep depression, but Cash made it his own and it has been called a ‘Valentine to the Suffering’ – perhaps appropriate for Good Friday.
His themes have sometimes been compared with that of the medieval mystics like;
Miester Ekhart who famously and controversially prayed ‘God, rid me of God,’ signalling ideas of God as an abstraction that can become more important to us than God. Absractions can also easily drive violence, but in the cross we see the death of all idolatrous ideas, the Divine choosing the death of God.
Or St. John of the Cross who famously described the sense of deep doubt and the experience of the absence of God as the ‘Dark Night of the Soul.’ If we don’t allow for doubt the questioning of our fragile ‘certainties’ can produce an anxiety within us which we can violently suppress. Or do violence to the people who are different who cause us to do the doubting. Like Jesus on the cross, when we doubt or feel extremely forsaken by God St.Johns ‘Dark Night’ can instead become a window through the anxiety, to spiritual growth and maturity.
Or Julian of Norwich, who in her embrace of extreme suffering saw Revelations of Love.
Like Nine Inch Nails these spiritual mystics were dark, weird and often misunderstood but came with a beauty made poignant and powerful by the small doses in which it came. They are perhaps not standards of our pop-middle class spirituality. But they’ve found a place within our spiritual tradition and if we’re not confronted by their truth on Good Friday …then when?
So you want it darker?
In the end these ideas point to not what the cross shows us about God’s love, but what the violence of the cross shows us about us.
We are often resistant to seeing what the cross is — not just violence, but an act of righteous violence. That those who killed Jesus were good religious people, acting on a sense of justice, following their law and Gods will… or so they thought.
In our prayer, we’re invited to confess how it is decidedly our violence, not God’s, but our righteous violence that, at the cross, meets God’s unconditional love, and mercy and so becomes the power of life over death.
The cross and its violence is the answer we desperately need in order to finally let go of our violence. To give up all our failed attempts at peace through superior firepower. To give up the ways we scapegoat others to feel better about ourselves. To give up our myths that life is safe, or that good people are entitled to immunity from suffering. And to give up the chasing, comparing and competing with the desires of others that death-drives our sense of worth, and so often, even subconscious to us, the violence within us and our world
Jesus on the cross says ‘Enough! Stop it! I expose it. I take on the trauma of it in my body. My body keeps the score and through my resurrection, says yes to the a new way we can fully and finally embrace and live. God’s non violent power of vulnerability, of honest doubt and fragile beauty that truly opens us to love and life.’
Trigger warning… It means a means to end all violence, Once and for All!
Let Us Pray…
Sources/ Acknowledgements:
The Weight of Sin Video, Travis Reed, The Work of the People, (subscription required for full view) https://www.theworkofthepeople.com/the-weight-of-sin
Saved by the Cross of Christ. But How? – Gary Deverell, Uncommon Prayers, 2023
Religious Aesthetics of Nine Inch Nails : Negative Theology as Meditation on Transcendence – James E. Willis in Finding God in the Devils Music: Critical Essays on Rock and Religion, DiBlasi and McParland, 2019.
Why Does Jesus Death Matter? Paul Nuechterlein, 2001
The People's Table... 