The Body Burden [John's Passion - Good Friday]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Good Friday 2023

 

The Body Burden

 

Jesus’ hands were tied.  In the garden, where they found him, they bound him, bound his wrists.  So much happens to Jesus’ body in this Good Friday story – so much pain, so much trauma, so much horror, even death.  But the first thing that happened to that body, on Thursday night, was that it was bound. 

 

Those who hated Jesus, and those who simply needed the work, took hold and control of his body – a humble body in which dwelt, mostly unknown, the fullness of God; they tamed his bones; they subdued his muscles; they stopped his precious hands – from movement and miracle.  Before everything that happened on Good Friday, before the crown and the nails, they bound him.

 

But we know the Good Friday story and so we know that wasn’t enough.  It wasn’t enough to simply stop him; they wanted to punish, punish that body that encroached on their spaces and touched their lepers and tossed their tables.  His offensive body: an invisible God is easier to ignore.  But this God body was so confrontational.  And so they would unleash on it – on that Jewish body, that Palestinian body, that peasant body, that occupied body –stores of unspent violence, what they carried in their hearts, what they learned from generations and institutions, from Church and State – violence as a solution, violence to claim and tame disobedient bodies, violence as the power to un-dignify. 

 

And so they struck his face to the point of unrecognition.  And they pressed a crown of thorns into his sacred head – through hair and scalp and bone.  And they beat red the olive skin of his bare back.  And in his body Jesus exhibited the evidence of torture, the weight of violence, even before the rough wood of the cross greedily tore at his sun-kissed shoulders.   

 

For us that body is all in our imagination.  So many centuries later, we meet our Jesus in prayers and hosts, in the mystical places of space and soul.  Our Jesus looks very much like God: invisible and pervasive.  On most days.  But today Jesus is far too human.  In this story, his story, all eyes, and hands, are on his body.  And we are made to look at a body that hangs, eyes closed, head askew, arms wide, on the cross. 

 

Never more in the Church year do we come so in contact with Jesus’ humanity.  Today it is unavoidable, in its messiness and mortality. 

 

For much of the Church year Jesus is in our hearts or inhabiting Heaven.  But sometimes we take the time to look at his body: on Good Friday and on Christmas.  On Christmas it’s different; he’s not on a cross; he is lying in a manger.  And we celebrate Incarnation, God embodied.  But that body is so small and soft and wrapped in swaddling clothes, so unlike his Good Friday body.  That Christmas body has not yet experienced years, pain, mortification.  It has not yet cracked and bled.  It has not embarrassed, as bodies tend to do, its divine host.  None of the perils of embodied life had yet happened to Jesus on that first Christmas.  Knees had not yet grown weak; cheeks had not yet flushed in the presence of a crush; pimples had not yet surfaced; muscles had not yet pulled or strained or failed; death had not yet occurred to him, that embodied God.  That baby body had not yet let Jesus down, down to his knees, under the weight of hard wood and hard hearts. 

 

But his Good Friday body, it was on full display, the insides out, the private made public.  The baby body was full of potential, endowed with dreams.  But this body: it is dying.  It is weak.  It is naked.  It is helpless.  It has lost.  It is everything we hope not to be in front of family, friends, and most especially our enemies.  The Good Friday body is the stuff of our worst mortal nightmares.  It makes us cringe; it makes us cry.  To look at it.  But also it is the body that we need to see.

 

It is a body on a cross: a circumstance far below God.  And yet true.

 

And still, though we have preached Christ crucified for 2000 years, it is hard to believe and harder to imagine.

 

Hard to believe and harder to imagine:

That blood and sweat dripped from his brow and stung in those heavenly eyes.

And there was no one to wipe his face clean.

And he couldn’t move his hands to help himself for the nails.

And as the day went on Jesus became so powerless, so drained, that he couldn’t catch a breath.

And that all those people – some watched and some left – did nothing to help him, heal him, save him – even though he did those very things for them.

As if their hands were also tied.  

 

And then Jesus just died.  Like he was normal, but died as a criminal, the punchline to a thousand bad jokes. 

 

After that precious body, built of the cosmos, abused without reservation or regret, breathed its final breath, one of the last lingerers plunged a spear into his side, to see the last of the hidden parts, the water and the blood, the stuff of life, pour out.  And then, after everything, after it is finished, they looked on the one whom they had pierced.  And they saw what was left of a God who emptied heaven and got too close, a God who foolishly chose humanity.

 

That is why we still look: because God chose humanity; God chose us.  Became one of us.  And in doing so, wore our trauma, our suffering, and our death – wore it all like a millstone willingly taken around the neck, wore it like a beam across the back.  It is important that we see that.  We need to see it, as terrible as it is, because it tells us that we do not carry the weight of mortality alone.  We are not alone in our trauma, or in our suffering, or in our death.  While there are no babies in this story, it too is the story of Incarnation, of Emmanuel, of God with us, with us in our worst moments.

 

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, as one of us.  And the time spent with us, lived with us, left a permanent mark on God.  Not even Easter could erase the scars.  God just can’t shake Good Friday.  It’s always there.  The immortal God who foolishly chose humanity, carries still the weight of mortality: the trauma and the suffering and the death – the scariest of our stuff.  God carries them still, so that you don’t have to carry them on your own.