April 6, 2007
(Good Friday)

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all people unto me

by The Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston, Scholar-in-Residence

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

So, here we are again...at the door of the tomb. The body has been carefully prepared --anointed, shrouded and placed inside the cave. The stone is poised. It has come to this, as we knew it would. The triumphal entry of Palm Sunday has spiraled down again. Good Friday indeed!

One of my parishioners in Chicago used to tell me every year that in her childhood memories, it always rained on Good Friday. There is, of course, some scriptural basis for this sense of sliding into gloom. In Mark, for example, the Passion Narrative is a story of abandonment, failure, and apparent defeat--a defeat that is reversed by God only at the end of the drama.

In Mark, Jesus is increasingly isolated in his agony. Deserted by his followers, he is alone on Calvary –- except, of course, for some women looking on from afar. He is betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, beaten by Pilate's flunkies, ridiculed by the passersby, and reviled by those who were crucified with him. Ultimately, the Markan Jesus appears even to be abandoned by his God, for he cries out from the cross: "God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

But this is not the message of the Good Friday Liturgy, nor is it the message of the Passion recorded by John. Consider some parts of that story just sung by the choir. The Jesus of the John Passion is very much in control of events. He moves through his sufferings with serene dignity and confident power. When the Roman soldiers and the Jewish police come out to arrest him, it is they--not Jesus--who draw back in fear and fall to the ground, powerless before the divine phrase--"I am he."

The Jesus of John is not a victim at the mercy of his captors because he chooses to lay down his life--with the utter conviction that he will take it up again. In the garden, he does not pray that the cup should pass from him. Rather, he poses a rhetorical question that demands a response in the negative: "And what shall I say, Father, save me from this hour?' No, for this purpose I have come to this hour." This is the Jesus who knows that he and the Father are eternally one. So his death is nothing more than the simple act of returning to the state he temporarily vacated for his stay in the world.

Nor is this Jesus alone on Calvary, for at the foot of the cross stand Mary his mother and the disciple whom he loved. Finally, he does not cry out in anguish to a God who has abandoned him. Rather his final words are a solemn decision, "It is finished." Only when he decides that his work is completed does John's Jesus hand over his spirit.

If there is struggle in this Passion, it is struggle without suspense, because the Prince of Darkness has no power over Jesus. He has defeated the cosmos before his trials began, and the Cross only acclaims his victory. Even Pilate seems to know as much, because he writes the inscription--"The King of the Jews"--in three languages. This Jesus has conquered all of the Domination Systems of his time and place: Greek culture, Hebrew religion and Roman law.

But the most telling bit is this: Just before the story begins, Jesus lifts his eyes to heaven and says, "Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son so that the Son may glorify thee".

In the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, there is a splendid fresco by Tommaso Giovanni Cassai, better known as Masaccio. The fresco is entitled Holy Trinity with St. Mary, St. John and Donors (click on the image to the right to see a larger version of the entire painting). And as the title reveals, there are three sets of figures in the fresco: God the Father and the Crucified Son; St. Mary and St. John at the foot of the cross; and a kneeling man and woman in contemporary dress -- Domenico di Lenzi and his wife, who paid for the work. They are located –- one facing the other, hands poised in prayer -– on the viewer’s side of a pair of Corinthian columns, which forms a proscenium arch that frames the action taking place on Calvary, which is located “up-stage.” The Holy Spirit, of course, is the traditional dove, suspended between the Father and the Son and pointed downward.

A much-studied landmark of early Renaissance painting, Trinity is the first example of the successful use of linear perspective in painting. But what makes Masaccio’s fresco so arresting is not its technique but its subtle interplay of its art and its theology. On the one hand, it is a fairly typical rendering of the Crucifixion. The body is limp and twisted, the head of the corpus droops, the belly is distended, and the eyes are closed in death. This Jesus, in fact, is the Jesus of Mark’s Passion. On the other hand, the artist locates the ultimate failure beneath a magnificent barrel vaulted ceiling supported by columns with Ionic capitals. The contemporary Florentine viewer would have immediately identified the magnificent coffered vault as a Roman triumphal arch and an allusion to the ultimate victory of the slain hero.

Likewise, the positioning of the Father. You can tell by the placement of his feet, and the stoop of his shoulders, that he is braced for lifting the Cross into heaven. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all people unto me” (John 12:32).

All the critics note the unusual position of the Father’s hands below the beams, suggesting that He seems either to steady or support the wood. But there is an upward, sweeping movement in the work which suggests rather that the Deity now gathers the suffering Son back to Himself. In short, Crucifixion and Resurrection are the same event in Masaccio’s interpretation. Death is literally being swallowed up in victory. Or to put it another way, Crucifixion and Glorification are the same event in Masaccio’s masterpiece. As they are in the John Gospel. In John’s book, Jesus says to the Father, “The hour has come,” –- which, in John, is a technical term for Crucifixion -- “The hour has come. Glorify you name.” And a voice comes from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again” (John 12:28).

Because of his masterful use of linear perspective, there is a lot of triangulation, or rather triangles, in the fresco. There is first of all, the triangle of the Trinitarian Godhead: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Then there is the triangle with St. Mary and St. John at its base, and the figures of the Holy Trinity at the apex. Then, finally, there is the triangle formed by the Trinity at its apex and the pair of donors forming its base. And recall, they are kneeling on our side of the proscenium.  They belong to us, and we to them. They occupy our space and time. And bisecting these two isosceles arrangements, is the Descent of the Dove, moving downward through the action and then –- it feels -- out into the space in the church.

In fact, if you stand or kneel on the line with the descent of the Dove, parallel to the line that bisects the pair of triangles, you end up yourself as the apex of an inverted pair of triangles with the donors, St. Mary and St. John as their respective bases. Thus aligned with the downward movement of the Dove, there is a strong sense that you too are being pierced by the Holy Spirit and drawn upward with the Son as He is carried by the Father into Glory. The viewer becomes a part of the action.

Further if you let go of the hubbub of the tourists, and the noise of the art historians giving learned little lectures about Masaccio’s debt to Brunelleschi, you are drawn out of time and space, lifted toward heaven by the action of Grace. It is, of course, Masaccio’s brilliant trick of point perspective. He has drawn you out of chronos into kairos. He has also drawn you into a deeper, more altering connection with the Fourth Gospel’s conviction that “…if I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people unto me.”

Most of us move through most of our lives with a more Markan than Johannine idea of the Resurrection. The experience is postponed. It's out "there" somewhere. Or up ahead. Or it belongs to somebody else. We await its coming with anticipation, but its coming is deferred. And we fail to see it--much less live it--in its present reality. In fact, most of us live a kind of perpetual Lent, never quite getting to Easter.

None of which is not to say that Crucifixion isn’t all around us. Our sons and daughters are dying in astonishing numbers in Iraq. AIDS is the scourge of Africa. Trains get blown up in Bangalore. Who knows when the borders of Israel and Lebanon will explode again! Darfur is dying. And last week we learned in the NY Times that our children are getting hooked on the prescription drugs innocently sitting on the shelves of our medicine cabinets at home.

So don’t get me wrong: John's Passion is not a Pollyanna narrative. It's not about grinning and bearing it. And so we might just well be tempted to join with those who understand that the Crucifixion is nothing more than a reminder of a fallen hero. A monument to a laudable dead prophet who--like all of the truth-tellers before and since--dared to struggle with the Strong Man and lost. But, on the other hand, we might just opt for Masaccio and John, seeing Crucifixion and Glorification as the same Easter Mystery.

In just a few moments, we will sing some very ancient hymns in veneration of the Cross. And as you listen to the choir, notice the words:

         "We glory in your cross, O Lord;
                  by virtue of your cross,
                           joy has come into the world."

And listen carefully as the Dean reads the last of the Solemn Collects:

         "Oh God of unchangeable power and eternal light;
                  Look favorably on your whole Church,
                           that wonderful and sacred mystery.
Let the whole world see and know
         that things which were cast down are being raised up,
                  and things which had grown old are being made new."

That, my friends, is a resurrection prayer. And that's Good Friday. Good Friday is not about death; it's about life.

Back in the middle of the 15th century, the beautiful façade of Santa Maria Novella, punctuated by its three doors done by Bernini, had not yet been constructed. The front of the church looked something like a tobacco barn. And you entered the church then through a small passage on the southeast side of the nave. It actually opens into the church from the cemetery outside.

The fresco is on the northwest wall of the nave, in line with the cemetery door. In fact, the cemetery is the entry point into the church for visitors even today. And once you enter, and your eyes have grown accustomed to the dim, you notice that Our Lady’s face is turned so that her line of sight is along the route you’re walking. Another Masaccio trick of perspective.

And while her gaze captures yours, you also notice that her right hand is gesturing to her Son on the Cross. She is, in fact, pointing the way to the one who is the Way. Following her lead, of course, you are leaving the world and entering paradise. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth will draw all people unto me.”