March 21, 2008 Good Friday Perspective

Dear E-pistle subscriber,

One of the most powerful customs of Holy Week comes at the end of the Maundy Thursday service, and is called the Stripping of the Altar.

The Stripping of the Altar is both a practical and a symbolic action.

It serves a practical need in removing all adornments, cushions, and decorative objects, and veiling, with black, all the crosses, and so the church building is prepared for Good Friday, the most solemn day of the Christian year.

The action is also symbolic. In stripping the church building of all reminders of comfort and beauty, we remind ourselves of the comfort and beauty we ordinarily enjoy in life, and by removing them, we willingly enter into a bit of austerity, hoping to identify a bit more with the sufferings of Jesus and of the poor.

I’ve been participating in the Stripping of the Altar every year now for almost twenty years, but last night I noticed something that I’d never noticed before.

If you stand directly in front of one of the gold crosses that are veiled in black, all you can see is the veil. The darkness.

But if you move around a bit, you get glimpses of light reflecting off the gold, shining through the veil.

I’m thinking off the top of my head here, but I think there’s a profound theological truth in that discovery.

If we stare at the pathos, at the tragedy, the cruelty of the crucifixion, all we see is the darkness.

Most of us are accustomed to looking at the crucifixion from the perspective of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, who wrote the first accounts of the crucifixion. Year after year in Passion Readings we take the part of the bloodthirsty crowd, yelling “crucify him!” and taunting Jesus. If we’ve been invited to consider the crucifixion from another perspective, it’s probably been from the perspective of Peter or another of the disciples who deserted Jesus.

But what if we move around a bit?

What happens when look at the crucifixion from other perspectives?

What if, for example, we looked at the crucifixion from the perspective of the Roman Centurion – isn’t there admiration in his voice as he says “surely this was the Son of God”?

Or what if we looked at Jesus on the cross from the perspective of the sympathetic criminal hanging alongside Jesus, who rebuked the other criminal for his cruelty to Jesus, takes responsibility for his own misdeeds, and – after his heartfelt plea to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your Kingdom”—receives Jesus’ reassurance, “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Or what if we allowed ourselves to identify not just with the men who betrayed and deserted Jesus but the women who remained faithful, who stood by weeping and watching, sympathetic with Jesus’ sufferings?

All these perspectives are straight from scripture.

All of them allow ourselves to see the crucifixion from another angle: A less self-conscience, self-condemnatory, self-abnegating angle.

All of them, in other words, allow a bit of the Easter light of the cross to shine through into our Good Friday.

See you Sunday,

Fr. John