And so we come to the Friday called good. The day we are asked to celebrate the day God died. What strikes me today is the ordinariness of this day. Even on a day of heightened sensibility, life still moves on. The crucifixion seems far away, the events powerful and yet removed. It reminds me of these lines from W.H. Auden’s poem Horae Canonica in which he tells the events of Good Friday hour by hour –
The wind has dropped and we have lost our public.
The faceless many who always
Collect when any world is to be wrecked,
Blown up, burnt down, cracked open,
Felled, sawn in two, hacked through, torn apart,
Have all melted away: not one
Of these who in the shade of walls and trees
Lie sprawled now, calmly sleeping,
Harmless as sheep, can remember why
He shouted or what about
So loudly in the sunshine this morning;
All if challenged would reply
-’It was a monster with one red eye,
A crowd that saw him die, not I.-
The hangman has gone to wash, the soldiers to eat;
We are left alone with our feat.
Today I should be in mourning, marking the death of God’s son, repenting of my complicity in the act. But life moves on around me nonetheless. I will drink my morning coffee, I will fix dinner tonight, I will take my children to the park. Good Friday will have to be remembered in the ordinariness of everyday life.
But isn’t that as it should be? That the death of Christ should influence and change everything? That enacting the ritual of the everyday should be imbued with the significance of Christ? That there is something different about changing the diapers, cutting the grass, or doing the dishes because of this death?
At first glance, those habits seem so ordinary as to be meaningless. In the shadow of cosmic redemption dramas, our daily actions seem so pointless and boring. Yet at the same time in light of the call that cosmic drama gave to each of us, those actions now take on new meaning. They become part of the drama, a way of identifying with the story. Acts of remembrance and service and hope.
Nothing is ordinary anymore. The world was wrecked and rebuilt, and even if we can’t always remember why, we walk in that changed world that is now charged with significance. And we call it good.
This week I will be cross-posting the reflections I wrote for Journey’s IFC’s blog relating the events of Holy Week to our church’s value statements. Some of these have appeared in different forms here at onehandclapping in the past. Image – “The Crucifixion – Haiti”