Gently Held
“We may not know, we cannot tell, what pains he had to bear.
But we believe it was for us he hung and suffered there.
—Verse 2 of Hymn 167 – There is a green hill far away
May we know, O Lord, may we tell, and indeed believe
in this love you have shown to us. Amen.
After absorbing the story of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, our prayer, perhaps should be for God to take us and gently hold us. We are human beings, so we do cherish acts of gentleness and tenderness. When we are in need, the kindness shown to us is healing. About now, we would like to be brought within the reach of the saving embrace of God, for our comfort, healing, and strength.
We are human beings. Two tender acts of affection, which we can picture, truly are lovely to think about. Think with me of the beauty of a kiss, the beauty of being held. Think of one friend putting their lips to the cheek of their friend to kiss them. Beautiful! Think of a mother holding her child. So lovely, so exquisite! We will come back to these gestures of affection in just a moment, but first, in our devotional work of Good Friday we take on the hard task of fully contemplating the love: the willing suffering, death, and burial of Jesus our Savior.
Think of two tender gestures given to Jesus at the end of his life. But remember them in the sorrowful context of his passion. On Good Friday we hold before us the story that falls between when Jesus is kissed, and when Jesus is held.
First, look at the kiss. It is in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, not in that of John that Judas gives a sign for those coming to arrest Jesus. He told the authorities, “Whomever I shall kiss, he is the one; seize him.” However tender that kiss might have been, it was a sign not of affection but of treachery. However close their friendship might have been at the beginning, Judas has miserably swung to some new cause in his thinking and actions. It is only in our faith and awareness of what Christ accomplishes for us that we see any beauty at all in that simple kiss. It comes after Jesus’s sacred meal of the previous evening. It is after his deeply soul-wrenching prayer in the garden, among his friends, that this kiss comes from this other friend.
Consider the other affectionate sign. After many other things take place—all the things that we have heard in the Passion Gospel—the body of Jesus is gently placed in the arms of his mother. Actually, this scene is not from the New Testament. In the gospel record, it is Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus that hold the body of Jesus, taking it reverently, wrapping it respectfully with linen and with spices according to Jewish custom. This is a tender, loving act. The tradition picturing Mary is from the quite ancient devotional practice called The Way of the Cross or The Stations of the Cross. In the space of time of our Proper Good Friday Liturgy, Fr. Wismar facilitates an outdoor, interactive version of this devotion for the children which he calls “Walk to Calvary”. It is the devotion that we hold at 2:00 the third hour of Good Friday prayers in the main church at St. Francis. There are fourteen stations, and the thirteenth station begins: “The body of Jesus is placed in the arms of his mother” This traditional scene has made it further into our devotional psyche by a very famous piece of art. The work of renaissance sculptor Michelangelo, now housed in St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City is the first of many works with this theme. I mean of course The Pietà. The marble masterpiece depicts the lifeless body of Jesus draped across the lap of his mother, Mary. Those who have seen it in person, tell me it can elicit profound inner responses, if not audible gasps, and visible tears. I like to suggest that that scene is figuratively a picture of the whole church on Good Friday. Mary is sometimes seen as a figure of the church: the one who showed remarkable humility and faithful obedience to bear Christ into the world.
The church is that Body of Christ that, on Good Friday, holds the crucified body of Christ. We ponder what love it is that takes us into God’s embrace, through the self-offering of Jesus. If you can picture that living reality, preserved in marble, you can see yourself now, contemplating, “O my soul! What wondrous love is this!” Notice too, in the piece: with one hand, Mary holds the body of Jesus, under his right arm; with the other, she seems to beckon the world to note and marvel at all the benefit wrought by the life and death of Jesus.
Between these two gestures, the kiss and the holding of Christ, the world of art once again affords us another tender touch. I am speaking of lines from the extraordinary hymn Pange lingua which is traditionally sung during the veneration of the cross at the Good Friday liturgy. Dominican scholar, Thomas Aquinas afforded us the Latin text for this plainsong piece that has become part of our deep devotion. In the English translation, let’s notice that the fourth and fifth verses (in our Episcopal 1982 Hymnal, Hymn 166) address the cross itself. It is a word to the cross, In the fifth verse it is called the “tree of glory”. References to the cross as the tree are seen elsewhere too, even in the writing of St. Paul. It is seen as the second Tree of Life: the one planted at Golgotha, not the one planted in creation in the Garden of Eden. It is the tree of life that bears the fruit which takes away sin and death.
As we shall see in verse five, the request is for the tree to relax and bend its branches, Observe the beautiful request to this tree. Though the wood’s properties from its birth are to remain strong and unbending, we ask that it make a kindly, reverent, and affectionate gesture in deference to the King of heavenly beauty who is gently extended upon its arms. Take in this poetic rendering of the cross’s role:
Bend thy boughs, O tree of glory! Thy relaxing sinews bend;
for a while, the ancient rigor that thy birth bestowed, suspend;
and the King of heavenly beauty gently on thine arms extend
And just as the Cross will relax and bend its boughs, we should on this day, relax the stubborn grip we keep on our own sins. We should by the power of this act of Christ, release at last our own fear of death. What Love does for us through Christ’s self-offering is to supply the removal of our sins, and the transformation of death. Because of him, the grave is no longer an end but a portal into life unending. Let go of the shame, let go of the fear. The Lord Jesus Christ has stretched out his arms of love on the wood of the cross that we might come within the reach of his saving embrace. With his kiss our sins are forgiven, as he holds us we know the meaning in our lives, we know life everlasting.