Good Friday - April 21, 2025

Good Friday, April 18, 2025, Church of the Atonement

The Very Rev'd Joy Rogers

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way,

and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:6)

In an essay titled Broken Continuities: "Night" and "White Crucifixion" (Christian Century, November 4, 1987, p. 963.), a religion professor named Karl Plank writes:

Around 3:00 AM on November 10, 1938, gaping darkness began to spew the flames that were to burn unabated for the next seven years. On this night Nazi mobs executed a well-planned "spontaneous outrage" throughout the precincts of German Jewry. Synagogues were burned, their sacred objects profaned and destroyed; Jewish dwellings were ransacked, their contents strewn and pillaged. Shattering the windows of Jewish shops, the growing swarm left businesses in ruin. Uprooting tombstones and desecrating Jewish graves, the ghoulish throng violated even the sanctuary of the dead . . . A chilling harbinger of nights yet to come. Nazi propagandists, struck by a perverse poetry, gave to this night the name by which it has endured in memory: Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Irony abounds in such a name, for in the litter of shattered windows lies more than bits of glass.

Kristallnacht testifies to a deeper breaking of basic human continuities. Shattered windows leave faith in fragments and pierce the wholeness of the human spirit.

          In that same year, a Jewish artist Marc Chagall would complete a remarkable painting titled White Crucifixion. (Art Institute of Chicago). 

The Russian Jew depicts a crucified Christ, skirted with a tallith (the traditional Jewish prayer shawl) and encircled by a kaleidoscopic whirl of images that narrates the progress of a Jewish pogrom. Over his head, an inscription in Hebrew: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

          Whatever the cross of Christ might mean for any of us, in 1938, Chagall shows how it was embedded in the realities of an emerging Holocaust.

Plank asserts that Chagall does not intend to Christianize his painting. Rather, in the chaotic world of White Crucifixion all are unredeemed, caught in a vortex of destruction, binding crucified victim and modern martyr. As the prayer shawl wraps the loins of the crucified figure, Chagall makes clear that the Christ and the Jewish sufferer are one. Chagall’s Messiah, this Jew of the cross, is no rescuer, but himself hangs powerless before the chaotic fire.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? *and are so far from my cry and from the words of my distress? (Psalm 22)

In his imagery of the Crucified, Chagall accuses Christians in his blunt portrayal of a Jewish Jesus and the connection between him and the profound suffering visited upon the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,so he did not open his mouth.

By a perversion of justice, he was taken away. (Isaiah 53:7-8)

Holocaust –a category of suffering and tragedy and human inhumanity to our fellow creatures beyond comprehension -- but an all-too-common fact of human existence. A secular definition of evil.

·       The victims of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, have terrible companions in those who were slaughtered in American lynchings, in the destruction visited upon Indigenous peoples by colonial powers, and in South American disappearings.

·       A holocaust of terror has devastated peoples in every part of the world and created the tragedy and the crisis of unnumbered refugees from every corner of the planet.

So many Victims who comprehend the terrible truth of crucifixion. Any word of redemption is facile and shallow when it is delivered by not so innocent bystanders.

And that is where we often find ourselves – finding it hard to stay with it, to probe the pain, to touch our grief, to confront the guilt, to seek the truth of God, amidst the traumas of our lives and world.

But he was wounded for our transgressions,crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the punishment that made us whole,and by his bruises we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)

It has taken 40 days of Lent and most of a Week we call Holy to get us to a Cross. The journey challenges us to learn of holiness from one who is stripped naked, nailed up like a scarecrow on a wooden pole.

And yet, tonight, we make the most dangerous claim of gospel faith -- that it is God who hangs there, hurting, vulnerable, accessible, unprotected. A victim. Our victim.

Forgive and forget, we like to say.

          But this Friday we call ‘good’ intends to make us remember.

          To remember that the hurt we do to others or the wounds we have suffered at another’s hand cannot be simply erased; the scars wiped away like chalk from a blackboard. 

·       Good Friday intends to make us look upon the consequences of hate and greed and the lust for power.

·       To forget mocks the sufferings that human beings inflict upon one another.

·       To forget is to trivialize the monstrous as if it did not matter.

·       So Good Friday makes us remember -- remember that nothing, not even resurrection erases this crucifixion, any crucifixion.

In the shadow of the cross, we are guilty bystanders, most days. Chagall’s painting confronts us with a world of victims. As do the heartbreaking headlines that mark our daily lives.

This nation has the highest number of gun deaths in the developed world – a holocaust of suicides and homicides.

          Immigrant communities and the Trans community are facing all manner of threat – holocausts in the making.

          We have the worst maternal and infant mortality rates of any developed nation, exacerbated by laws that rob women of bodily autonomy and competent health care – a holocaust rendered invisible by inattention.

          We are frightened by the instability and chaos that the current Administration has visited upon this nation, and much of the planet.

          Good Friday stops us in our tracks and intends to shatter our certainties, confront the broken basic human continuities that abound in our time and place. We may not rush away too quickly now or presume that an empty tomb will make it all okay.

          Utter brokenness and persistent pain accuse us. Horrific realities must not be trivialized by the comfortable prop of resurrection faith.

          To approach the cross with too much faith, to stand in its shadow with an easy, even arrogant, confidence of Easter light, is finally to confront no cross at all, only the unrepentant echoes of our religious noise, says Karl Plank.

It is only when we are ready to turn to the victims, to stand with the victims, to hold them in our embrace and weep for all that has been endured, for all who have been lost, that something more is possible.

Jesus’ cross and all the crosses that mark our lives invite us first into silence. It is not when we speak to victims but only when we listen to their testimony that we can truly perceive the cross. It is not our story to tell; it is ours to hear.

As we are called to hear tonight the austere poetry of the Hebrew prophet as a stark counterpoint to the heart-breaking artistry of John the evangelist, all of it witness to the enduring truth of a Crucified Messiah.

·       Chagall’s White Crucifixion accuses us of complacency in the face of the passion of others.

·       The Johannine Crucifixion invites us into the passion of the world, through the passion of Christ.

Humility and repentance and courage and love are all that can turn us from onlookers to witnesses – to the possibility of a new community of victims and witnesses who will wait together for the Kingdom of God.

And in the end, that is why we come here tonight. 

To place ourselves before the holy victim and discover that we are placing ourselves in the path of all victims. And before a Cross that still must be an unanswerable scandal.

To resist the rush to resurrection without touching the pain, without acknowledging evil that we have done nothing to halt; without repenting of our failures of faith and love, without recognizing the face of Jesus in the world’s crucified ones and knowing our need for their forgiveness and his.

          Is that too much to ask?

          Of a people whose life depends on this story, this victim.

          The rites are ways to remember -- to remember what the world tries to make us forget.

          The nature of the gift, the nature of the God.

He was despised and rejected by others;a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; (Isaiah 53: 3)

The man on the cross advertises the holiness of God in all the hellish places of human existence; and marks them with his broken body as the place of forgiveness, of assurance, of naked trust in a greater love than our own.

          And then he asks us to follow him there and do the same.