Holy Week, Good Friday
John 19: 1-15
Then Pilate took Jesus and had
him scourged. The soldiers braided a crown of thorns and put it on his head,
and threw a purple cloak around him, walked up to him and said, “Hail, King of
the Jews!” and struck him in the face.
And again Pilate went out to them and said, “Behold, thus I bring him
out to you, so that you may know that I find no guilt in him.
And Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple cloak.
And Pilate said to them, “Behold, the man!” [Behold, this is Man!]
When the chief priests and the Temple attendants saw him, they shouted,
“Crucify him, crucify him!”
Then Pilate said, “Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no
guilt in him.”
Then the Jewish leaders replied, “We have a law, and according to that
law he must die, because he has made himself a Son of God.”
When Pilate heard these words, he was even more alarmed, and again he
went into he courthouse and said to Jesus, “From where have you received your
mission?” But Jesus gave him no answer.
Then Pilate said to
him, “You will not speak with me? Do you not know that I have the power to
release you and also to crucify you?”
Jesus answered, “You would not have power over me unless it had been
given to you on high. Therefore the greater burden of destiny falls upon him
who handed me over to you.”
From then on, Pilate tried to set him free. But the people shouted, “If
you release him, you are no longer a friend of Caesar, for everyone who makes
himself a king is against Caesar.”
When he heard these words, Pilate led Jesus out, and sat down on the
judgment seat in the place called the Pavement, in Hebrew Gabbatha. I was the
day of the preparation of the Passover Festival, about midday. And he said to
the people, “Behold, this is your King.” But they shouted, “Away with him, away
with him, crucify him!”
Pilate asked them, “Shall I crucify your King?”
And the chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar!”
Good Friday Evening
John 19: 1-15
When we are born, the bones
at the tops of our heads have not yet grown
together. They are still open. The
Father’s sun, moon and stars still shine their living cosmic forces down into
us through this ‘skull skylight’. They pour the living, forming forces of the
cosmos into us, helping us shape the growing instrument of the body.
 |
| Josephine Wall |
As we grow, the skylight
closes. To quote Wordsworth:
Heaven
lies about us in our infancy!
Shades
of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,….
At
length the Man perceives it [heaven] die away,
And
fade into the light of common day.[1]
The window to heaven shuts. But
all the while, we are shaping our own unique and very individual faces.
 |
| Grunewald |
Christ opened a new skylight into the human constitution. At Jesus’
Baptism, “as he came up out of the water, he saw the heavens were torn open,
and he saw the spirit of God descending upon him like a dove.” Mark 1:9 – 11
Jesus, the unique individual, is born anew, from above, through water and the
Holy Spirit. The breadth and power of the cosmic dimension are reunited with
the uniquely individual human. And thus a new human being is formed. Christ
Jesus becomes the New Adam, our new ancestor. Uniting ourselves with him, the
heavens will open again for us too.
Christ Jesus is also God with
a human face. His disciples were so united with him in love that they began to
look like him, to wear His face. In the Garden of Gethsemane
God, eternally divine, and eternally human, now wears a face that shows
what every human being experiences on earth—from radiant joy to deepest anguish--and
everything in between. The face of Christ, above all, shows deep compassion,
born of an intensely intimate understanding of the human condition. There is no
interior space that he has not inhabited. He danced at weddings, and
experienced the joy of friendship. He also experienced the terrible and lonely
suffering of torture and execution. But above all He knew the mighty joyous sense
of triumph of fulfillment, of the accomplishment of overcoming for the first
time the deepest tragedy that has befallen us—death itself.
 |
| Memling |
Scientists studying the brain have recently discovered what are called
mirror neurons, sensory centers of empathy that allow us to read faces, and to perceive
what others are feeling. Through this perceptual mirroring, we can respond to
others appropriately.
The face that Christ presents
to us in art is often earnest. His face expresses an intent seriousness. It is
as though He were silently asking: will you mirror Me? I have plumbed the
depths of human experience in order to understand you, to gather you up from
the depths. Will you take Me as seriously as I take you? Will you now plumb
your own depths, to find Me there?
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