A collect from Morning Prayer, one that focuses on the church’s mission starts off with these words: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms on the hard wood of the cross so that all might come within the reach of your saving embrace.’ For some reason, this Good Friday my mind has returned again and again to those outstretched hands of Jesus nailed to the hard wood of the cross.
Perhaps it’s because hands have always intrigued me. I’ve loved drawing them over the years in all the millions of positions they can be, holding things, clenched together, working or open. I’ve always looked at people ’s hands because they tell so much about a person’s life, whether the skin is smooth or chapped, whether it has ground-in dirt from a life of hard work, or the skin is pristine, that so often comes with someone who has limited mobility or is paralysed. I watch the colour of a person’s fingers to see how their circulation is. I smile when the crayoned hands of a child come outstretched to the communion rail. I, too, at times have presented cut and less-than-perfect hands to God at the moment of receiving the sacrament and know that it still is OK. And I know that at the moment of receiving or giving communion, hands or fingers touch, making a connection that humans crave because human touch is crucial to love.
Perhaps hands are on my mind because I think of all the people throughout the world who have lost their hands for one reason or another, but for too, too many as a result of picking up a land mine that explodes in their hands. That fragmentation is an egregious example of humanity’s brokenness.
Of all the photographs that have come out of the war in Iraq the one that reminded me most of the cross was that of a weeping Iraqi woman holding out her bloodied bandaged hands, in a gesture of supplication, though I suspect it was one of extreme pain. Those hands looked so much like all the drawings of Christ’s hands either on or off the cross. How many other wounded hands are out there?
Jesus on the cross, with his outstretched hands, embraces the suffering of humankind. Though his suffering is particular, it is also universal. Christ is our way to God and is the person and place where God’s search for us, God’s outstretched hands, meets our outstretched hands seeking God. (The best image for that connection is, of course, Michelangelo’s depiction of God’s hand touching Adam’s found on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.)
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And when have we likewise stretched out our hands in a gesture of vulnerability, pain, desolation and despair as Christ did on the cross for our behalf? Do we understand that the mystery of the incarnation not only encompasses that of a baby but of a human being who stretched out his hands in despair and love, who deeply shared our human condition of finitude?
Sebastian Moore writes in his book, The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger, that the incarnation is the mystery of a God who comes upon us and loves us beyond all the limits that come from ourselves. When Jesus came amongst us, God also did, touching us in the innermost region of the soul where sin can reside. That is the divinity of Christ, through whom God touches us, deep inside. Through the mystery of the incarnation, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, God inundates our souls, joining us in the inner chaos to restore order. That inner chaos is sin, that part of us that resists God’s love.
In the cross we see our sin transformed into the grace of God, and in it we also see our crucifixion by the forces of our desires. Moore believes that we are so afraid of death that we desperately try to escape its inevitability, instead of understanding it to be a part of the natural process that leads us back to God. When people feel that they are being crucified physically, actually their lives are being transformed from sin to grace. There is only one true cross to which all our crosses have to be conformed; and this involves not just asking Christ to help him carry his own cross but turning our cross around to conform to Christ’s. The turning around of one’s cross is changing one’s prayer to: ‘Not what I desire but what you desire’… part of that prayer that Jesus uttered in despair at the garden of Gethsemane.
Another part of conforming our lives to Christ’s, I think, is to open our hands in love, surrender and vulnerability, to admit that we really don’t have everything in control, that there is an awful lot going on right now that exhausts the soul, raises deep questions and that we desperately are seeking answers and clarity.
That love is not easy or cheap, however. Saint Francis understood when he wrote: ‘It was easy to love God in all that was beautiful. The lessons of deeper knowledge, though, instructed me to embrace God in all things.’ He prayed that God would not let him leave this earth until God promised him that he could always touch the face of anyone who suffered.
It is when we understand that the suffering of someone the next street over, or a part of this congregation or in El Salvador or on the other side of the world touches us, when we can extend our hands out, palms up, in that universal gesture of supplication, that we can begin to share in Christ’s self-giving on the cross. When we allow ourselves to be touched deeply within by God, letting God get into those hidden corners of our hearts and help us clean the cobwebs of sin from there, then we become more human and, therefore, closer to the image of God as God wished for us when God created us.
An Aboriginal woman from Australia prayed: ‘Love demands everything, Jesus. It touches the very centre of our being. Thinking of us you gave up what we cherish most. You breathed out your life in love, that we might live.’
On this Friday we call Good, may we humbly give thanks to a God who loved us so much to come amongst us, live and die with us, always embracing us in a love that defies reason. May we respond, then, to God’s love with an equal love to those around us, embracing them as well. Maybe, maybe, even we can bring about new life to this aching world.
[photos of Good Friday in another note]
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