Good Friday of the Passion of the Lord
You've probably seen those optical illusions where, if you look at the picture one way, you'll see an old woman - but if you look at it another way, you'll see a young girl? (See here for one example: http://www.moillusions.com/2006/05/young-lady-or-old-hag.html) Optical illusions make us aware of the fact that what we think might be happening isn't always what is happening. Or - there's usually another way to look at the same facts.
This week's Tridduum asks us to participate in a kind of optical illusion of the soul, to see ourselves and the world differently than we might have found it. We live in a world that invites skepticism, especially about religious ideas and things that can't usually be seen, felt or heard by normal human senses. Jesus' life often gets depicted as merely the life of a really great guy who said some important things like, "Love your neighbor." Our culture sometimes sees Jesus' death, however, as being largely irrelevant compared to the great things Jesus said during his life. And even moreso, Jesus' resurrection seems like religious mumbo jumbo that no one rational should believe. The optical vision of our culture is limited (and this is because we humans are limited by our very human capabilities!): it sees only Jesus' life as significant, but not his death and resurrection.
Today's readings ask us to perceive Jesus in another way. The Old Testament reading (Isaiah 52:13-53:12) and the Gospel (John 18:1-19:42) both try to invite us to see the other side of the optical illusion of Jesus' life. This passage in Isaiah is known as a hinge passage that connects Old and New Testaments together. Though this passage was written well before Jesus' day, Christians have long identified the "he" in this passage as Jesus on his way to the cross. Jesus' horrific death on a cross is what "mars" him, that will make him utterly unattractive to us, that will make him bear no resemblance to the person who existed before the cross.
And yet - Isaiah and John both invite us to see him in a different way. Isaiah suggests that what we perceive to be ugliness, we might better see as beauty, because that broken, scarred body "bore our infirmities". He was pierced for us and mauled for us. John asks us to see Jesus' death as a testimony to the truth of the scriptures and thus to the truth of God's presence among us.
The thing about optical illusions is that you can only be invited to see them; another person can't make you see it but can only point it out. That is the way our witness to Christ happens, too. We cannot make people see what we see about Jesus. We cannot forcibly compel people - not even by the best possible proofs of God's existence. As it happens, this is the way love is, too. Love does not coerce, but only shows the way - even when that love has been hung on a cross.
Today, let us pray that we will see God's own way and follow where he leads.
- Jana M. Bennett