Amanda McMillen, “God Feels It Too”

In the 4th century, there was a Christian woman named Egeria who lived in Western Europe and decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. She wrote extensively about her observations of Christian practices in Jerusalem in a journal, which she addressed to her girlfriends back home. Those journals are one of the Church’s most useful sources of information about early Christian devotional practices. Now as someone who uses various apps to communicate with friends and keeps both a handwritten and online diary myself, this historical fact gives me great delight, knowing that our very journals, postcards, and letters to friends are significant to the historical record - it’s also kind of a scary thought I realize, and in our day and age I guess this looks more like our online record, but still, on a personal level, I just love the legitimacy this brings to the ways we chat with our friends.

So in these journals, Egeria describes the practices of early Christians in Jerusalem as they reenacted Jesus’ last week of life before his death on Good Friday. She describes in particular the old practice of venerating the cross. At this time, it was believed that the actual cross on which Jesus was crucified was held by the church in Jerusalem - the large cross was laid out in the church, and people would pass by it, maybe bowing before it, touching it, even kissing it. It was guarded by deacons so that no one would try to desecrate it or steal a fragment  - but Egeria shares some hot gossip that someone once bit off part of the cross while pretending to kiss it, in order to steal a souvenir. Just imagine Egeria as the ancient equivalent of TMZ - bringing the latest celebrity gossip across the Roman Empire.

Thanks to Egeria’s journals, we know that this practice of venerating the cross is ancient. And we might not lay out the actual wooden cross on which Jesus was crucified in our own church, but we do venerate the cross in other ways. We might wear cross necklaces, we often process into church each week following a beautiful cross, we have crosses on our prayer books and on our bibles, they adorn our stained glass windows, our grave markers, tops of churches. The cross is a ubiquitous symbol in our everyday Christian lives.

Perhaps you are wondering why that is. It is more than a bit odd, I think, that we venerate this symbol which represents the torture and grueling death of the God we worship. Crucifixion was a regular form of Roman execution practiced at that time, known to be the most brutal and most humiliating method possible. It was reserved for murderers and criminals against the state, to send a message to onlookers of what would happen if they tried to revolt. It was meant as a spectacle of horror. The crucified person would essentially suffocate slowly, as their body collapsed under its own weight, held up only by a few nails. It was an unimaginably painful end. So why would we venerate a symbol of such deplorable violence? Why would we choose to dwell on that which is painful, and tragic, and traumatic?

I was watching one of the various reality tv shows that I love a few weeks ago, and I was served an ad for collagen, like a powder supplement that you can put in smoothies. And the punchline of the ad was this: “as you age, your collagen production slows. but with vital proteins, your joints, hair, nails, and skin may never have to know.” And I thought. Whoa. Never? That’s incredible. I’m in the wrong business, time to get into the collagen business apparently. It’s incredible - and it’s also blissfully in denial of the way time works. Talk about not wanting to face the inevitable nature of aging. The brand is called Vital Proteins, in case you too want to make sure that your joints and skin will never have to know that you’re aging.

But I get it, it is painful to dwell on pain or weakness - I understand the draw of that denial. When we dwell on the pain of the cross, on what it means for our Christian faith, we are also dwelling on our own pain - the areas in our lives where we feel despair. At the cross, we have an image of the gap between the way things should be, and the way things are. The God of the Universe, through whom all things were made, should be on a heavenly throne. But we do not see God on a heavenly throne when we dwell on the cross on Good Friday. We see Jesus dying an excruciating death, lifted high not on his throne in the heavenly places, but by hands nailed into wood.

In our own lives, we feel suffering that reminds us of that gap between what should be and what actually is. It’s not just the way that our joints and skin definitely know that we are aging. It’s also the way our relationships become fractured by resentment and cold distance. It’s the way our bodies fail us, reminding us of the death we fear. It’s the way a diagnosis ruins every beautiful plan we have ever had. It’s the child we can’t connect with anymore, who stopped calling a while ago. It’s the poverty that leaves some sleeping on cold benches in the wintertime. It’s the addiction that holds us firmly in its grip. It’s the trauma we once suffered that still makes its way into our nightmares. It’s the sin of pride that regularly robs us of joy. We know what it’s like to suffer, too. What is “it” for you?

When we look at the cross as Christians have done for centuries, we dwell on human suffering – Jesus’ human suffering, and all of ours, too. We are pausing to dwell on all of human suffering. And it is painful to dwell on what plagues us. I don’t blame you if you’d rather just skip over it, think positively, and leave the past in the past. And sometimes I think we don’t have the capacity to focus on what is most painful when we have lives to live and things to do. We might try to put our pain in a box on a shelf, so that we can just get on with the day. But as Dave talked about in his Palm Sunday sermon this week, the pain that infects our hearts isn’t something we can just expel spontaneously. Rather, when we try to place it on a shelf, it might become something that creeps into our dreams, wakes us up at night, reminds us of our fears in an unexpected moment, and leads us to lash out at one another, because that person doesn’t know what it’s like to have this pain. 

Good Friday is the time of the year when we are forced to sit in our pain for a moment, as we dwell on the pain of Christ. Because our own suffering, our own understanding of that gap between the way things are and the way things should be, is itself experienced in the body of our dying Lord. As his body breaks and bleeds, Jesus feels the grief of the fractured relationships. He feels the uncertainty of the feared diagnosis. He feels the hopelessness of the estranged child. He feels the injustice of the poor. He feels the agony of the unending addiction. He feels the horror of trauma. He feels the weight of our pride.

When we dwell on the cross, we are dwelling on human pain, and we are dwelling also on the person who hangs on that cross. Jesus, being God, is different than we are - thank God. Jesus doesn’t try to avoid pain the way we, quite understandably, often do. In fact, not only does Jesus not try to avoid it, he seems to be actively following it, like a moth to a flame.

Jesus, on the cross, has bound himself to our pain; he seems to be actually drawn to it, to the very darkest places of human suffering, even to hell itself. When we dwell on the cross, we are not dwelling just on the suffering alone, just on the hard wood of the cross, just on the instrument of pain. We are not left alone in the abyss of our suffering.

Because we see there, at the cross, God’s very body, the Word made flesh, who is lifted high, and who managed to turn an instrument of torture into a throne of grace. Who takes everything that leads us to despair, and carries it on his own broken body. As our reading from Hebrews today tells us, let us draw near to God. Let us draw near to the cross, with the pain that lays heavy on our own shoulders, and know that we are never left alone there. Whatever “it” is for you, God feels all of it, too. And it is finished. Amen.