The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair. --
Soren Kierkegaard
God’s ways are not our ways, and it’s a good thing, too. How otherwise could we call this Friday ‘Good’? The logic of the cross makes no sense by any kind of normal human reckoning. It is a logic that is in almost every way the reverse of what we take as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ in a fallen world.
Do you know that painting by the early Renaissance artist Masaccio called The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden? If there is an image that better expresses human forsakenness, or of two sorrier, soul-shattered, heart-broken people, I’m not aware of it. That image of Adam and Eve is us. Forsakenness is us—that’s the bad news. But it doesn’t have to be, and that’s the good news that we celebrate on this Friday we call for good reason ‘Good’. And so if we don’t recognize ourselves in them, then it is probably very difficult to understand the significance of the astonishing event that we commemorate today. But they knew something we don’t. They knew both the ‘before the Fall’ and the ‘after the Fall’; we know only the ‘after’, and we have come to accept the ‘after’ as normal, as natural.* But that ‘after’ is not normal; it’s not what we were created for. To think it's normal is to be in despair.
Genesis tells us that we humans were created in the image and likeness of God. But in that moment of the Fall, whenever or whatever it was, like Humpty Dumpty, the human soul shattered. And so like a shattered mirror was the human soul's capacity to do what it was created to do: to know and reflect the goodness of God in His fullness. After that event, we human beings could know something of the truth, but only in bits and pieces. We had become incapable of reflecting—or as Mary was to put it in a later age, ‘magnifying’--the fullness of the goodness and beauty of the One in whose image we had been created. And so our ways could no longer be His ways; at best our ways reflect His ways as shards of mirror glass scattered on a desolate city sidewalk glisten in the sunlight. That’s something—it’s better than nothing—but it’s not what we were created for.
We are lucky that we know only the ‘after’ and not the ‘before’, because to know both would be unbearable. But we nevertheless long for that which was lost. All of our longings are, whether we are aware of it or not, a longing to have restored to us the fullness that was lost. Because after the Fall we humans became a soul-shattered people, and as after Humpty Dumpty’s great fall, all the king’s horses and the king’s men couldn’t put us back together again. We nevertheless long to be put back together again, to become what we were created for: to magnify in its fullness the goodness and beauty of Him in whose image we were created.
In the Christ of the gospels we encounter the human being whose ways were always God’s ways. Jesus Christ was like us humans in all ways but sin, which means that in Him the human image and likeness of God was not shattered. It remained whole, and so He, unlike us, magnified the goodness and beauty of the Father whose will He sought in everything He did.
So then how to understand those disconcerting words from the cross—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Sure, Peter and most of the other disciples had forsaken Him, but now even His Father had done so? Why? At this moment of all moments? Why? Because if we soul-shattered humans were to become whole like Him, His human soul had to shatter like ours. All his life He knew the ‘before’, and at that moment, He knew the ‘after’. We sons and daughters of Adam, whoever the prelapsarian Adam was, never knew as he knew the 'before', only the after to which many humans have simply come to accept as normative. But to accept it as normative is to fall into the despair that Kierkegaard describes as not knowing itself. The beginning of hope is to recognize how desperate our situation in fact is.
Christ’s anguished cry from the cross marks for Him His Masaccio Moment. In these words we hear echoed down through the ages the lament of Adam and Eve as they came to understand the enormity of their loss. In that moment He re-experienced as the sinless representative of all humanity the soul-shattering consequences of Adam’s sin in all of its alienating power. And like Adam, He knew the before, and He knew the after. He experienced the despair that knows itself.
Jesus Christ on the cross was never forsaken by the Father, and never were the rest of us, but in this moment He knew in its fullness the anguish of what was lost. Nothing human, even this deeply experienced human alienation from the Father, is alien to Him. In this moment Christ speaks from the cross as the still sinless, but now sin-shattered representative of all broken, anguished humanity at precisely the moment when humanity’s ages-long experience of having been forsaken by God is decisively ended by God. In the Risen Christ we encounter the once shattered but then restored image of the human being in its fullness. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men had no interest whatsoever in putting him back together again, but his Father did. And so the risen Christ is the shattered us made whole. He is the image of what we were created for; He is the restored fullness of the image and likeness of God in human form.
So this is what our restoration to wholeness required: First, His movement into our forsakenness and brokenness; and, second, our movement into His restored wholeness. If we choose to make that movement, slowly, step by step, our shattered souls get put back together again, and we find, as in the lives of the saints, that our human ways become gradually more like God’s ways, and that our image comes more to magnify His fullness.
Blessed are they who recognize their brokenness and retain hope; blessed are they who trust that even in the darkest darkness, no matter how forsaken they feel, God is there. Because Jesus Christ has been there, done that, and nothing in our human experience is alien to Him. And so, therefore, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of God.
Forsakenness is us—that’s the bad news. But it doesn’t have to be, and that’s the good news that we celebrate on this Friday we call for good reason ‘Good’.
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*I am not a literalist, but while I don't think the Genesis story about the expulsion from the Garden is literally true, I believe it is mytho-poetically true. I believe the story points to an event that really happened and that had huge ontological consequences for human beings. The story points to the essence of its significance, but in ways that are open to different levels of interpretation. This is just one possible interpretation.
Ed note: This was part of a Tre Ore meditation for Good Friday at my local parish in 2015.