Homilies

Good Friday – 15 April 2022

The Australian cartoonist, Michael Leunig has both amused us and challenged us now for many years.  Sometimes we find his art quirky; at other times we find his representations questioning our premises about the world and about ourselves.  Indeed, some of them occasionally confront the premises we have about God himself.  On this day I think of one particular such illustration.  Leunig has a man meeting God in the person of someone wounded on the side of the road.  God begs the man, “Help me I am God, and I am wounded.”  “You’re not God,” says the man. “God is all powerful.”  “I am all vulnerable,” says God. “I am in pain. I am at your mercy.”  It is too unbearable for the man.  He is so infuriated he kills off that God.

Most of us want God to be powerful because it is we who would like to be powerful; we project onto God a type of cosmic control because we want to be in control, and not to suffer.  We fear the pain, the chaos, and loss of certainty if vulnerability is at the heart of life.  Yet today we celebrate that this vulnerability is not just at the heart of life but also in the heart of God’s own very life.

In Leunig’s cartoon the man cannot accept a vulnerable God, and he kills that God.  The figure in the cartoon represents each of us, however, for we too wish to crucify and put to death all that makes us vulnerable.  Yet we know how vulnerable we are.  

Every day we are confronted with images of needless destruction and unimaginable depravity in the villages of Ukraine;

The seasons of the year are changing, and we do not know how the climate will continue to evolve and what might be the full extent of its implications;

We know how vulnerable we are in ourselves:  our anxieties, our fears, our longings, and our hopes.  Often underneath the exterior we feel fragile and at times quietly, and at other times not so quietly, desperate.

We know how vulnerable are our relationships:  we struggle with the imperfections of our marriages and with the daily effort to listen to one another, to understand one another, and to allow each other the space and freedom that love demands.

We know how vulnerable are our families: we feel misunderstood by our parents; our children take turns that we cannot understand and appreciate; we feel both deeply connected and distant to one another at the same time.

We know how vulnerable are our commitments:  we know how easily they can be undermined, subverted, and hijacked by all manner of pressures both within us and around us.

Perhaps Good Friday has such meaning for us because, even without fully realizing, the commemoration of the One who suffers provides us with a kind of space to identify our own vulnerability, to recognize our own suffering, and in the midst of this, to trust, nonetheless, in that hope that rises from the ashes of our fragility. This is the certain invitation that the commemoration of the Lord’s Passion extends to us.  For a few relatively brief moments we can be true to our own vulnerability and fragility, and to the meaninglessness of suffering in our world.  We don’t have to pretend it to be otherwise.  

However, as we greet our own wounded self and vulnerable world, we, too, are faced with the question, like the person in Leunig’s cartoon, as to whether we will seek to kill it.  Or whether we will journey with it and find in it the seed of whole different perspective about ourselves, about life, and about God. 

It is the Christian understanding that in that suffering from which none of are immune ‑ in all the myriad ways that we uniquely and personally experience which give demonstration to our own incompleteness ‑ there is the seed of new possibility and life, a constant invitation to see ourselves and others in a new way.  Thus, the Cross of Jesus, in which we are confronted with God’s own vulnerability in such a way to expose our own, calls us to conversion.  Perhaps, though, as Sebastian Moore wrote, it is not so much a conversion from sin as a conversion from innocence.”[1]  What does he mean by this but that the Cross of Jesus shatters any illusion to innocence, to a life immune from vulnerability, fragility, and suffering if we are to truly receive the call of the Spirit.  

The Cross saves us, however. It does not leave us in our vulnerability.  It speaks to us rather precisely in our vulnerability that we must attend to the springs of hope that rise in the midst of our questions.  To return to Michael Leunig:

When the heart is cut or cracked or broken

Do not clutch it

Let the wound lie open

Let the wind from the good old sea blow in

To bathe the wound with salt

And let it sting

Let a stray dog lick it

Let a bird lean in the hole and sing

A simple song like a tiny bell

And let it ring

In the midst of all that we experience a hope rises like a tiny bell.  It may begin as a faint tinkle, barely perceptible, but the more we attend to it its chimes it becomes stronger and stronger, and we realize that its sound is transforming us.  It is the hope of Jesus himself, echoing deep within us.  It is the hope for a new life, for a more fulfilled life, for a more complete life, a life without war and anxieity, for a life in which our doubts, our fears, our resentments, our hurts will be transformed into something different so that we may experience ourselves to be whom we now only faintly dream we can be.  The Passion and Cross of Jesus teach us that this is a truly transformative hope if we believe it and if we follow it.  It is a hope that does not remove or defend us from our doubt or question but rather that which can only be known in the midst of our doubts and questions.

O Cross of Christ,

You are the door to where and how we struggle.

You invite us down the stairway of the truth of ourselves

And welcome us into the room of no pretence.

In the uncertainty of that room,

You light a candle which sheds is rays across our shadows

You restore our confidence never to cease in our hope

And in that hope you open the windows of our selves that we might breathe again,

And live anew. (Source unkown)


[1]  Sebastian Moore, Jesus, the liberator of desire, (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 37.

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