Good Friday

Night Watch

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And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, “So, could you not watch with me one hour? Matthew 26:40 ESV

Sorry, Jesus. I would have been there for the whole hour, but this is how my Good Friday morning went . . .

I am a lark, not an owl. So, when our church asked for volunteers for the night watch, a prayer vigil in our chapel between the Holy Thursday service commemorating Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, and the first Good Friday service at 8:00 AM, I volunteered for the 4-5 AM slot — a time I was sure no one else wanted.

I had set my alarm for 3:00 but woke at 2:30. I was a little anxious. The press has reported more random acts of violence in the subway in recent weeks. Someone is punching women in the face. A guy was pushed in front of a train last week. I chose my outerwear with some thought about how well it would repel a knife attack and whether my boots could provide a painful kick to an attacker’s shins. Nobody better mess with me. I’ve been working out!

Hey, in the Garden of Gethsemane, one of the disciples carried a shiv.

At 3:20, I didn’t find any muggers on the subway platform. I didn’t find anyone. It was the first time I ever saw it empty.

According to the MTA app, a train should have brought me to the church by 3:45, but it was now 18 minutes late.

After a few minutes, I saw a man slowly walk down the stairs to the platform. NYC is hard on people whose joints hurt. He got to the bottom and then sat down on the steps. That is a good way to get run over by people running to catch their train, but not at 3:30 AM.

After a few minutes, I walked past him to recheck the expected arrival time. As I did, I saw that he moved slowly because he was wearing a man’s white sneaker on his right foot and a woman’s low-heeled pump on his left. I suspect neither fit him well, but they matched the rest of his wardrobe.

I returned to checking my email but felt bad for the guy. Finally, I pulled a bill out of my wallet and handed it to him. He looked at me in surprise but didn’t take it. I thought at first he had no hands, but he had pulled his arms out of his sleeves to wrap them around his shivering body. He had to struggle to get a hand out to take my handout.

The amount I gave him might buy breakfast from one of the vendors who set up on the sidewalk outside the station. I don’t know. Inflation hits the poor even harder than people like me.

But it bought me an easier conscience. I’ve kept that price down.

I got on the train and started reading a story about how right-wing podcasters and politicians are attacking Catholic Charities for helping “illegals,” even though the director of one agency that has received threats against their staff says that everyone they help has papers. He agreed that there is a lot wrong with our immigration system. All the church is trying to do is pick up the pieces.

One center received about 75 threatening or obscene phone calls after Fox News targeted it. When the director said they were only trying to carry out Jesus’ command to welcome strangers, he was told “that the gospel was wrong.”

As I finished reading this, my watch told me that my 4:00 AM time to keep watch in the chapel had started, but my train was still crawling under the East River.

I looked at the other people in my car. There may have been twenty. I had no idea whether any of them were “legal.” What I did know is that my city can’t run without them. Four years ago, we were hailing the people who clean floors, deliver food to groceries, and empty bedpans in nursing homes as “essential workers.” They were “heroes.” Now, they were just people who would be late for work.

It was 4:00 AM. I said I would keep watch, so I started praying for the people around me, who were so tired that they slept sitting up.

I finally got to the church at 4:15. It is an architectural jewel on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The 12,500-pipe organ is the largest in New York City, and the preaching is world-class.

I call it “Jacquie’s church.” When we retired, she got to pick. It is an Episcopal church whose rector calls it “the poorest rich church in Manhattan.”

Jacquie and I go there because of the line of hungry men, women, and kids that stretches around the block every morning and every evening, waiting to be fed at the church’s hunger program. We also go because everyone is welcome at worship regardless of who they are, what they look like, what they wear, and who they love.

I took a seat in the chapel.

The clergy had left a plate of bread and pitcher of wine on the altar from the previous evening’s communion service — “Christ’s offering for us,” as the communion liturgy says.

Last night, I read what Thomas Merton wrote in his journal after contemplating these symbols. He saw them flowing through and dissolving life’s compartments—the walls we build between sacred and secular, clean and unclean, holy and profane, Republican and Democrat, rich and poor. All things come together here.

After spending (almost) an hour “watching” with Jesus, my train ride home was faster. My neighborhood was beginning to wake up — or had not yet gone to bed. One of the things I learned when I started going to my gym before dawn is that the “ladies of the evening” work into the morning. I’ve quit pretending that I don’t see them. One young woman I often pass wished me a good morning and I told her to stay safe. Another tugged my sleeve and used what may be the only English word she knows to tell me what she had to offer. I wished her well, too.

It’s a tough world out there, and the nights are long.

I am grateful that Jacquie’s church has taught me this prayer:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary; bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

Blessed Are The Anguished

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— Demonstration supporting Sammy’s Law, March 22, 2024. Photo: Roger Talbott

This is the week when Christians recall the passion and death of Jesus. On Thursday, we have a service to remember his last supper. On Friday, we often have long services in the afternoon that recall the seven things he said on the cross or the 12 events that happened on the way to the cross.

All these are in preparation for the joyous celebration of Christ’s resurrection on Easter Day. 

Some churches also have a service of Tenebrae — a word that means “darkness.” The service consists of lamentations from the Psalms and the prophets. No one preaches. If there is music, it is also the music of lament and grief — think, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.” Periodically, a candle at the front of the church is extinguished, and the church grows so dark it is hard to see anything but the candles.

In the end, only one large candle remains lit and it is removed from the sanctuary. The congregation sits in silence. Then there is a loud noise. Last night, someone beat on an unseen kettle drum. The large candle is returned to the front of the church, a symbol of St. John’s words, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.” 

When I used to lead Tenebrae services in the suburban church I pastored when our sons were growing up, our son Matt helped me by making the loud noise at the end of the service. He created a loud, hollow noise that sounded like a door slamming shut on your tomb. 

As an adult, Matt sometimes attended a Tenebrae service even if he didn’t attend church on Easter morning. He said, “It is the world’s best horror show.” 

As I recited lamentations in my church’s Tenebrae service this year, I remembered how all of us who loved Matt felt when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and watched over the next ten terrible weeks as he slowly wasted away in front of us, even as the light of his love for life and his family fought back against the darkness. 

The feeling we had, like the feeling the followers of Jesus must have had in the last few hours of his life, was anguish. 

It is the same feeling I have had for the last six months about Israel and Gaza. 

I have Jewish family and friends for whom Israel’s national security represents a kind of psychological safety net in a world that periodically decides to blame Jews for everything. The brutal attack on October 7-8 poked a hole in that safety net. Many of them see the net being further degraded as Israel’s short-term military objectives risk the long-term safety of all the world’s Jews. 

As what might have been a just war has become just war, my friends and friends of friends who are Muslim, Arabic Christians, and people whose skin doesn’t match the paint samples Americans arbitrarily call “White” see our country’s support of Israel (now waning) as a clear indication that some lives matter more than others. 

The great temptation is to feel nothing.  After all, I can’t do anything about it. It is the way of the world. As one of my pastors said last Sunday, most of the people involved in Jesus’ crucifixion treated it the way we Americans treat mass shootings. It was just another day. 

His Sunday sermon, the Tenebrae service last night, Holy Thursday, and Good Friday remind me if I am to remain whole and human in this cruel world, I am called to feel anguish. 

I Googled “anguish” and found this:

“Anguish is often referred to as emotional distress or pain, and it can encompass several different emotions, such as trauma, grief, sorrow, fear, and anxiety. It’s a reasonable, typical, and sometimes even a rational response to a horrible situation.” 

Betterhealth.com

It isn’t easy to choose to feel distress and pain. No one can do it all the time, as the exhausted caregivers of dying loved ones know all too well.  Yet we also know that shutting those feelings out entirely makes us less than human. 

We need rituals and seasons that bring us back to our anguish.

 In the last few years, I’ve been fascinated by how people who never go to church, especially young people, show up for Ash Wednesday. Having ashes applied to your forehead while hearing “Remember you are dust” is as grim a ritual as there is in Christianity’s toolbox.  Yet, if a clergy person is willing to stand in a public place and perform that ritual, people will line up for it, showing that it reaches something that happy, clappy weekly “celebrations” do not. It helps us get in touch with the anguish of life itself. I suspect that if there were some way to take Tenebrae out into the streets, people would line up for that, too. 

I experience the same “vibe” when I attend Yom Kippur services at Malkhut, the Jewish spiritual community my daughter-in-law, Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg,  has formed here in Western Queens, and hear my son, Jim, chant in Hebrew alphabetical order the names of the sins we all commit. (You can taste that vibe by listening to Leonard Cohen sing “Who by Fire.”) I suspect that my Muslim friends who are observing Ramadan are getting in touch with the same feelings. 

 I have recently seen the importance of secular rituals of lamentation, too. I have attended demonstrations led by Jews and Muslims demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. I recently marched with neighbors who are demanding a radical change in New York State law — to give New York City the right to set its own speed limits — a week after another child had been run over in Queens. All of them are acts of communal anguish and lament.

As the Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann has repeatedly pointed out, lamentation is prophetic. It expresses humanity’s resistance to the Powers that Be, who insist cruelty and death are necessary. Living in this world without anguish means caving to the Powers that are trying to squeeze us into their image.  

Jesus once said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” We find comfort because we are not alone; we are part of the human race made in the image of God, who often weeps over us.  

This is part of a larger project on the Beatitudes. I would appreciate any comments you would like to share.

The April Fool Beatitude: A Good Friday Meditation

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The optical illusion “The Young Girl—Old Woman” 

I suspect that this is not the first time you have seen this picture. What do you see?

  • Do you see a beautiful young woman? April Fool! It’s really an old lady.
  • Do you see an old lady? April Fool! It’s really a beautiful young woman.

What I see depends on the day. I’ve seen an old lady quite often. But today, for the life of me, I can only see the young woman.

Did you know that there is a Bible verse that works like this? It is not just any Bible verse. It is the last and longest of the nine Beatitudes:

“Blessed are you, when men revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For so persecuted they the prophets who were before you.”

Matthew 5:11-12 KJV

I know, the language is a bit archaic. My 4th grade Sunday School teacher made us commit the Beatitudes to memory. Back in those days, everything was in the King James Version.

I got a glow-in-the-dark cross as a reward for getting them right!

About 10 years ago, I decided to recommit the Beatitudes to memory. I have repeated them to myself almost every day since. For some reason, I still do it in the King James Version.

It’s a little hard to see the joke in something so serious. After all, this verse calls up images of Christians being thrown to the lions in the arena, saints being burned at the stake, Coptic Christians being beheaded by ISIS — to say nothing of Jesus on the cross.

This Beatitude gives American Christians the courage to say “Merry CHRISTMAS” to the check-out lady at Walmart in response to her “Happy Holidays.” It prompts them to repost a Christian meme on Facebook that says, “Most people won’t share this, but remember that Jesus said:

For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

Luke 9:26 ESV

If the check-out lady rolls her eyes or you lose Facebook “friends” for Jesus’ sake, you can console yourself with the promise that you will have a great reward in heaven.

But, depending on the day, when I repeat these words to myself: “Blessed are you, when men revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.”

Depending on the day, I might lose the comma.

Do you miss the comma?

Jesus spoke these words in Aramaic. Matthew wrote them down in Greek. There are no commas in Greek or Aramaic. You just kind of have to know how to say it.

Yes, Matthew probably understood Jesus the way King James’ translators did when they inserted that comma into their English translation. Men persecute you, for Jesus sake.

If you are a Christian, it’s hard to see it any other way.

But, Christians have had a way of making this verse work like that picture above. Christians have a long history of persecuting people — for Jesus’ sake.

Good Friday is an example.

Our son, Jim, is married to a Rabbi. Jim and their two children are also Jewish. That makes me aware that for centuries, and in some places even today, Good Friday was one of the most dangerous times to be Jewish. Christians would hear the story of Jesus’ arrest, torture and crucifixion. In John’s gospel, especially, the “Jews” are named over and over again as the perpetrators. *

These Christians would often emerge from their churches ready to do to the “Christ-killers” what their ancestors did to Jesus. Beating up Jews, burning their homes, and even killing Jewish children was as much a part of Easter as coloring eggs.

Of course, these Christians persecuted them for Jesus’ sake.

Today, I run into Christians who believe it is their duty revile and persecute and say all manner of evil against Muslims, homosexuals, and transexual people falsely for Jesus sake. As a recent Tweet said, “More U.S. Congressmen have been convicted of sexual assault in a public restroom than transexuals.” But, good Christians insist that you show your birth certificate before you enter the Ladies room.

So, who is the “you” that Jesus is blessing here? The April Fool Beatitude is always about “you,” not me.

It undermines the self-righteousness that underlies all our blaming, shaming, and maiming of people who don’t look like us, believe like us, pray like us, or love like us.

I just realized that I just reviled, persecuted, and said all manner of evil against my fellow Christians falsely (in the sense of overstating my case to make my point). Of course, I did it for Jesus sake.

That’s why I keep repeating the Beatitudes every day. Just when I get to be such a good person that I can persecute bad people. Jesus says, “April Fool!” and blesses those I persecute. He reminds me just how poor in spirit I really am. I have to start again.

* This is a bit of a puzzle, because John, Jesus, all the disciples and followers of Jesus were Jews, too. Also, most of them were also Galileans. That is, they came from “Upstate” or whatever people in your nearest metropolitan area call the nearest rural area. The Galileans were the rubes, the apple-knockers, the rednecks. You could pick them out of a crowd. One of the most intriguing theories is that the Galileans called people from Jerusalem and its surrounding area, Judea, “Jews.” Jews from Ju-dea, get it? They were the slickers, the snooty city people who always thought they were better.