Passiontide Storytelling: What To Do With “The Reproaches”?

Across the centuries on Good Friday, a haunting Gregorian chant called the faithful to come forward and venerate the “wood of the cross on which the salvation of the world was hung.”

“My people, what have I done to you? How have I wearied you? Answer me.
I brought you out of Egypt but you have prepared a cross for your Savior.” (1)

The “The Reproaches” continue in many Roman Catholic and high-church Lutheran and Anglican parishes, paralleled in the liturgies of the Orthodox churches. In poignant terms, God is pictured confronting his people about the death of Jesus—a theme that became central to medieval and even modern sermonizing.

Along with these verses, the fixed Good Friday prayers prayed for the conversion of the “perfidious Jews.”  Such prayers played a big part in inciting holy week violence against Jews, from early medieval times until the end of the 19th century in many places.

Post-Holocaust Changes

Since the Holocaust, an increasing number of Christians have awakened out of this anti-Judaic delusion, horrified at the “final solution” the piety of centuries helped foster when the Nazis transformed it into a chillingly thorough national agenda.  (2) Many liturgical churches now shy away from using them at all because of their unsavory historical associations.

Still others go so far as writing the High Priests out of the story entirely, shifting the blame entirely onto the Romans—a move which I find unconvincing and unnecessary, to say nothing of the fact that the Temple authorities take an integral role in the Scriptural drama (3). That some Jewish authorities felt that the nation was threatened by a man and a movement they perceived as bound to lead to insurrection is, quite simply, the way human authorities respond.

I rejoice that others seek to redeem and revision traditional readings, bringing out the implicit human universality in the Passion narratives, which is the way I always understood them. God’s “people” — Christians, Jews, all humanity can and does resist God’s purposes for the world. Offloading guilt onto scapegoats—humanity’s historical default category—insulates us from all the ways, great and small, that we, and humanity itself, “crucify God” and God’s creatures in our injustice, environmental degradation, and mistreatment of each other. Both the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels bear witness to this, to say nothing of daily news reports.

Liturgical Re-visioning

A fine example of liturgical re-visioning of The Reproaches can be found in the 2006 Evangelical Lutheran Worship Book, which imagines God addressing not just Jesus' persecutors, but the church:  “O my people, O my church, what have I done to you?” No longer is "my people" them but us—which is how I always understood it.  The new Lutheran Reproaches also include very specific repentance:

O my people, O my church, what more could I have done for you?
I grafted you into my people Israel, but you made them scapegoats for your own guilt, and you have prepared a cross for your Savior:
R. Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal One, have mercy on us.  (4)

Likewise, the liturgy prays that Jews, "called and elected as Your own may receive the fulfillment of the covenant's promise,” a studiously Anglican-style ambiguity, but far from the ancient “perfidious.” I take it personally to mean that I stand in solidarity with my Jewish brothers and sisters as we both await the age of Messianic fulfillment.

Holy Week tells us we are all “standin’ in the need of prayer.” Why not stand together, even if we live in distinctly different traditions, all of which deserve respect?
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1. For a complete text of the contemporary Roman Rite version see: https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/activities/view.cfm?id=1040

2.  See the account of Pope John Paul II's Liturgy of Repentance in Rabbi David Rosen’s address at Georgetown University: http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=7oJILSPwFfJSG&b=8451903&ct=12477353

3.  As in previous posts, I feel that conjectural reworking of the reported facts of the story will never have the weight in history of Scripture itself. Thus it remains crucial how we understand, preach, liturgize and teach texts themselves, which most of the Christian world believes are "revealed."

4.  See Evangelical Lutheran Worship, ELCA, 2006

Why Did Jesus Die? Part 6

Ordinary Brutality

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look and see if there be any sorrow like my sorrow....

Today is a day of quite ordinary brutality. A man is dragged through the streets of a city, then impaled on an instrument of torture until he’s dead. This sort of thing happens all the time, every day, somewhere in the world.

I used to weep for Jesus, but now I weep for the world, for all the victims of ordinary brutality. If we “look and see” we must look in two directions: to the Crucified one, and to the world’s brutalities, both overt and subtle, that find their deep meeting-place in him.

I dare hope that my tears are somehow part of Jesus’ own tears for the same world which he loved; that they are even connected with God’s own tears for the dark despoilation of soil and souls, of forest and family in this still glorious creation, full of so much good.

How can anyone who believes that the creation is fundamentally good not recognize the insidious power of evil that arises from, and through the human heart to misuse earth and its creatures in destructively self-aggrandizing ways? How can anyone who believes that human beings are made in the image of a great Goodness not realize that the seeds of that goodness—our capacities for love, generosity, mutuality, cleverness, creativity and assertiveness—can grow up in crooked ways that blur and twist that image into sinister patterns?

Good Friday unmasks the face of the world and of our human nature, such an organic part of creation—a face dark with ugliness and evil as well as radiant with goodness and beauty.

There is a deep strand of Christian piety that would, perhaps inadvertantly, isolate Jesus’ suffering as some magical transaction between God and Jesus that floats above the world, “saving” it in some hidden metaphysical sense. I do not deny any truth that may be in metaphysical musings, but for me the story of Christ’s suffering points out in all directions to the ordinary brutalities and injustices of the world. His Way of responding to this brutality is not his special possession, but an open path and power for those who would inhabit this world redemptively.

Our salvation comes not simply and solely from Christ dying on the cross, but from the way Christ died, which is of one piece with the way he lived. This is a way he “opens for us in his flesh” and draws us into participation in it through the Spirit. Thus the life-blood of his own Way, his very Spirit, begins to circulate through us for the healing not only of the world, but of our own divided souls.