Holy Day on Ice
by John Zmirak - April 20, 2011
Reprinted with permission.
It's always a testy issue, how to celebrate Good Friday. Those of us who have the day off wonder whether we're really luckier than those who have to work: At least those people have got their penance already, and can mark the day properly by stepping out at noon to say the rosary, perhaps in a nearby church. Some parishes have evening liturgies, where working stiffs who've put down their daily crosses can gather to mark Christ carrying His, then trickle back home to a sober evening, perhaps spent watching a film that fits the day, while feasting on bread and water – something like Quo Vadis or The Passion of Joan of Arc.
How are the rest of us meant to fill this bleak and seemingly endless day? Some of us do indeed receive Good Friday as a holiday – but this one turns the popular use of that word right on its head, and shoves us face to fist with its original meaning. A holy day, but the farthest thing from a holiday, at least in the sense of that Katharine Hepburn movie. Holy means something set apart, stark and appalling, like the burning bush that Moses feared to look on lest he would die; like the precinct of the Inner Temple where once a year the Jewish high priest would, on the Day of Atonement, whisper the Name of God. What rendered that old place sacred was the piling up of prayers and bloody sin offerings, and it's hard for us moderns to fathom what that must have meant – how ancients could feel reverence and awe in a place full of cattle entrails, smoking corpses, and running blood. But that's what the ancient Temple was, and perhaps remembering that can help us more rightly approach the Cross.
In his profound works of Christian anthropology, Catholic scholar Rene Girard notes that in ancient cultures men purged their guilt by choosing an innocent scapegoat from their midst, piling on it all their accumulated guilt and unresolved conflicts, then sacrificing it to wash their sins away. The scapegoat (sometimes inanimate or animal, but all too often human) would seem during the sacrifice the foulest, vilest object in creation, a sewer of sin, a magnet attracting all the evils from men's hearts. Then it would be destroyed, and peace in the community and the human heart would be restored. After that, something surprising happened: The city, which had just finished reviling its scapegoat, would begin to regard it with awe – stunned at its power to purge the people of evil, and grateful for their deliverance. Sometimes such cities would even revere what they had recently execrated – a story we see played out in the Oedipus trilogy, where that unwittingly incestuous and patricidal king, by the third play, has become a kind of prophet whom the city begs for protection. There are countless real, historical examples of this phenomenon that Girard finds in history and anthropology.
If we would look close to home, we can think of the loathing and terror most North American settlers over three centuries felt for American Indians. Once the Indians had been driven from most of their lands, white Americans began to revere them, to name our football teams and summer camps for them, and employ Indians as symbols of the fragile balance of nature. (Remember that Keep America Beautiful ad that featured a noble Indian crying over what we'd done to the continent? To this day, it gets me crying, too.)
Sites of horrific suffering often come to seem to us ennobled. At battlefields like Gettysburg or Ypres, we are overwhelmed by the thought of all the blood that soaked the soil, all the bones that lie unblessed and forever nameless. At least at such sites we can focus our flooded feelings on the courage of men who willingly fought. Other sites like Dresden or Hiroshima offer no such consolation; all they remind us of is the awful price civilians pay for the criminal deeds of their leaders. Still other mass graves leave us starkly speechless, almost incapable of thought: That is the reaction I have heard, again and again, from those who have visited Nazi death camps. When Catholic nuns tried to offer some consolation of prayer by building a convent alongside Auschwitz, Jews were outraged and petitioned Pope John Paul II to move the place. Having witnessed firsthand the deportations and the ghettos, the pope understood their anguish: It was too soon, too soon. Perhaps in 50 or 100 years it may be time for Christians and Jews to pray together at this site, where the butchers of a neo-pagan, pseudo-scientific cult tried to wipe out the cousins of Christ – where (as Walker Percy has written) they tried to erase God's fingerprints from history, the better to deify man. Not yet.
According to Girard, the fashion of Jesus' self-sacrifice for our sins – the fact that He died as a public scapegoat – serves a humane and providential purpose: to reveal how starkly evil it is for us to choose human scapegoats and project our sins on them. Indeed, throughout the Gospels, Jesus hammers insistently on the theme that the only sins that ought to keep us up at night are our own. The only culpability we are sure of is the one that weighs us down, the only sins we can certainly say were mortal are those we have committed. None of this means we should stop fighting injustice, defending the innocent, or condemning objective evil. But the only finger we should point is into the mirror.
It has always disturbed me that, in the recitation of the Passion narrative, we in the congregation are called on to cry: "Crucify him!" and "Give us Barabbas!" Every year, it eats at my gut, as I wish I could find someone else to blame. I think I am not alone. Historically, there have been anti-Semitic riots during Holy Week, as crowds of Christians who completely missed the point took vengeance on Jews for their own redemption. And much of the abuse Jews have suffered over the centuries has come from Christians who blamed the death of Christ on Jews' sins, instead of their own. How many of us, when we read the Gospel narrative, assure ourselves that we would have been standing with Mary and John at the foot of the cross? The alternative is unbearable: to admit that we might have fled like the disciples, lied like the first pope St. Peter, or joined the crowd of disappointed religious conservatives that mocked Our Lord with the words: "He saved others but he cannot save himself!"
Indeed, that is how things worked. As Our Lord learned in bitter prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, that was the choice He faced: Save others, or save Himself. In a world where the Fall had rendered all things save suffering scarce, where pure love is vanishingly rare, there could be no forgiveness without the shedding of blood. Man could make no real progress toward purity, so the Pure One would have to cast Himself at the feet of men, to be trampled like a grape. As we lift the golden chalice with trembling hands to drink, perhaps the purest prayer we can keep on our lips this Good Friday are the words each one of us sinners used two thousand years ago: "Crucify him! Give us Barabbas!"
John Zmirak is author, most recently, of the graphic novel The Grand Inquisitor and is Writer-in-Residence at Thomas More College in New Hampshire. He writes weekly for InsideCatholic.com.
