READINGS

1. Good Friday

HOMILY

Last year I offered a meditation on sacrifice for Good Friday.

And now we've been living through the COVID emergency for a year and I wanted to meditate again for Good Friday, but on something slightly different.

A year in which all of us have been exposed to emergency, a sense of the fragility of things, of ourselves, failures of resilience, collapse, fear.

So much I think has gone on and for those of us who are introverted like myself obviously, it's been a time of trying to think through things, undergo all the feelings that usually we can get away without looking at, because we have enough social life to keep us buoyant.

So this year, rather than looking technically at sacrifice, like I did last year, I want to look at something which has become more important for me, something I've learned over the year meditating on Christ's death - what it means.

And that is on the importance of the place of shame.

In the epistles of the Hebrews, we have the wonderful verse, which we all know:

For the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross, he despised the shame and is seated at the right hand of God.

Actually, the phrase despised ... he held at nothing the shame, - and is seated at the right hand of God.

Because so many of our discussions of Christianity have dealt with atonement theory and bad theories of sacrifice, they've tended to look at how Jesus's death pardons sin.

And they tended to look at Jesus's death in a transactional sense as though Jesus was going to his cross to complete a transaction to seal a deal which would in some way get us to be forgiven.

In one sense, I've got nothing against the fact that Jesus went to his cross to die for our sins.

It is perfectly clear what St Paul and others show and say, but I think that something is missed by that when the going to his death for a transaction obscures what he was doing with relation to the place of shame.

Why do I say this?

Well, it's possible to forgive someone for their sins in a rather formal matter as though what Jesus came to his death was about:

well, you're a pretty awful lot, you have done all these awful things, but I'm going to pay the price for you.

I'm going to send someone to pay the price for you, and once the price is paid, you know - behave!

So Jesus comes, pays the price, and now we must behave.

This is not the activity of someone who really likes us.

We can talk about someone loving us in a kind of a very superior, control-freak way, but it's not someone, it's not the act of someone who really likes us.

What I've picked up this year is how important it was to consider Jesus going to his death not simply as a transactional activity, but as a giving of himself into a place activity out of fondness for us.

That was something I hadn't really understood before.

I've tried to understand how God liking us is very often forgotten - heart of God's loving us.

The notion of God liking us means actually enjoying what he's made, actually wanting to be alongside us, being curious about what we're going to get up to, being interested in where we're taking things, encouraging us.

In other words, liking is a very non-superior sort of loving.

And it seems to me that the whole purpose of God becoming human was to engage in a very non-superior form of loving.

It was to show equal-heartedness and to create equal-heartedness.

In other words, and this is something that I hadn't grasped before, there's a fondness for us, for this creation, which is us who are humans.

This fragile often screw-up who may have good intentions, but often gets muddled up in the weirdest and craziest things, doesn't understand things as self-destructive, - all of those things.

And yet Jesus coming into our midst is not as it were holding his nose saying: I don't really like you, but I'm going to sort this out.

It's: I'm fond of you.

And why what I've picked up this year is that fondness is what opens the place of shame, because Jesus, in going to his death, was being thoroughly shamed.

He was undergoing the curse of Deuteronomy, he was undergoing the being shamed by the Romans, being abandoned by his friends, blamed by the thieves on the cross.

In other words, he was going into the most toxic place that any of us can occupy.

It's a toxic place, which we humans create for other humans, in which we do our damnedest to avoid by putting other humans in it, and it runs us in terrifying ways.

Shame produces fight, flight or freeze in us.

Fight if we're strong enough to fight back at who's shaming us.

Flight if we aren't.

And freeze - if we're so weak that playing dead is the best thing to do, because the feeling of being shamed is to be cast out of being, to drop through a hole in the floor of the universe and disappear.

And yet, this is the space that Jesus is occupying.

And I think he's occupying it deliberately.

It's not merely that he had to taste death for us as the episode of the Hebrew saying, but he tasted shame for us.

He's occupying the place of shame, which means that it is occupied by God.

The Holy Spirit, which has been breached out upon us, includes the fullness of the God, who occupies the place of shame and makes it glorious.

Why is this so important? Because you need to be fond of someone not to want them to be ashamed.

There's a positive sense of shame, which is when we're vulnerable and when we're aware that we need to be approached delicately and we need to approach other people delicately.

It's only someone who's fond of you, who approaches you in your delicacy and vulnerability that doesn't try to provoke you into fight, flight or freeze, which is what comes with shame.

Doesn't try to define themselves over against yourselves to drive you into a hole.

There's a fondness for you that involves coming alongside you, holding your shame delicately, which means that we no longer be run by shame.

I've spent much of my life being run by shame.

We get flip tricked into running away from ourselves, into taking up bizarre reactive positions on things, because we're too ashamed to live with and deal with who we are.

And the bizarre thing is that someone who wanted to forgive our sins without holding our shame wouldn't really be doing the job.

Sins are things which we do deliberately, consciously.

It's when we realize that we're doing them, they come to our conscience that we can be forgiven.

But shame runs us so much more deeply than guilt.

Curiously it's only when we cease to be run by shame that we become capable of learning the responsibility that is to do with doing good or bad things, taking responsibility for what I've done, learning how not to do bad things, learning how to do good things.

While I'm run by shame, panic is the mode of being.

When panic is the mode of being, things you do good or bad, it's difficult to begin to take responsibility for them, difficult to be forgiven for them.

So this Good Friday what I wanted to think about is Jesus's slow, deliberate going to his cross as something motivated by and demonstrating and making three-dimensional an act of fondness.

He's saying:

I am going to occupy this terrible, terrible space, because I know how inclined you are to put each other in it.

I also know that, until that space is occupied, you'll never really believe that you're capable of becoming more than you are.

You will be dominated by panic and fear.

Even your sins won't be able to be real sins because of shame.

Your chances actually being able to stand and learn and become humans - that will be undermined by your constantly flipping each other out by shame.

So my gift to you this Good Friday is to enter the place of shame so that you may know and, by the Holy Spirit, you may receive the tender fondness, which respects your delicacy, which respects your vulnerability, that enables you to learn not to put other people into that place, to learn not to be run by that place yourselves.

Thus you can become viable and responsible and act in ways that are freedom, and give you worth, dignity, so that you are able to love.

In other words, the fondness that holds shame is an absolutely essential part of the forgiveness of sins.

What I wanted to do in today's Good Friday meditation is bring out how Christ dying for our sins is so much richer an act of being with us and for us than we usually imagine.