Welcome. A slightly different blog this week, and one that seeks to take us close to the very heart and centre of our faith.
Good Friday – Learning from Different Cultures.
With Holy Week and Easter coming up, this is a low-key reflection on how involvement with cultural diversity might shape and deepen our understanding and celebration of Good Friday. (My Grove Booklet ‘Worship in a Multi-Ethnic Society’ looks at some of the broader issues of worship in multi-ethnic churches).
Even in the most integrated of multi-ethnic churches different ethnic patterns are observable. Festivals give clear indications. Marking the New Year is very much stronger amongst ethnic minorities than amongst English people, for reasons I have never been able to clearly discern. But of more significance are differences over how Good Friday is marked. I consider that (white) English Christians are in danger of seriously under-regarding the day and treating it as just another day off work. By contrast Christians from most minority ethnic groups give the day far greater weight, which is for the good of their souls.
There are several areas where minority ethnic Christian observation of Good Friday is health and faith giving for the whole church.
1. Physicality.
As a broad generalisation, the body is more significant in most minority ethnic cultures than it is with white British people. The role of dancing, and the physical confidence associated with it, is an obvious example. Also relevant is that generally physical labour, often under harsh duress, has been a more widespread experience. The Crucifixion was obviously very physical, embodied. ‘He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree’ (1 Peter 2:24). It is to our loss that the + looks so like a neat, abstract mathematical symbol – an item in an equation were the outcome is that our sins are forgiven, but which completely fails to engage our imaginations and our hearts with the brutality and pain, the humiliation and degradation that Jesus really did experience. Mel Gibson’s 2004 film ‘The Passion of the Christ’ may have exaggerated and played too heavily on the brutality meted out to Jesus, but if the gospel writers were more subdued that may possibly be that they knew their readers were so aware of the extreme cruelty of crucifixion that they could leave physical detail unsaid. But the outcome is that I think the crosses in our churches short-change us in terms of recognising the physical suffering of Jesus. Surely church crosses ought to carry some sense that it was in fact a tree upon which a person suffered and died; for example by making it rougher and more irregular not smooth and geometrical.
Easier to deploy, and more commonly used, in churches today are other implements of Jesus’ suffering, such as the nails or crown of thorns, for example by getting church members to carry a 3” nail during Holy Week. By whatever means, helping church members to connect more directly with the crucifixion as a visceral and physical event, and not just a theoretical stage in the ‘plan of salvation’ is important, both for Good Friday resonating with cultures (including white ones) where the body is recognised as important, and correcting the reduced awareness of what crucifixion means in cultures that lean towards the abstract and theoretical.
2. Suffering.
‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord’ is a much sung spiritual for good reason. It invites us into identifying with the physical suffering of Jesus. Increasingly for people in the west physical suffering is an unfamiliar experience, at least until old age. We live in generally safe environments, which is why the terrible and sudden eruption of violence, injury and death into ‘European’ Ukraine has shocked us so powerfully. Just a few days before his Crucifixion Jesus prophesied the coming destruction of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41-45) in terms chillingly similar to the brutal destruction of Mariupol.
We have medication to avoid or reduce physical pain. By contrast the spirituality which has, in extremis, come out of slavery, or at least serious poverty naturally identifies with the physical pain of Jesus on the cross, not simply as a somewhat abstract agent of salvation, but as a brother who knows even more intensely and awfully than we do the agonising reality of physical pain.
It can be morbid to over-identify with the physical pain of Jesus, but to avoid emotional encounter with it reduces both our sense of awe at the sacrifice Jesus made for us, and makes us less able to empathetically place ourselves alongside with those who suffer today. The disruption of the pandemic has given much greater profile to lament as an integral element of Christian spirituality. Good Friday provides an opportunity not to short circuit the Christian faith by going too easily to the joy and power of the resurrection, but rather encourages us to spend time (ideally the Three Hours) being present with the suffering of Jesus, recognising, and perhaps more clearly identifying, the place of suffering in our lives and growth, and enabling love to flow from our hearts to those we know who are most suffering today. The well-used words of Lamentations 1:12 ‘Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look around and see. Is there any suffering like my suffering’ is an invitation not to walk by on the other side but to use our time and imaginations on Good Friday to inhabit both the suffering of Jesus, and a world of deep suffering today.
3. Expressiveness.
Any listing of the distinctive traits that separate white, western culture from that of most other cultures in the world, and also those in our midst in Britain, would include ‘expressiveness’ as a major characteristic. How people grieve at funerals gives a fairly clear indication of different patterns of behaviour, as does the contrasting comparison with how people celebrate. The crucifixion was both highly charged emotionally (‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and your children’ Lk 23:28); and an event of cosmic significance (‘Darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, for the sun stopped shining’ Lk 23:44). Inevitably many cultures will mark it in emotionally powerful and expressive ways.
The Cuban-American theologian Justo L Gonzalez has written: ‘The gory Hispanic Christ that so offends North Atlantic sentiments must be truly smitten, truly one of ours. He must be divine, for otherwise his suffering has no power to redeem, and he must be human, for otherwise his suffering has nothing to do with ours’ (in Stephen B Bevans ‘Models of Contextual Theology’, 2002, p 116). ‘Goriness’ too was a characteristic of the road-side shrines (of the Crucifixion, or death of St Sebastian) that I observed in Sri Lanka. Both instances refer to a society used to suffering and physical violence (thus Tamil films) that can both strengthen emotional bonding with the suffering of Jesus; albeit also running the danger of allowing a faith that can become passively macabre, or even too readily shade into easily accepting violent behaviour.
But there are lower key ways which the church, especially in catholic traditions, has found of identifying expressively and emotionally with the suffering of Jesus, such as more sombre and barer furnishing in churches. Congregational adoption of the Caribbean tradition of wearing black can be a helpful way of all ethnic groups together expressing the awe and solemnity of the day.
Over to you.
I am sure there are plenty of wider examples of how diverse Christian cultures can help us push back against the marginalisation of Good Friday not only in our society but also our churches, especially Protestant ones. I would be really grateful if you can send them in to me.