Address 5: Horror
by Sarah Coakley
Salisbury Cathedral, Good Friday, March 29, 2013
Preaching the Passion, 12 noon – 1.20 pm
The Preaching of the Passion
Blessed be our God for ever and ever. Amen.
‘Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever. Amen.
A reading from the gospel of Mark, ch. 15
‘There were … women looking on from afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene. and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome; who, when [Jesus] was in Galilee, followed him, and ministered to him; and also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem’ (Mark 15. 40-41)
‘And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour’ (Mark 15.33)
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There is a phenomenon in nursing training, I am told, called the discipline of ‘staying’. The doctors may come and go, fleeing if need be from what they cannot control or alleviate; but the nurses ‘stay’: they are taught this business of ‘staying’ to look on that which others cannot bear: the suppurating wound; the face horribly disfigured by burns; the gangrenous limb which awaits amputation; the agony of death itself, in one like Jesus ‘who is pierced’.
The synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, all agree that only the women stayed when Jesus was dying – standing at a distance, to be sure, possibly pushed away a bit by the centurions from a horror, a spectacle, that was as repulsive and gross as it was politically astute: for here was the pax Romana making it clear that its peace was always something that came at a price. This was the message of horror for the men, and seemingly it wasn’t quite intended for women’s eyes. Yet as for those women, it was unclear what senselessness, what excess of love and devotion, kept them clinging on to Jesus in his own last hour; still, they could safely be herded off to one side.
A horror is something that by definition defies categories of explanation, and in which meaning comes to an end: the horror of injustice, the horror of complete human powerlessness, the horror of the triumph of evil and cackhandedness. The first and pressing question on Good Friday, then, is whether we are willing and able to ‘stay’ with the horror of Jesus’s death - like the women followers of Jesus, like the nurses who train themselves not to look away – and accompany him through the darkness of his three final hours of suffering. We accompany him in horror because evading it evades the quest for meaning which we must go on asking for, even as ordinary meaning dies. We accompany him in horror too because we know that we are implicated in it: for horrors are not just strokes of evil fate from somewhere else than our own lost humanity, but the stuff of which we too are made and take part in, if only by silent and cowardly assent. Our staying acknowledges that painful fact, as well as expressing our love for the saviour.
And our staying also acknowledges what mystery means here: not mystification or mumbo-jumbo, but the willingness again to stay with the unfolding narrative and to keep coming at the horror’s implications, deeper and deeper each time. Mystery is always destined for revelation – but never in a hurry. The ‘why’ question is the ultimately unavoidable one: why has God allowed injustice to triumph over love in this horror? But the mystery is strung out along a narrative which cannot be answered extrinsically: first, the horror has to be faced, in ourselves, as well as in others. And it is the special gift of those willing to watch without hope of meaning to show us the way: not out of love of spectacle, but simply out of love: the embarrassing, excessive, love that Jesus educed from his female following.
That is the first, and only route, back into the deeper meaning, the ‘deeper magic’ of sacrifice and atonement. But first comes the staying, while we do not, and cannot, understand.
‘And there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour’.
Silence
Prayer: ‘Look with pity, O heavenly Father, through the sufferings of your Son, upon all people who live with horror, terror, disease and death as their constant companions. Have mercy upon us. Help us to eliminate our own cruelty and carelessness towards these our neighbours. Strengthen those whose particular vocation it is to stay with them and to relieve their sufferings. And grant that every one of us may be renewed in our consciousness of their need; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
