ON GOOD Friday, there are two ways to enter into the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. One is “natural”: to see the story as we see other stories — as spectators. In our mind’s eye, we watch every step along the way of sorrows, each puncturing spine in the crown of thorns exacting the price for Christ’s crown of glory. This way is hard.
The other way is less “natural”: to be not spectators but participants. It may feel presumptuous to imagine the Passion as if one is part of it, looking through the eyes of gospel characters. There are choices here: Peter, Judas, perhaps one of the Marys — even Pilate? Most spiritually strenuous is looking through Jesus’s eyes, trying to feel his anguish of body as if it were our own, the thudding of nails into flesh and bone, that breathing-out which had no following breath in.
If we take that less natural approach, we go beyond observation, to invite upon ourselves (perhaps “inflict upon ourselves”?) either the multiple failings of gospel characters, or the anguish of Christ himself: his humiliation, his hurt at being abandoned, his fear that even his heavenly Father had (in the theologically-questionable words of an otherwise powerful hymn) “turned his face away”.
In the early stages of faith, I struggled to make sense of what I learned about some theories of prayer — for example, that there is a hierarchy in prayer. At the bottom was intercession. Mere asking for stuff, however good or necessary, would not promote us to a higher spiritual realm, it seemed.
A higher stage was progression into meditation. This required an active use of spiritual imagination, enabling us to meet scripture in a new way: less informative, more inspiring. We would begin to get to know gospel characters as real people, because we imagined ourselves in them.
Beyond this was contemplation: a level of openness to God, which (if the manuals are to be believed, as I once believed them) is beyond most of us ordinary Christians with our families and secular commitments, our lives in the workaday world.
If we become spiritual participants in the Passion, not spectators, we still have to make a choice. When we meditate on the events of Good Friday, will we look through Jesus’s eyes? As well as feeling presumptuous, this risks blurring the boundaries between our personal sufferings and his salvific suffering. Or will we choose the apparently easier path, finding ourselves in some ordinary mortal? In that case, the challenges are different, but still daunting.
If we meditate by seeing through (say) Peter’s eyes, how can we live with our thrice-denial? If we choose Judas, we surely run the risk of falling, like him, into self-destructive despair. It seems that, whichever point of view we choose from which to see the Passion happen, it is going to cost us dear. It may even be dangerous.
I no longer believe in a hierarchy of prayer. Not simply because of personal failure, though it is true that I have never “progressed” beyond meditation into contemplation. Meditation is not my comfort zone, precisely, but it does allow me to take the experiences of the characters in the Passion with real seriousness. Their sufferings become real to me, like those which I endure in daily living. I am not yet ready for true contemplation.
That is why, when I wrote about Judas for Passion Sunday (Faith, 4 April), and set his betrayal of Jesus against Peter’s, I knew that I was leaving the picture incomplete. I did not — do not — believe that Judas’s kiss was somehow worse than Peter’s denial. One of them sinned, I suspect, out of a sense of having been betrayed himself. The other boasted of an ideal he could not live up to. I have done both. I have been both.
Meditation is not some “higher” path. Approaching the Passion through a gospel character, even Jesus himself, brings spiritual insights. But there is always a place for the more “natural” way — being us, as we are in our own day, seeing what he, so long ago, made possible for us. Back in a time when being unclothed meant humiliation rather than liberation, Jeremy Taylor made good use of the natural approach to the Passion when he observed, simply, that Jesus “became naked, that we might first be clothed with righteousness, and then with immortality”.
