This sermon comments on the poem Friday's Child by W.H. Auden.
WH Auden was born in 1907 in York, England. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. After having abandoned the faith at about the age of 13 and dabbling in what he would later called the “Christian heresies” of William Blake and Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, Auden immigrated to America and entered the Episcopal Church and lived out his days as an observant churchman.
Temporally, I think this poem speaks clearly to the experience of Good Friday; and it expresses, I think, a common and appropriate psychological response to Good Friday – common, that is, I think among Christians who approach Holy Week and Good Friday intentionally and prayerfully. The poem also gives theological expression to the contemporary cultural situation within which the Church, and the Church’s people, now find themselves called to bear witness to Jesus. Many, especially in Western Europe and America, see a kind of seismic shift in Western culture after World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. We live in a time when indeed the old “analogies are rot” – wherein the idols of human ways of believing, at place sense the enlightenment, have been violently shaken and perhaps overthrown entirely. Think of the sure confidence of secular culture, even in America, beginning really with the Puritan settlement of New England – the kind of certainty that found expression in Manifest Destiny, in the pervasive confidence of enlightened rationalism coming out of the Protestant Reformation, and in the political systems laid on the foundations of such people as Blackstone, Locke, and Montesquieu – or, nearer to us, as the founding fathers of the United States.
Friday’s Child is dedicated to the memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a contemporary of Auden’s. Bonhoeffer, as many of you probably know, was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who studied at Union (Theological) Seminary in New York. His denomination had actively opposed the Nazi rise to power, and Bonhoeffer returned to Germany out of a conviction that he was called to share the fate of his people. As the situation deteriorated Bonhoeffer became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. In 1943 he was arrested after money used to help Jews escape to Switzerland was traced to him. The contours of the plot were uncovered and after being shuffled through various prisons and concentration camps for a year and a half, Bonhoeffer was executed in 1945 at Flossenburg, three weeks before the liberation of Berlin. Bonhoeffer had written movingly about the cost of being a disciple of Jesus. He said
…cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.
Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must the asked for, the door at which a man must knock.
Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price, and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us.
Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.
And Bonhoeffer was richly filled with God’s costly grace. His martyrdom was at once obscene and beautiful in the way that only a martyrdom can be – like our Lord’s own suffering and death. At dawn on April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer was stripped naked in his cell and tortured and ridiculed by the guards. He was led naked into the prison yard where he was made to hanged by piano wire from a meat hook. His hanging lasted half an hour before he died.
In the words of Auden’s poem: this kind of cruelty, perpetrated on such an enormous scale in our time, is what has left all the analogies rot upon which our senses hitherto based belief…. When we are faced with such cruelty, such devastation, such suffering – we can have the experience of being cognitively stripped – of being denuded of all the ground-rules of our believing: all those things that we think God is – like justice and goodness and beauty and mercy and compassion and love – we can find all of that stripped away, mocked, obscenely inverted, or entirely evacuated from our experience, left to hang and to suffocate. And we don’t have to run up against something as spectacular as a genocide to have this experience of epistemic devastation. It can happen – indeed for us it usually happens – in the middle of something as cruelly mundane as cancer or a car crash or Alzheimer’s or a suicide in the family.
At such times – all that we’ve learned from Scripture or heard in church rings hollow. It has no foothold in the soul. And this can be the most painful thing for a Christian – just when we need the Lord’s consolation and mercy the most, to find that its disappeared, along with the Lord himself, withdrawn, having descended to the dead – and we have to endure having learned “all proofs or disproofs that we tender / of his existence are returned / unopened to the sender.”
Mother Therese had this experience. Some of you may have read the recent book of her letters and writings called “Come be my Light” – where we learn that her spiritual life was a rarely mitigated experience of this kind of epistemic divestment, for over fifty years. Fifty years of earnest and constant seeking after the Lord, and his constant withdrawal beyond the horizon of our apprehension. The Lover in the Song of Solomon says:
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.
The endurance of such things is precisely the via dolorosa, the way of suffering: its what it is to take up your cross daily and trudge with Jesus up to Golgotha, to choose with him moment by moment continually to plunge into the darkness of psychic desolation – the sword of grief piercing your own heart also, in the awful emptiness and silence. In the words in Auden’s poem: Meanwhile, a silence on the cross, / As dead as we shall ever be, / speaks of some total gain or loss, / and you and I are free / to guess from the insulted face / just what appearances he saves / by suffering in a public place / a death reserved for slaves”.
It is precisely this freedom to guess – or as Auden calls it at the beginning of the poem, this freedom “to choose” that’s so horrifying, and yet which is God’s own most awesome gift to us. Christians encounter it in a way that MATTERS in these times of desolation and suffering. Because THEN we’re really stripped, then the choice is a REAL choice: not based on rotten analogies, but based on what von Balthazar called “the obedience of a corpse.” The question every believer must ask himself is: Who do YOU say that I am. Sooner or later we will be asked this question at Golgotha, at the place of a skull. Who do you say that I am? This corpse hanging on a tree – who abandoned all his good and useful teaching, all his miracle working in Galilee – who set his eyes toward Jerusalem, and came here for THIS. Who do you say that I am?
I want to leave you with two thoughts. Today we are left in silence before the cross – we end this liturgy with the really horrifying fact that the Lord comes into his Kingdom on the cross: IESUS NAZARENUS REX IUDEORUM.
I would like to leave you at the foot of the cross. But I would like to point out that if you are at the foot of the cross, you are with Mary. If you’re at the foot of the cross, you’re standing there with Mary. Our task is to hold to Jesus in faith, with Mary, even here. Mary’s greatness lies in the fact that she held on in faith to Jesus. We keep finding her in the Gospels, next to Jesus, despite her constant discovery of the rotten analogies: depite having constantly to face the identity of her Son outpacing her ability to understand, hearing him say “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I would be in my father’s house?” and “Woman what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come,” and “Who are my mother and my brothers? Everyone who hears the word of God and keeps it is my sister and my brother and my mother…” And finally on the cross she holds on in faith even as the most intimate analogies are stripped away. Msgr. Romano Guardini said: “…at last [Jesus] severed the very bond of son-ship, appointing another, the man beside her under the cross, to take his place! On the highest, thinnest pinnacle of creation, Jesus stood alone, face to face with the justice of God. [And Mary’s greatness is in that] From the depths of her co-agony on Golgotha, Mary, with a final bound of faith, accepted this double separation – and once again stood beside him!”
Our vocation is – with Mary – to confess Jesus to be as Messiah even in the face of the cross’s awful silence, to hear in that silence the voice of God’s total self-disclosure, and to know Jesus to be our king and savior by knowing “his suffering in a public place / a death reserved for slaves.”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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