I have a confession: the two days of the year when I feel the most at home within Christianity are Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Triumphalistic Christianity troubles me. I don’t mean to say that the hope that Christianity provides is what troubles me. I mean to say that when Christianity is taken as a given, empirical metanarrative that explains away our human experiences, then it troubles me. I dislike apologetics for this reason. I’m not interested in “proving” the “truth” of Christianity. For this reason, sermons that say something like, “it’s Friday…but Sunday’s coming” bother me. Let Good Friday be Good Friday. Let Easter Sunday be Easter Sunday.
Good Friday and Holy Saturday resonate with me because my “belief” or my “faith” is more attuned to the mood of these days than it is to other days on the ecclesial calendar. Our religion has existed for two millennia. It can be argued that it’s brought more good than bad to the world, though I don’t know how to measure such a claim. What I do know is this: what Christians thought had happened and what they thought it meant for the near future has proven false, or at best unprovable. The Apostle Paul was in error when he wrote (in 1 Thessalonians 4:17), “we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.” Yes, I understand that there’s a hermeneutical move that can extract a deeper meaning from this text, something like, “This is the attitude that all Christians everywhere should have always, until Christ does return,” but I doubt that’s what Paul meant. Paul meant that he suspected he would see the parousia of Christ occur, and soon.
More than nineteen centuries have passed. There has been no “Second Coming”. When Christians proclaim the “Memorial Acclamation” that “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,” we must admit that we understand one of three acclamations: Christ has died. We understand death. We debate the meaning of resurrection but as the evolving Resurrection Narratives of the canonical Gospels show, and how later interpretations like that in the Gospel of Peter intensify, our story about Jesus’ resurrection is actual a plurality: stories. Those stories differ in their presentation and interpretation of the Resurrection. They add details about his appearance, about his being touched and heard by this or that person, about him eating, but also about him appearing out of no where and then disappearing again. He’s a ghost; he’s not a ghost. As we return to Paul again, when we read his exposition on the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, we see someone wrestling with how to understand what he is convinced that he has encountered: an embodied man who had died but who is embodied in a way that is different from our own embodiment.
I say all that to say this. Whatever assurance we Christians have must be understood as something felt, something hoped, but not something known. The Evangelists didn’t know what it meant for Christ to have risen. Paul didn’t either. We don’t, surely. If we understand death to a degree, and resurrection hardly at all, then what to make of the claim that there’s a future hope that will occur in cosmic space-time as Christ “returns”? I have no answers though I have heard many.
On Good Friday, we have something concrete. We have a man who has brought us hope. His life has impacted us generations later. He has inspired us and he has challenged us. We’ve never seen him. Some claim to encounter him, to hear him speak, but the subjectivity of such claims aren’t helpful for those of us who lack such ecstatic visions! On Holy Saturday, we have the divine silence that is characteristic of many of our lives—I suspect most but who am I to say?
This is why I want Good Friday to have its place and Holy Saturday too. Don’t push me toward Easter Sunday. When I have to proclaim, “He is risen,” I do it with doubts and I don’t know if I know what I’m saying. But I understand, “he has died”.
In his collection of essays, Heaven in Disorder, Slavoj Žižek includes one titled “Christ in the Time of a Pandemic” (pp. 128-131). In it, he claims about our shared life during the pandemic, “We live in some kind of hell, caught in a permanent tension and depression, the pandemic having destroyed the daily life we were used to. And here Christ enters—but how?” He rejects the “standard answer” that “especially in times of trouble…there is a higher almighty power that loves us and protects us” (p. 128). As all those who died during the pandemic testify, if they were loved, they weren’t protected. With this reality in mind, Žižek takes inspiration from Meister Eckhart, saying, if we have to choose heaven with God or hell with Christ, we should choose hell. And for Žižek this is a real choice, as I’ll explain momentarily.
For Žižek, the crucifixion is the moment when “God is abandoned by Himself” (p. 129). He quotes G.K. Chesterton, the Catholic philosopher and critic, who says that on this day, “God has forsaken God”. Žižek comments, “…in Christianity, God dies for himself—in his ‘Father, why have you abandoned me?’ Christ himself commits what is, for a Christian, the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith (p. 130).” But for Žižek, this makes Christ our model. He writes:
Christ’s death on the cross signifies that one should drop without restraint the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology—Christ’s death is the the death of this God, it refuses any “deeper meaning” that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes (p. 130).
In Jesus’ cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Žižek finds Christ present with us, though notably from a materialist perspective. “Christ is now present here more than ever, He is suffering here with us. When we curse our fate in despair, when he courageously accept that no higher force will help us, he is here with us (p. 131).”
For Žižek, this means that “we act with Christ only if we assume our responsibility for the pandemic and other catastrophes, and act together in global solidarity, aware that no higher power guarantees the happy outcome (p. 131).” He calls this “global solidarity” “Holy Spirit,” reinterpreting the Third Person of the Trinity to be “the community of believers bound by love”. In this, Žižek writes, “Christ returns as a link of love between his followers, not as a higher power uniting them (p. 131).”
This may be too depressing an interpretation of Christianity for most Christians. Admittedly, there are days when I can’t settle for a materialist reading like the one Žižek offers here. Sometimes I need the hope that even though I don’t understand what we Christians are saying about Jesus’ resurrection, reappearing, and other concepts like a future resurrection, I hope that these ideas maybe point to something. But today isn’t the day for that. On Sunday, I’ll force myself to hope. I’ll declare, “He is risen, indeed!” But not today. Today is Good Friday. Žižek is correct: today, we’re alone, except for each other.
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