Good Friday 2011

Good Friday 22 April 2011

The question that I keep wrestling with as I have been pondering on the Passion narrative we have just heard, is that question that someone asks Peter after Jesus has been arrested and is being detained for questioning at the High Priest’s house: “Didn’t I see you in the garden with him?” St John is alone of the four evangelists in using this word garden- today’s Passion opened with Jesus crossing the Kedron valley to go to the Mount of Olives, and immediately we read “There was a garden there, and he went into it with his disciples”. At the end of the Passion too, we are back in a garden- because John tells us “at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been buried”. What are we to make of this? What is this garden?

I am sure your minds have immediately turned to the first time in the whole Bible when we hear about a garden- the ancient account of the creation of the world that we have in Genesis chapter 2 where the best way the Jews of those distant centuries could think of to describe the way things ought to be, the easy, harmonious relationship humanity ought to have with God, was to call it a garden. A place of beauty, order, calm. We read “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden….and there he put the man whom he had formed”, (Gen 2 viii). Of course, this happy innocent state of being at peace and at one with God did not last, for as we know the garden was the place of the yielding of Adam and Eve to the blandishments of the Devil, of the initial and far-reaching disobedience of mankind, which resulted in exile from the garden. From now on, our human destiny was going to be a far more complicated affair, our relationship with God hard to discern and maintain, our basic sinfulness forever getting in the way – “therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden….to till the ground from which he was taken”. (Gen 3 xxiii).

All this has been discussed by the Holy Father in his latest book- I quote “John’s use of the word garden is an unmistakeable reference to the story of Paradise and the Fall. That story, he tells us, is being resumed here” (J of N II p149). The place of Adam’s disobedience will now be the place of the new Adam’s obedience – “even to accepting death, death on a cross”. The place where Adam and Eve are tempted and decide just to do their own thing and hang the consequences will be the place where Our Lord was, as it tells us in Hebrews “tempted in every way that we are, though he is without sin” and where he prays to the Father “Not as I will, but as thou wilt….thy will be done” (Mt 26 xxxix, xlii). As Pope Benedict comments “It was in the garden that Jesus fully accepted the Father’s will, made it his own, and thus changed the course of history”. (ibid p150)

Of course in the garden of Eden everything depends on one thing: the Tree. What is this tree, and what is our attitude to it? Genesis speaks of “the tree of life….in the midst of the garden….the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2 ix). This tree is what everything revolves around in the drama of the Fall, everything depends on it, hangs on it- God says to Adam and Eve leave these things to God, accept that there are moral absolutes of good and evil, that it is not a question of “Does it feel good to me?” but “Is it good?”. Accept these limits to your freedom and all will be well. Do not interfere with the Tree! Do not start rearranging what is good and what is evil, leave well alone or we shall have chaos, a world where nothing is certain but everything, good and evil, just a matter of opinion. Well, we’ve got that!

And now in another garden there stands another Tree, a Tree on which everything depends, a Tree on which everything- everyone even- hangs in the tortured body of Our Lord Jesus himself. This Tree, the Cross, is the Tree of Life isn’t it, this is the place where good and evil are known, where good and evil meet for their ultimate combat. As we shall shortly be singing “This is the wood of the Cross, on which hung the Saviour of the world”. There is an Anglo-Saxon poem, I think from the 9th century, “The Dream of the Rood”, one of the glories of the pre-Reformation devotional literature of this country, in which the Tree, the Cross, speaks. Here is a bit of it: “Men shifted me on their shoulders and set me on a hill….I saw the Lord of Mankind hasten with such courage to climb upon me. I dared not bow or break there, against my Lord’s wish, when I saw the surface of the earth tremble….Then the young warrior, God Almighty, stripped himself, firm and unflinching. He climbed upon the cross, brave before many, to redeem mankind.” The poet shows us a Christ who is not coerced by soldiers, not forced onto the cross, but a Jesus who is serenely in control, “firm and unflinching” as he climbs onto the Tree as a warrior ready to do battle.

Dear friends, we are in that garden today, at this Solemn Liturgy we step, as at every Mass, outside of time and stand in eternity- this is the hour, this is the moment! We are in the garden, we are up against the reality of the garden, the reality of how we can be reconciled to God and live again in his friendship, that reality as we know is the Tree, the Cross! How we want to stay in this garden, to live our lives always in friendship with God, in the garden of his intimacy. And at the end of our earthly lives, when we too come to die, let us have our answer ready to that question put to Peter- “Didn’t I see you in the garden with him?” “Yes, I was there, I was there when they nailed him to the Tree”. Dear Jesus, help us! Help us to stay close to you in the garden, even if that means, as we know it does, that we have to stay close to the tree that is your Cross. Amen.