Good Friday amid pandemic deaths

The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.” - T.S. Eliot If there is any year when Good Friday fit our national mood, it was this one. We are a country with so much fresh grief.

In 2020, the United States recorded its highest annual number of deaths ever — more than 3.3 million. The typical yearly toll from heart disease and cancer was augmented by COVID-19, which became the country’s third-leading killer. And passing away from this disease while under quarantine was often horrible — a lonely, painful, gasping death.

COVID-19 has both caused and revealed great unfairness. The young and irresponsible who often spread the virus have generally not paid its price. That has fallen mainly on the elderly and medically vulnerable. And even within these groups, the suffering has not been impartial. Ethnic and racial minorities have had roughly double the death rate of non-Hispanic Whites.

This should offend us and motivate the pursuit of a more just and healthy society. But in a larger sense, all death involves a troubling paradox. It is always unfair — yet, in the end, it is completely egalitarian. It is always unjust — snuffing out unknowable potential or irrecoverable experiences — but universal. And most of us manage to live in denial until the loss of a loved one or the fear of our own death becomes undeniable.

To the discomfort of some Christians, the Passion story shows Jesus at his most human. Through most of his life, he tried to escape from crowds to seek solitary communion with God. But the night of his arrest, he wanted the company of his friends, who promptly went to sleep. His anguish at the prospect of impending death was nearly overwhelming. The Gospel of Luke says,”His sweat became like drops of blood.” Uncharacteristically, he prayed that God would find some other way: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” The response? What theologian Jurgen Moltmann called “God’s terrible silence.”

Through most of his rigged trial, Jesus said nothing. He is whipped, mocked and convicted to appease an angry mob. He is nailed to a cross, largely abandoned by his followers, to suffer a horrible death — a lonely, painful, gasping death. In the process, he said a few final words. Some were practical — arranging for the care of his mother. Some were the protest of a suffering body against impending death: “I thirst.” As you might expect, given the content of his preaching, Jesus forgave his executioners.

But then, in the ninth hour, something harder to explain:

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” For those of us who find God especially present in Jesus, this prospect is jarring: God feeling abandoned by God. G.K. Chesterton finds in the text the suggestion that God “went not only through agony, but through doubt.” Christianity is the only religion, Chesterton went on to say, in which “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”

What does this mean? It means, at least, that anguish and questioning are not sins or weaknesses. They are the proper responses to the horrors of death. In the ninth hour, God gave permission for confusion. He dignified doubt. “At the point where men and women lose hope,” said Moltmann, “where they become powerless and can do nothing more, the lonely, assailed and forsaken Christ waits for them.”

It is easy to dismiss or ridicule the idea of God on a cross. But I would have a hard time following a philosophical abstraction. At some points in our lives, we may need a God who has entered our darkest places of uncertainty and depression. A God who can comprehend the fear of a death without significance. A God who knows the silence of God.

The last words of Christ ring a different note: “Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!’ “This was more than resignation; it was trust. In the end, he found, not an answer, but a person — someone capable of reversing the verdict of Good Friday. That is all we are promised, and it is more than enough.