MI CRISTO VIVE!

 MI CRISTO VIVE!          Good Friday 2024

In the early morning nearly every day, I go running or walking around a parking lot. Every now and then, on the back row nearest the road, some vehicles are parked by men and women who work for Retro Environmental. Many of them are from Latin America. And one little Tacoma pick-em-up truck is sometimes there. The gentleman is from Honduras, and when he makes enough money here, he goes back to Honduras to build churches. In the back window of the truck in all-caps are the word, “MI CRISTO VIVE.” My Christ Lives! As I ran by this morning, I said to myself, “That is why Good Friday is good: because it was not the end of the story. In fact, it was only the beginning. MI CRISTO VIVE! 

Wednesday was the morning after the Key Bridge collapsed and eight men, also from Latin America, were plunged into the icy waters of the Patapsco River from a height of 185 feet. So far in the rescue and recovery effort, only two survived, and one of them is in critical care. I happen to know one of the men of Retro Environmental commutes from Dundalk every morning. I asked him if the bridge collapse had changed his commute. He said no, but that he lives only five minutes from the bridge, and that it woke him and his family in the middle of the night. He said it sounded as if a bomb had gone off. He was clearly shaken. And Thursday morning he told me that Wednesday night they took a service road down into the Port area and just sat on the shore, not far from the water, and looked at the wreckage. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “It just all collapsed at once.” 

It was raining when we spoke. It rained pretty much all day the morning after the Key Bridge collapsed. For the last year or so, as I run my laps around the parking lot, I suddenly find a line of five syllables come to mind, and I stop and write a haiku, a Japanese style of poem: three lines, five syllables, seven, and then five. I jotted down, “The sky is weeping/After tragedy destroys/Bridge and many lives.” I later revised it to say, “Our God is weeping/After tragedy destroys/Bridge and many lives.” 

How mysterious for this to happen in Holy Week. A few days earlier I was doing a walking meditation after my exercise. As I walked westward there were piles upon piles upon layers of dark clouds, recalling those dark hours for Christ on the Cross. I was listening to John Adams’s music and taped sounds, On The Transmigration of Souls, itself a meditation on the day of 9/11 and the aftermath. More than one person has said the disappearance of the Key Bridge bears an errie resemblance to the disappearance of the Twin Towers from the New York City skyline. 

As I walked into the darkness, I hear the words “missing” and “remember” intoned over and over again over the music and sounds of voices on the street that morning in New York City. And words from posters people posted near the St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway near Trintiy Episcopal Church: “She had the voice like an angel…and she shared it with everyone…in good times and in bad…” I used to do Stations of the Cross with children on Good Friday morning. They would draw a picture of Jesus before Pilate, or, Jesus carries his Cross. One little girl drew Jesus holding the cross in one hand as if the cross was only five or six inches high. I remember saying, “Jesus makes the cross look so small!” And that’s so true! That’s what Good Friday really is all about. The Roman Cross, a symbol of capital punishment. A symbol of the very idea of state-sanctioned execution. A desperate symbol of Power and Punishment for any and all who dare to challenge the authority of the Empire in one corner wearing the dark trunks. In the other corner, wearing the white trunks, Jesus, an itinerant teacher and ambassador for God’s love of all people no matter what. Jesus, who as much as tells Pilate, representative of the Empire’s utter brutality, “Go ahead. Give me your best shot. It will be nothing over against the power and love of God, my Father.” Jesus really does make the cross look so small. MI CRISTO VIVE! 

Turning back eastward on my walking meditation, the sky is lighting up with pinks, reds, purples and yellows of Easter sunrise. I’m thinking of my days at the New York Foundling Hospital under the supervision of Sister Anne Flood, Sisters of Charity. For my “job interview” to do field work there as a chaplain to group homes and in the main hospital, she introduces me to a young girl, fourteen and pregnant, and leaves the two of us to get to know one another. And after been tossed into the deep end of the pool Sister Anne takes me up to the top floor where there is a girl who has been born with just a brain stem, no brain, unable to communicate with us, but through her eyes we know she knows we are there with her as the Foundling keeps her safe and secure. Or, being asked to teach a group of young boys the Lord’s Prayer, which begins, “Our Father…” They look at me with so many questions because most of their fathers are absent, or incarcerated, and why would anyone pray in the name of someone we have never ever known? 

At first, I think, so many people, so many children, live their lives on the cross with Jesus every day. And I keep going back to be with these young people, and the girl on the top floor, and those in group homes because both parents are either missing, dangerous, or incarcerated, and I learn that no, that’s not it. Jesus came back to spend lifetimes with all of them. And with those missing since 9/11. And with those who just plunged into the Patapsco River on a cold night on the Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland. And with all ofus.Jesus, who makes the cross look so small, returns to be with all of us who mourn, all of those who are lost, and all of those who yearn for just one person, one someone, to share with them the Love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

As we listen to John’s story of the Crucifixion, we might notice that the actual crucifixion is mentioned only in passing. “There they crucified him…” That’s it. Only four words. Mark writes, “It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him.” Luke says, “When they came to the place of The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals…” And Matthew gives it barely a backwards glance, “And when they had crucified him…” That’s it. That’s all the four gospels give us. No hammers. No nails. For all we know they tied his hands and feet to the cross as was often done, and which induced more suffering,  slowly suffocating with no blood lost. Why, I wonder, walking back westward into the darkness, do we fixate on the actual act itself when not one of the four evangelists gives us even one single detail about the crucifixion itself? We make dramatic movies about nailing his hands and feet to the cross. We reproduce millions of crucifixes with nails prominently displayed. I think to myself, why do we slow down to get a better look at an accident on the highway? Why did great crowds of people go to a town center to watch a black man be publicly lynched? Why did crowds gather around a guillotine during the French revolution to see the supposed bad guys get their so-called ‘just desserts’? What is it about we humans that we need to watch someone suffer by hanging, or by firing squad, or by lethal injection? We know that none of these methods of execution bring any sort of true justice or closure. We know that Jesus is there with those being executed; that he is being executed over and over again; but that in the end Jesus lives, and is living still, and makes the cross look so small. So powerless. I pass the pick-em-up truck. I see the words, MI CRISTO VIVE! 

We sing about Christ bursting his three days prison. But heading back into the lightening sky I think: from Friday at 3:00 PM to Sunday morning at, what, 4:00 AM, or 5:00 AM, marks the shortest three days in history. Something closer to 42 hours than 72 hours. Evidently, Jesus could not wait to come back to be with us! Welcome happy morning age to age shall say! 

The Passion according to John has one moment that has always given me a strange combination of hope mixed with uncertainty. It’s when Jesus, looking down from the cross, sees his mother, with her sister, and Mary Magdalene, the three of them standing there. John tells us, “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” Where does this disciple some from? Is it one of the three women? Is it one of the Twelve? This “disciple whom he loved” is mentioned also at the Last Supper in John. But never identified. Some insist it is the evangelist John himself. But that has always seemed a bit sketchy. Someone has suggested it was the Samaritan woman at the well. Others suggest that we are the disciple Jesus loves. 

When the end is about to come, the text tells us, “Jesus says, ‘I am thirsty.’ And they give him some sour wine.” When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bows his head and hands over his spirit. His ruach! His breath. The very breath God first breathed into a handful of dust and water to give life to the first man. At that final moment, Jesus gives back that breath. The spirit God had put in him. The same ruach of God that hovers over the chaotic waters of creation is handed over. Returned. Given back for, as he says, for the life of the world. 

Perhaps he hands his spirit over to the disciple whom he loves. Perhaps that disciple whom Jesus loves is us. Each one of us. All of us together. He hands over his spirit, his breath, the Holy Breath of God, to each of us and all of us so we might still the chaotic waters of this life of ours. To still the waters stirred up by so many Roman crosses throughout all of Israel on that day like the three erected at The Place of the Skull. His was just one of many. He knew that. His last gift to all those whose lives are on the cross at one time or another. Or, all the time. Because once he hands over his spirit, we are made into his community of God’s steadfast love. 

MI CRISTO VIVE! I pass the pick-em-up truck one last time. As we contemplate the waters that once flowed beneath the Key Bridge, as we contemplate the chaotic waters of this world, as we see just how small Jesus makes the cross look, may we know that Jesus not only lives, but he wants to live in us. He wants us to know the steadfast love of God his Father who rescued him from the tomb, and means to rescue us all from the tombs we make for God’s Son, and the tombs we make for ourselves. And to know that Good Friday is good because it is not the end of the story, but only the beginning. And the sun is already rising on new day, a new life, a new world, if only we will receive with open hearts his one final gift to us all – the gift of His Spirit. The spirit of truth, the spirit of justice, the spirit of the Father’s Love for all that has been created, seen and unseen. Good Friday is not the end of the story. He invites us to become the rest of the story. MI CRISTO VIVE! Good Day!