THE CRY OF THE LEAVES
MARCH 21, 2008 – GOOD FRIDAY
THOMAS H. YORTY, WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
The opposite of resurrection is not crucifixion, it is “descended into hell” that phrase we say every time we say the Apostle’s Creed. It comes from the first letter of Peter in which the apostle says, “Christ was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit in which also he went and made proclamation to the spirits in prison.”
Luther took the idea literally to mean that Christ entered hell as a kind of General Patton in the fight against the forces of evil. But Calvin understood the phrase metaphorically, meaning the doubt and fear and questioning Jesus underwent on the cross. He was in hell, Calvin said if hell is separation from God in our hour of greatest need, facing our own death.1
I’d like to consider tonight not just the crucifixion, but its immediate implication. I suspect most of us, most Good Fridays, remember and honor the death of Christ but then, like those frightened disciples hole-up somewhere, figuratively speaking, until he shows up again on Easter.
Such is our response perhaps because we are resigned to the law of entropy that all things wind down and disintegrate, “death strews the leaves of sure obliteration on our paths,” says Wallace Stevens, “the many paths where triumph rang its brassy phrase.”2
But there’s more to this than obliteration. Just as the stone sinks to the bottom of the pond disappearing into the muck and mire, each of us descends or will descend into the loneliness, down into the darkness and utter absence of God.
“Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind,” Stevens says, “not the cry of divine attention/ Nor the smoke drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry./ It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves.”3
We are those leaves. For all of us rich and poor, wise and foolish, there comes a time when our cry, like the leaves is flat and empty and single with no hope for transcendence.
Emerson said, “the ruin that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye.” A ruin that underlies the trials and tribulations of this life. “The dominant ruin, the unapproachable.”4
What was Jesus doing in that dark, silent interim between his crucifixion today and his resurrection on Easter? Wherever he was, and we do not talk much about this obscure Christian belief, his descent into hell, into oblivion remarkably continues the work which began at his birth.
“It is here, in this bad, that we reach the last purity of the knowledge of good,” someone said. Death is the mother of beauty. Hence the name of this day—Good Friday.
Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, philosopher and mystic marveled at our capacity for good and evil. “Our greatness and our wretchedness are so evident that true religion…must account for these vast contradictions.”5
And so Good Friday is a day of accounting if you will. Not only for our own death and obliteration, for the path of our own remorse and regret. It is a day of taking into account the suffering of all the human family.
On Friday, on the cross, Jesus deals with all of us who have estranged ourselves from God. Those on the top and those on the bottom, the wise, the getting wiser and those without any wisdom at all.
We who turned away when God offered us the hand of grace. All of the great company who are like leaves hanging on branches swept by the cold wind; all whose cry is heard as a single emptiness; all who no longer dream of transcendence but confess the bitter secretions of life.
These are the ones who now become the objects of God’s special care. Jesus reaches out, reaches down, and offers again the hand of grace.
It is a theologian of our time who said that the good we discover, in this bad, this day of crucifixion and death, is that what Jesus descended into is “solidarity with those who have lost their way from God.”6
The good news on this dark day is that no matter what, we cannot remove ourselves from the loving reach of God. Such is the geography of God’s love that we cannot find anywhere in earth or under the earth, as the Psalmist says, where God is not with us, or gone before us, to receive us at his side.
Even in hell—however it is defined, whatever its cosmic implications—God’s loving reach and open arms extend. Because Christ descended there, to hell, so is God there and so is God’s love.
What this means and what we have known in our heads if not our hearts is that there are no limits to where God will go in order to retrieve us, woo us, win us back to the right side of life. No limits to God’s finding us, saving us and bringing us home again.
Even at the bottom of the pond, the bottom named war, the bottom named depression, even at the bottom named failure, fear, shame, and regret we are never the first and only ones to arrive because he has been there ahead of us.
That Jesus would descend into hell, as the old creed says, is an affirmation that there is no place to which you and I can descend that he has not already descended and having already descended is there to meet us when we say God is silent, God is absent, God is nowhere to be found.
Pascal’s true religion accounts for the worst and the best in us. Today, the arc of God’s love swings farther in the direction of oblivion and obliteration than anyone thought. And two days from now it will swing again farther in the direction of life and wholeness than anyone thought.
So that within this one faith, this one relationship to God all of our disparate selves and experiences are united and made whole. The opposite of resurrection is descended into hell; the opposite of descended into hell is ascended into heaven. The entire landscape of our lives, of our souls, of our deepest yearning and most paralyzing fear has become the place of God’s dwelling.
Just when we thought ourselves alone with some disease or broken dream or incalculable dilemma knowing Christ was here too, lifts our isolation, fear and despair. Death is the mother of beauty within whose burning bosom we discern our Lord and Savior waiting, sleeplessly.7 Amen.