Good Friday: Whosoever Loves Joy

For a summary of Passus XXI, see Nineteenth Day of Lent.

It is on this day, perhaps most appropriately of all days, that the pattern of this devotional would seem to break down.  Today is the Friday we call good, in which we remember and share in Christ’s suffering and death upon the cross.  And yet Passus XXI of Piers Plowman tells the story of the resurrection and Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit and the establishment of the true community of God’s Church, which will give life to the world.  Can we contemplate the joy of a new creation on this day of sorrows?

There certainly is a way of thinking about Good Friday that would tell us not to look beyond the cross, but to fix our contemplation on the bloodied man who says “Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow” (Lamentations 1:12) and banish from from our minds the one who says “I died, and behold, I am alive forevermore” (Revelation 1:18).  And there is something to commend this:  it is only too tempting to fast forward the upsetting parts and skip straight to the “happy ending.”

Yet there can also develop a sort of perversity in our observance of Good Friday if we insist on contemplating the blood and the tears wholly on their own and not as part of the whole story of Jesus.  It can cause us to think that the pain and humiliation of Golgotha is the moment of truth for our salvation and everything else just commentary.  It can cause us to think that our faith is more “authentic” if, like the disciples, we are almost despairingly unaware of the Easter to come.  It can cause us to place all our weight on that first line of Psalm 22 which Jesus uttered from the cross—“My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me?”—and not on the praises of God’s deliverance which are threaded through that sacred poet’s lament and with which he closes his song.

But the truth is, there’s a reason we call this Friday “good,” and that reason is not some sense of frightening and incomprehensible paradox—that would make the adjective “good” perverse and meaningless.  Rather, this Friday is good because the crucifixion of Jesus is inseparable from his resurrection.  Indeed, Jesus always foretold the two events to his disciples together (see Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34).  This Friday is good because the cross is the way Jesus had to travel to the resurrection.  This Friday is good not because the cross and its suffering are good somehow on their own terms, but because the cross is the door of eternal life, the gate of paradise.

Langland has something of this in mind in Passus XXI when Conscience tells Will why the victorious Christ, “the Christians’ conqueror,” has appeared to him bloodied and bearing the cross:

“But the cause why he approaches thus, with the cross of his passion,

Is to teach us therewith, that when we are tempted,

To fight and defend ourselves with the cross from falling into sin

And to see by his sorrow that whosoever loves joy

To penance and to poverty must subject himself

And undergo willingly much woe in this world.”

The cross, Conscience reminds us, is something taken up by “whosoever loves joy.”  It is the penance and poverty and woe we must suffer in this world because we desire that joy of the One this world persecutes and rejects.  It is the pain that is endurable now because of the joy that awaits in resurrection.  It is not at all something that is undertaken because pain and sorrow are somehow “more true” that life and joy, nor is it undertaken because Christians and their God love suffering.  Rather, Christ took up the cross because he was the great lover of joy and the great bringer of life to a world that knows only the power of death and its pains and the finality of mourning.  He suffered in his body all the death and all the pains of this world and raised that body up again on the third day to partake of the everlasting life of the age to come.  And so it is that he made the woe of the world a prologue to heavenly bliss and opened through his bloody passion the gates of paradise.  For it was this world, this vale of tears, and not some other one, that he desired to bring into life.  And that is why we call this Friday good.

“Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy.  When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come.  But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world.  So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”  (John 16:20-22)