by Robert O. Wyatt

I must confess. Through young adulthood, I loved that warm feeling I get in Lent when the church seems to darken, colors turn deep purple, and the music becomes muted, contemplative, penitent.

I loved to let feelings of remorse flow before God, calling to mind my minor sins while suppressing my less appealing offenses so that they would not disturb the solemn, righteous, satisfying mood. But as I learned to make a more forthright examination of my failings, Lent became more of a challenge, less of a comfort. Finally, I learned to try to see myself as God sees me, and try to love myself as the wonderful person God sees that I can be. Still, I must admit that I often see my faults more vividly than I experience God’s love. And now that I am a pastor, I know that some of God’s children tragically feel God’s judgment without any sense of divine forgiveness and affirmation.

I must also confess that— even these days—as Holy Week approaches, I look forward to Maundy Thursday. I experience the bittersweet fellowship of the Last Supper, as a group of flawed disciples gather around their soonto-be-crucified Savior, his betrayer in their midst. And of course, Easter Sunday is always magnificent, with joyful shouts of “Christ is risen” and the security of knowing that the grave is not the end and that all manner of thing will be well.

But Good Friday. Good Friday has always been a problem for me. Yes, I tried to feel what I imagined I was supposed to feel: excruciating pain in empathy with Jesus’ pain, excruciating guilt that Christ bore the stripes and nails that are justly mine, excruciating thankfulness that the Lord’s death has set me free. But it just didn’t work. Year after year, I would sit through Good Friday services unmoved.

When my wife, Terri, called me to check about scheduling her first routine colonoscopy, I glanced at my calendar and saw that the morning was free. What I did not notice was what was printed at the top of the page: Maundy Thursday. “Sure,” I told her, “I’ll keep the time clear.” And then I promptly marked off the morning. As Lent approached and I began planning in earnest, I noticed my mistake and asked if she could reschedule. She called the hospital and found out that the next available date was months away. “Okay,” I told her, “I’ll just take my laptop and work on my sermon in the waiting room.”

So I was there in the waiting room, tap tap tapping away, when the call came that Terri was waiting in recovery. I rushed—yes, rushed— to her side, not because I had any thought that something might be amiss, but because she is—well— the love of my life. I cherish every moment I spend with her. I delight in an e-mail or a phone call or even a sarcastic remark (ouch!). Terri is pretty and funny and oh so direct and honest. I know how to love God because I know how to love her.

I sat by her side as she came to; anesthesia always nauseates her, and this was no exception. Then one of the nurses told us that the doctor wanted a word with us. And when he entered the room, my worst fears were confirmed. The doctor blurted, “She has a tumor about the size of a golf ball. This is not good!” Only a biopsy could confirm a malignancy, he said; then he repeated, “This is not good!” Tumors that size are almost always cancerous. Our questions then became, so, if it is cancer, has it spread? What is the treatment? How likely is a cure? How brutal is the chemotherapy? And, most basic, blunt, and imponderable of all: Will she live?

The great in-between

How I passed the afternoon, I do not remember. My sermon was written, and I knew I couldn’t compose another. I had decided to tell the congregation that night of Terri’s condition. And then I slipped quietly into the mood of the liturgical day—that bittersweet, ambivalent feeling of living somewhere between the triumph of Christ’s glorious entrance on Palm Sunday and his death and betrayal. Easter was a long way off.

Later, my parishioners would describe me as serene. But this isn’t true. I was not serene. I was in suspension, in the great in-between, the in-between after the sunshine and before the storm. Good Friday still lay ahead.

Here is what I did: I prayed for Terri’s deliverance. I begged God to let the cup of cancer pass from her lips. I laid my hands upon her and anointed her with oil and beseeched our Lord Jesus Christ to drive far from her all impediments and sicknesses of body, mind, and spirit—to deliver her from all evil. And I hoped. I hoped that she would survive, that we could get through this. And I hoped that I could continue to live a worthwhile life if she died. And that was all. And that was enough.

Here is what I did not do: I did not wonder what kind of sins God was punishing her for by giving her cancer. I did not ask what sort of lesson God was teaching me by afflicting the one I love. I did not cry to the Lord, asking why Terri had been given to me only to be cruelly taken away. As someone once trained in on who dies in a tornado or who goes insane or who gets a divorce or who dies of cancer. A happy world full of just deserts and deserved punishments is not the world God created. And, furthermore, it is not the world that our Lord entered as our incarnate Savior.

And so, in this in-between state, this state between life and death, I presided at the washing of feet, the Maundy Thursday Eucharist, the stripping of the altar, and the darkening of the church on a cold April evening. Every word, every action took on a new meaning as we hung suspended between light and dark, consolation and desolation, good and evil, life and death.

I began mulling over Good Fridays past. I thought about my own theology of the cross, so influenced by my upbringing in the rural South among strict fundamentalists and teary-eyed evangelicals. I remembered my early puzzlement at the idea that because God is just and humanity has sinned, someone must be punished. Only someone truly human but as great as God could satisfy God’s sense of justice. That someone is Jesus, very God and very human. (The name for this, I later learned, is the satisfaction theory of atonement.)

And I remembered my revulsion at the notion that God demanded more than justice: God demanded punishment. It seems that God was thought to be very angry at Adam’s sin and our own, and God could only get over it if God set God’s wrath free on someone, and that someone was Jesus. And the more Jesus was beaten and gored and stretched on the cross, the better God felt. (That’s called the penal substation theory, I now know, and is akin to what was portrayed in Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ.)

And I remembered my puzzlement with another theory of atonement— that Jesus was given to the Devil as a ransom, because Satan owned humanity once we all fell into sin. And the Devil took Jesus as the ransom, but Jesus fooled the Devil and arose victorious on the third day (the ransom theory). Thereby we were liberated from slavery and death.

Theories were not what I needed. I do believe in the resurrection. I do believe in eternal life. But what I wanted was not eternal life in a pastel heaven where Terri and I will float along on a pink cloud; I wanted my wife alive and healthy and by my side. And I wanted it now.

Not that I was angry at God. I knew that bad things happen to good people, and that modern medicine was our main certifiable hope. But I also wanted the Lord to be my shield and defender and I wanted to be sheltered by God’s wings and held in the crook of God’s arm when death is near.

But then came grace, and I began to take comfort in the only doctrine of atonement that had ever appealed to my sense of justice and comforted me: The notion that, when Christ became incarnate, he not only became an example of selflessness (the moral theory of atonement), but God in God’s self has experienced the very worst suffering that any of us can undergo; that if God created a world where we experience pain and evil, God also had the guts to suffer and die as one of us; that we are never alone in our suffering; that God will never leave us; that the Lord will raise us up on the last day (here I owe a debt to theologian Robert Farrar Capon, particularly his 1971 book The Third Peacock). I knew that day, that moment, why Good Friday is good, for the cross of Christ stands as God’s eternal pledge never to abandon us. The cross of shame, that day, became for me the cross of victory.

After that moment, I felt pain and fear and hope. After that moment, I felt sorrow and joy. God is with us, with all humanity, no matter what the outcome. The God who went into the fire with the three young men condemned by the Babylonian king (Daniel 3) is the God who goes into the fire with us. Sometimes God rescues us; sometimes God does not. But God always enters the fire; God always ascends the cross.

One guarantee

By the Monday after Easter, we knew the tumor was cancerous; we gulped. By Friday, the tumor was out. And, during the next week, we learned that the cancer had spread to two lymph nodes. Not the best news, but not the worst. The doctors were optimistic. The clouds of Good Friday began to lift and Easter again began to dawn. Hope was alive, but also realism. For there are no guarantees against the screech of tires or a twister or a small blood clot headed toward the brain. There is but one guarantee. To paraphrase Robert Farrar Capon, the babe born in the manger among poverty, suffering, oppression, and slaughter is not the babe who guarantees to rescue us from all suffering. But when our car drifts uncontrollably into a snowbank during a killer blizzard, our gas tank drifting toward empty, he guarantees to get in the car and freeze to death with us.

The Rev. Robert O. Wyatt, an Episcopal priest, serves the people of God at St. Helena’s Church near Chicago.