Holy Friday – ‘The Word Himself is no more’

Icon of the Crucifixion

It is difficult for me to come up with anything to say on this Holy Friday. Contemplating death – even my own, let alone that of the Son of God today – is a truly frightening and humbling thing. Just as theodicies are no good to those who suffer pain and heartbreak, in the end even philosophies are no good to those faced with death. And for a philosopher, that’s really hard to face with; even impossible. And so I go searching – in the poetry of Christian poets, in the hymnody of the Church. But silence seems to be the theme, and that is the directive of this day of Christ’s death and of the Holy Saturday which follows. הס מפניו כל־הארץ – ‘Let all the earth keep silence before Him.’. In the end, what could be more fitting than to dwell on the homilies of Holy Father Filaret of Moscow, on the need for silence before the face of this dread reality, this ontology which no human thought or word or project or life can escape? The following is from one of Saint Filaret’s homilies delivered on Great and Holy Friday.

What would you now, brethren, from the ministers of the word? The Word Himself is no more!

The Word, co-æternal with the FATHER and the SPIRIT, born for our salvation, the Author of every quick and powerful word, is silent, dead, buried and sealed up. The more plainly and convincingly ‘to show man the path of life’, this very Word came down from heaven and put on flesh; but men would not hearken unto the Word, they tare His flesh, and lo, ‘He is cut off out of the land of the living’. Who then shall now give unto us the word of life and salvation?

Let us hasten to confess the mystery of the Word which shall disarm His persecutors, and restore Him to souls ready to receive Him. The Word of GOD is not bound by death. As a word from the lips of man dies not entirely away at the moment its sound ceases, but rather gathers new strength, and passing through the senses, penetrates the minds and hearts of the hearers; so also the Hypostatical Word of GOD, the SON of GOD, in His saving incarnation, whilst dying in the flesh, ‘fills all things’ with His Spirit and might. Thus when CHRIST waxeth faint and becometh silent on the cross, then is it that heaven and earth raise their voice unto Him, and the dead preach the resurrection of the Crucified, and the very stones cry out. ‘And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.’

Christians, the incarnate Word keepeth silence only in order to speak unto us with greater power and effect; withdraws, that He may the more inwardly ‘dwell among us’; dies, that He may grant us His inheritance. Assembled by the Church to hold converse with the departed JESUS, listen ye unto the quick and powerful word of the dead; listen ye to the testament He has left unto you; ‘And I appoint unto you a kingdom, as My FATHER hath appointed unto Me.’ But lest any untimely dreams of the greatness of that inheritance should turn away our gaze from the Crucified JESUS pictured to us in these solemn days, let us, Christians, the more carefully observe that His immediate heirs found no other treasure after His death than the wood of the cross upon which He suffered and died, and it was this same cross which they offered as a pattern for imitation to all who desired to partake in the inheritance of His kingdom.

What does this mean? It means, that as ‘CHRIST ought to have suffered,’ in order ‘to enter into His glory,’ which He ‘hath with His FATHER,’ so also does it behove the Christian, ‘through much tribulation, to enter into the kingdom of GOD’ which CHRIST hath bequeathed unto him; it means that as the cross of CHRIST is the gate of the kingdom of GOD for all, so is the cross of every Christian the key of the kingdom to every son of the kingdom. This then is the epitome of the sublime preaching of the Cross, so incomprehensible to the mind, so easily accepted by faith, and so powerful through GOD. Let us offer it as a drop of myrrh upon the sepulchre of the quickening Word.

Saint Filaret does not spare us the full implications of what he is saying here, which is what makes his homily so powerful. The Word is gone from the face of the earth; all the earth is gone mute and dumb. The entire weight of the Cross upon the shoulders of the blameless Christ, though borne gladly, still results in His mortal end, the mortal end which He shares with us in our fallen nature. And we are silent. We have to be. Without the Word, we have nothing to say. We may know what is coming, the Holy Pascha that awaits us. But Filaret would not have us jump blithely from this present sadness to that comfort and consolation, without first looking firmly and fixedly into the abyss of ‘darkness, sorrow, terror, labour, sickness, death, misery, humiliation, the enmity of all nature, all powers of destruction’ before us, the one which Christ Himself faced. Saint Filaret would have us look to Christ even as He cried out ‘Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?’

We can’t help but flinch from this, and tremble with fear, if we fully understand the implications of what is said. We fear to go there; we fear to take up this cross; we do not have the strength. Christ does, though. As Laozi said in the Daodejing, chapter eight (Richard John Lynn’s translation):

The highest good is like water. The goodness of water lies in benefitting the myriad things without contention, while locating itself in places that common people scorn.

Note how the Word, water flowing from His side, does benefit the ‘myriad things’ (wanwu 萬物, a figure of speech denoting the whole of creation) while locating Himself in a place where He is scorned by all, and more than that, a place which is avoided by all if we can help it. We do not want to go there; and yet this is where Christ and the Church carry us – before His cross, where we keep silence.

Come, let us all sing the praises of Him who was crucified for us,
For Mary said when she beheld Him upon the tree:
Though You do endure the cross, You are my Son and my God!