Dancing in the Dark - A Good Friday Meditation

April 6, 2007 by djackson.

It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness fell over the whole land until the ninth hour. - Luke 23.44

At a critical moment in Herman Melville’s great novel Moby Dick, crazed Captain Ahab smashes his sextant, a navigational instrument used to tell a vessel’s longitude and lattitude by gauging its relationship to the sun.  As his ivory pegleg dances the mechanism into the deck, Ahab chants his unholy anathema:

Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament.

The captain decides he will chart his course by reference to the horizon, the world at his own level.  That method immediately fails and his ship begins a wandering course in a watery world without landmarks.

In Christ we behold the sextant of our salvation, God’s perfect instrument for revealing the light of the Lord’s glory and charting the exact course of our return from sin to salvation.  On Calvary we see it smashed by maimed humanity, ground beneath our prosthetic souls into the wood of the cross.  He is the light that shines in our world, and Good Friday declares that we instead love the darkness.  Our sinful race decrees as one that we will set helm and rudder in accordance with the eye-level instruments of our own wisdom and passions.  But our schemes fail us, our calculations mislead, and we wander lost on the surface of primeval chaos.

Good Friday disorients.  As we reject our True North, direction loses all meaning.  As we murder eternity, we make time meaningless.  Writer Kathleen Norris notes that in Benedictine monasteries the bells which regularly segment the stages of each day fall silent on Good Friday.  “I notice more than ever,” she confesses, “how disorienting this is.  I’ve been here since September, and the bells had come to make sense of time for me, every quarter hour.”  Monastic tradition rightly reminds us that this is a day of unmaking, when we pay the price of seeking to be our own gods.

So what to do on Good Friday?  Simply this:  stay.  Resist the temptation to cheat the sorrow of Calvary by borrowing from Easter’s future.  Good Friday sales at the mall whisper that its all pretend; there’s really nothing to worry about.  Easter Sunday becomes a feast and a fashion show if we skip the fast and the sackcloth that underline our need for redemption.  Instead, let us wait it out and sit it out and sweat it out in the sunless, clockless, clueless darkness of this day we ironically call “Good.”  Let us realize the reality of our own unmaking in order to grasp the undeservedness of our recreation.  Let us sail the sunless seas of Genesis 1 and the landmarkless oceans of Noah’s ark until we learn to yearn for the return of the Sun of Righteousness, risen with healing in his wings.

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