Unanswered Questions

Does Good Friday leave you with more questions than answers? Even yet, is there not some small hope each Holy Week that we will find a hint of an answer to our deepest questions when confronted with the mystery of the cross? Is there not something definitive about this day, of all days, that might offer us answers?

If we look to St. John’s Gospel itself, we are not reassured. Look at how many questions are unanswered in this Passion narrative. There are many, many questions, and as is so typical in John’s Gospel, few are answered directly. It seems like everyone is talking past one another.

In John’s account of the Passion, only two of the questions posed are answered directly. When Jesus is confronted by those coming to arrest him in the garden, he asks, “Whom are you looking for?” And the answer is clear: “Jesus of Nazareth.” The answer may seem direct, but don’t you have follow-up questions? Do those coming to arrest Jesus really know whom they are seeking? Other than some historical figure named Jesus of Nazareth, do they understand who he truly is?

The other question is really a series of three questions that are posed to Peter, in which he is asked about his relationship with Jesus. “You are not also one of this man's disciples, are you?” Peter’s answer is definitive: no, he is not one of Jesus’s disciples.

So, according to John’s rendering of Jesus’ Passion, two answers to two questions are clear: Jesus of Nazareth is being sought for arrest and trial, and one of his closest disciples denies him three times.

But the rest of this narrative leaves us with so many other unanswered questions, either stated or left unsaid. And I would guess that we all bring our own questions to the foot of the cross this day, longing for answers to them. Last evening, on Maundy Thursday, we entertained the possibility that perhaps we come to the liturgies of Holy Week each year expecting to be able to do something for God. Can we offer our heartiest repentance this year? Can we turn Peter’s clear denial of Jesus into our own definitive affirmation of him as our Lord? Can we at least put ourselves in some place of deep sorrow and hurt to watch for just a minute with our Lord, to share in some small part in his suffering?

But the questions keep coming. We can’t avoid them. How could Jesus have been denied by his closest followers? Why did the cross have to be the means of our salvation? Did God abandon Jesus on that cross, and if so, why?

And sometimes, the questions become much, much more personal. Isn’t today the day when we face head-on the mystery of suffering, especially that of our own lives and of our loved ones? How can we not bring to the foot of the cross today the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, of innocent lives lost, of homeless refugees, and of destroyed cities? How can we not bring to the foot of the cross today the unholy divisions in our own nation and the desperate cries of anguish in our own communities? Today, at the foot of the cross, how do we repent for and respond to centuries of horrifying and heinous acts of violence and murder against our Jewish brothers and sisters in this holiest of weeks and on this day in particular?

The questions go on and on. We cannot keep them out. If we hope that this day will be a day for answers, we are sorely disappointed. There is even a mute resignation on this day that avoids superlatives. But shouldn’t this be the day for superlatives? Is not this day, on which Jesus accomplished everything that needed to be accomplished for the salvation of the world, the day for a superlative? Is this not just a Good Friday but the most excellent Friday, the best Friday there ever was? Or is this the worst Friday because of the manner in which our salvation had to happen?

There is, it seems, not much we can say this day except nothing at all. Maybe we can only accept a half-hearted acknowledgment that this day is good and stop there. Superlatives fail. Words fail. And meanwhile, the questions keep coming.

When the answers do not arrive, and when our words are fragile, sometimes poetry is our friend. Poetry understands that sometimes to speak to a truth, we must speak around it, knowing that we can never express the ineffable. It is on this day, where words are inadequate, that we might savor the words of the Welsh priest and poet R.S. Thomas, who attempts to give voice to our confusion. We are like the unnamed person in one of his poems. There, in a lonely church, is a solitary man. “There is no other sound/In the darkness but the sound of a man/Breathing, testing his faith/On emptiness, nailing his questions/One by one to an untenanted cross.”[1]

Are we in that place today? Is there anything more we can do than sit in the darkness of a world being rent apart daily by sin? Can we do anything other than breathe into the silence, where sometimes no answers come? Can we do anything more than venerate a cross, seemingly tenanted by a corpus of our crucified Lord but truly left empty because he has risen and now reigns with God? Can we put up with nailing our questions, one by one, Good Friday after Good Friday, day after day, to a cross where we find no answer but the knowledge that on Easter Day, the tomb was empty?

Maybe this day is one in which we stop trying to answer all the world’s questions and even our own. Maybe this is the day to sit with the one answer that reigns above all and that towers above this ravaged earth, which is littered with our questions. And even when our fiercest questions clutter an untenanted cross, there is one question that we so often try to answer ourselves, as if we are the ones to answer it. But what if we posed this question to God himself? We have already heard this question today: Whom do you seek? And here we find the most definitive answer in the world.

Because the cross is untenanted, we know this answer is true. So, we direct to God the question that we usually try to answer ourselves. Whom do you seek, God? And God responds, you, my beloved child. On Good Friday, the one answer we can be certain of is that our crucified Lord, now risen and ascended, is constantly seeking us. On this good day, he is the Good Shepherd, the one who never stops looking for us, even when we get lost in our questions. He has left the cross untenanted so that we can nail our questions there, and his way of answering is to find us, in whatever desert land we have wandered to and in whatever hole we have dug ourselves into.

And although we will continue to breathe into the darkness and test our faith by nailing question after question to an untenanted cross, and although we may not hear the answers we want in return, we know this: the Good Shepherd has called us each by name. And if we ever doubt that we can hear his voice, we must recall the place where we can hear it most clearly: at the foot of the cross.

Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Good Friday
April 15, 2022

[1] R.S. Thomas, “In Church”