Post 162--Good Friday

Today Christians all over the world for two millennia have been commemorating Good Friday. That is to say, the death of Jesus Christ by one of the most cruel executions the ancient Roman Empire ever devised, namely crucifixion. The story is told in the New Testament of the Bible at various places:  Matthew 27, Mark 15, Luke 23 and John 19.  If you’re not too familiar with the Bible, you will find the most understandable translation to be that called The Messenger.  I was almost going to say “the most pleasant translation,” but reading the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and the events leading up to it is anything but pleasant; it is heart wrenching, nothing pleasant about it.

In Post 161 I referred to Maudy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. Many churches attend special services that day, as my wife and I did in the evening at First Baptist Church in downtown Vancouver. The choir sang a few very beautiful hymns, but the last one really did me in. I broke down in tears, I was so emotionally overcome by the lyrics themselves as well as the melody and, not the least, the way it was sung. I played it on Utube again this morning and had the same experience. Even now, at this very moment, I have tears in my eyes. I am a singer and when I hear songs that I know, I sing along. But both last night and this morning, I was too overwhelmed to sing along. I could only listen and let waves of emotion run over me—emotions, I hasten to add, of joy, gladness and peace, but also of sadness and shame, because of the reason for all of this tragic drama, namely the sin that has distorted the entire world and every individual in it, including me.

Another word for sin is evil, both words that we, heirs of the Enlightenment of some centuries back and the subsequent rationalist philosophies it has spawned, including secularism and postmodernism, do not want to hear.  Well, evil is one word we may tolerate, but sin? No way. That’s nonsense, primitive. We will have no truck with it. Well, neither does God. But He does not deny its reality as most of us do. Instead, He provides a way out; He does not leave us stuck in or with it. The events from Christmas through Good Friday are the prelude to His way of overcoming it by diverting the punishment from us to Jesus. 

I know, for most of us it sounds like a bizarre story, something that no one immersed in our culture could possibly think up; it is simply too exotic for us. But, you know, much of our Western culture is exotic to most of the world. Every culture is exotic to another culture far away. But no matter what you do, it is always in the context of a specific culture that is exotic to almost every other culture. That’s just the way we are; we exist in various cultures, all of them exotic to others. So, if God was going to do something in the world of humans,  no matter what, He has to do it in terms of a specific culture. No way around it. That’s how we are created. He can’t do it in every culture. No one will understand.

So, for His own reason, he chose the culture that was started by Abraham and developed into Jewish culture of the ancient past in the Old Testament. Of course, it is exotic to us, for we live in another culture and have difficulty understanding that of the Bible. So, why do you reject it just because it is expressed in an exotic culture? Why would you insist that God did His special work with Jesus in our culture?  Isn’t that selfish?  Is that what you want to be? That ain’t very nice, you know, to put it mildly. 

So, we just have to bite the bullet and recognize that we live in an exotic culture that finds it difficult to understand events in another, but that does not make them untrue or false or a figment of someone’s imagination. Nor is it because the people in those days were primitive and ready to believe anything. There was an entire class of highly educated Jews who disbelieved the very notion of a resurrection. Same with some of the ancient Greek philosophers.  None of these people wanted to believe the story; it was too irrational for them. 

I herewith reproduce the lyrics of the song that so moves me. After that, I offer you the URLs of five different ways this song is sung. There are more and you can access them yourselves. Please read these lyrics carefully, slowly, meditatively. And then, when you’re done, as today’s newscasters tend to say, “Have a listen.” And respond with your heart. 

Go to Dark Gethsemane

Go to dark Gethsemane, you who feel the tempter’s power;

your Redeemer’s conflict see; watch with Him one bitter hour;

turn not from His griefs away; learn of Jesus Christ to pray.

Follow to the judgment hall; view the Lord of life arraigned.

O the wormwood and the gall! O the pangs His soul sustained!

Shun not suffering, shame, or loss; learn of Him to bear the cross.

Calvary’s mournful mountain climb; there, adoring at His feet,

mark that miracle of time, God’s own sacrifice complete:

“It is finished!” hear Him cry; learn of Jesus Christ to die.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD6tcMroY0A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jY_qrAjFyM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1jpg1Ioei4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o09BMI-whLA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCk4IK3ZRXc

Post 161--Vimy Pride Can Never Diminish the Pain

Today is Maundy Thursday, the day on which Christians begin the weekend that ends with Easter, the day we celebrate Christi's resurrection.  This being a blog devoted to the Christian faith, this post should really be about that tremendously important historical event.  However, it happens to be the day that I read Joe O'Connor's report about the Vimy Ridge memorial week, when Canada remembers, mourns and celebrates the supreme sacrifice thousands of Canadian soldiers made at Vimy Ridge in France. It was such an important event that it has been  credited with the birth of the Canadian nation. 

I don't get a chance/time to write a post every day or even regularly, but I will try to treat you to some meditation on the Good Friday--Easter axis before the weekend is over. However, as a Christian writer I cannot simply ignore such an important and sad event for and in our nation. Actually the Good Friday--Easter axis has this in common with the Vimy story: they both include a very sad part and very joyful one.  For Vimy, the sad part is the death of thousands of young Canadian men; the happy part is that it represents a young nation coming out of the closet of obscurity onto the world stage. We Canadians are proud of that.  So, death leading to a new life.

Similarly, the sad part of the Christian story is the death of Christ through crucifixion for the sinfulness of the human race, including yours and mine. The celebration is about the resurrection of Christ: Death does not have the final word; it is not the real end, except of just a phase. And that resurrection spelled the beginning of a new awakening emerging from Jerusalem into pretty well all the nations of the world.  Here, too, death leading to a new life. 

But for today, the Vimy story as Joe O'Connor tells it in the "National Post in the Vancouver Sun (April 10, 2017). I decided to leave the newspaper's reference to "related stories" down below in place for your further edification.

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Willie McGregor was sitting in a tent, sipping on bottled water and peeling an orange. It was going to be a long day, the 94-year-old Albertan said, as the hot April sun beat down on Vimy. The last time McGregor was in France was June 1944. He landed on the beaches of Normandy — as an army medic — and saw things that no person should ever see.

“There are times when I’ll think about the war every night,” McGregor says. “I was asked after I came back if I wanted to work in a hospital and I said, ‘No, I’ve seen enough blood.’

“I went into farming. I have had a good life.”

On Sunday, McGregor was here, at Vimy, positioned in the shade near the soaring Canadian Memorial. “It is an honour,” he said. The 25,000 other Canadians who came, many wearing red and white, would agree. A 21-gun salute was fired, replica biplanes flew past, bagpipes played, a minute of silence was observed. Prime ministers, presidents and future kings gave speeches. Justin Trudeau elicited roars from the crowd, speaking of “the burden they bore, the country they made;” the Prince of Wales intoned, “this was Canada at its best;” while François Hollande said the “message of Vimy was to stand united.”

Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images

But Vimy, at its core, is for the Canadian people: a memorial to 3,598 farmers, city boys and fishermen, killed taking a ridge that no other nation could take. The land is a gift from France, paid for in Canadian blood. Walter Allward’s soaring monument exudes an aura of permanence.

In northern France and nearby Belgium, the war — even 100 years after Vimy — is not viewed at a distance, but up close. people hear that you are a Canadian and some smile with surprise. Every village has a cenotaph. Every other field, it seems, a cemetery.

Kurt DeBacker was born in Ypres, Belgium, the site of the world’s first gas attack, a town pulverized during four years of fighting, a place full of Canadian ghosts.

DENIS CHARLET/AFP/Getty Images

“I grew up in the world’s largest graveyard,” DeBacker says.

When DeBacker was a kid — he is 46 now — his mother would tell him to watch out for the rusty bits in the garden, shrapnel pieces that he and his pals dug up by the bucket and traded in at the museum for Snickers bars. He was 13 when his school principal appeared at the class door and asked his friend, Laurent, to step outside.

“Laurent didn’t return to school for two weeks,” DeBacker says. “His father was a sugar beet farm. He ploughed over an old shell and was killed when it exploded.

“My friends, we grew up playing in the Commonwealth cemeteries — we were respectful of them — but the grass there was always so soft and green.”

That grass was once mud. Deep and thick, and full of the dead, about 50 per cent of whom were never identified. What sometimes gets forgotten in the memory wars — in the tribal custom of honouring our dead — is that the Germans were boys, too. With moms and dads and brothers and sisters and stories and dreams that died in the mud. In this land of bones, it is hard to find a place more lonesome than a German cemetery.

Christian Hartman/AFP/Getty Images

I went to a German  cemetery and it was very emotional for me,” says Heike Hemlin, a German-born public servant who moved to Canada 25 years ago. Hemlin grew up in a culture of silence, when being German meant being ashamed of what your grandparents and great-grandparents had done. “We were the bad guys,” she says.

Commonwealth cemeteries are full of light, colourful flowers, manicured grass and white marble headstones. German crosses are black. The men are buried in mass graves. There are no flowers. Germany rents the land — in perpetuity, relying on groups of schoolchildren and volunteer donations to maintain their burial sites. It is punishment, everlasting, for starting the war, and it is part of the tragedy of it.

The pain is everywhere: John Kelsall’s father, Sam, fought at Vimy. Sam would often tell the story of a farm boy in his unit from Saskatchewan. When a hand grenade landed in a trench full of men, the boy pounced it — sacrificing himself for his friends.

“My father would tell that story with tears in his eyes,” Kelsall says.

Peter Robinson’s great-grandfather, Pte. Edward J. Clement, survived Vimy, but was killed three months later near Arras. His widow, Elizabeth, lived for another seven decades.

“I saw what his death caused,” Robinson says. “Sadness, anger, financial strain — not least because the politicians of the day were so indifferent to the widows’ plight.”

Related

·         ‘We must believe it: Never again’: Trudeau commemorates 100th anniversary of Vimy Ridge

·         Vimy Ridge database: Search the names of ancestors who died in the historic First World War battle

·         A century later, Canadians are still searching for traces of the 44 missing soldiers of Vimy

Six days ago, Gen. (ret.) Rick Hillier addressed a crowd of Vimy pilgrims on a boat gliding up the Seine River and told them how, if they were proud of being Canadian now — if their hearts beat red — that their hearts would be bursting come Sunday, April 9th. There is pride, indeed, great big chests full of it, being here, on this day, and listening to stories about our great-great-grandparents’ generation, dying, living, fighting like lions to the everlasting gratitude of the French.

But pride, perhaps, isn’t the correct word at Vimy, with its soaring monument, and with the politicians on-hand to give speeches on the 100th anniversary of an event where nothing needed to be said.

Words can’t capture the magnitude of the place. Look east, away from the monument, over the Douai Plain, and what you see is beauty: farmers’ fields, rich and green in the April afternoon light. Walk around the base of the monument, however, and the meaning of Vimy is clear. It is carved into the stone — 11,285 names of the Canadians who died in France and whose bodies were never found.

“We haven’t learned a thing, have we?” Willie McGregor said, his voice full of wonder. “I think of this world, and it is still a terrible mess.”