And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken long before the sky would open
Forsaken almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.
This familiar verse is from Leonard Cohen’s most famous song, “Suzanne”. With all the chaos and suffering surrounding us this Lent, I have found myself re-listening to all the songs of Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer and poet who died almost a decade ago. In my experience, of all the singers of his (and my) generation, only Leonard Cohen has the Biblical depth and religious imagination to give voice to the paradoxical pain and joy of being human, especially in times like these.
Cohen’s powerful double image of Jesus as both sailor and sinker—as water walker and drowning man—reminds us that, in Holy Week, we hear two distinct versions of the Passion story. On Palm Sunday we heard Matthew’s more straightforward narrative read, and today we heard John’s more poetic narrative sung. In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus is at the mercy of other people’s aggression. In John’s version Jesus is always in charge.
The Church decided long ago that it could live with narrative versions of events that contradict each other. Clement of Alexandria, writing a mere century after the events we observe this week, said: : “John, the last of all, seeing that what was material was set forth in the Gospels, on the entreaty of his intimate friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel.” Matthew gives us the (mostly) straightforward story of suffering. John sings us a song of divine glory. The community that gave us John’s Gospel already knew Matthew’s narrative facts and took them as the starting point for some theological embroidery on what it all meant.
Why do you and I come out of a beautiful spring afternoon to sit in church for an hour to remember these events? I think we do so because we know, at some deep level, that Good Friday is both about Jesus and about us. Yes, Jesus suffers and dies; but so do you and I. Many years ago I participated in a Good Friday reading of John’s Passion at a monastery, and the monks there flipped the script. They had the congregation read the part of Jesus together, and they had the senior monks read the roles of the bad guys. They knew that this story is only partly about Jesus. It is also about us.
And so we come out of a spring day to observe these events because, like our Benedictine brothers, we know that as Jesus goes through all this he is standing in for us—not only in the sense of dying for us, but in the greater sense of dying with us. In taking on one particular human life, God knows what is to suffer and die. This event is less about a sacrifice for sin than it is an expression of divine empathy. When you and I suffer—which, alas, we all do and will—we suffer in solidarity with the One who goes to the cross. The God we pray to knows what it is to be us. We reach out in pain and confusion to One who has also been there.
In some sense, all the world’s religions seek to answer the question of human suffering. Why do we suffer? Do we suffer for a reason? Is it for some larger, divine purpose?
Ever since the Book of Job, well-intentioned, pious people have tried to explain suffering as if it’s part of some larger plan. Job’s friends give him all kinds of religious reasons for his anguish. They tell him in so many ways that it’s his fault. When God finally speaks, God rebukes them all for their simplistic blaming of the sufferer for his own pain and sorrow. Countless generations of Christian preachers have tried to blame you and me for Jesus’s crucifixion. Yes, human beings much like us sent Jesus to his death. But my monk friends knew something the preachers have forgotten: in going to the cross, Jesus stands for and with us. We are quick to see God as the cause of our suffering. We are slow to understand that God also shares our pain.
In his great novelistic memoir of Auschwitz, Night, the late Elie Wiesel told this story of death in the concentration camp:
The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. “Where is God? Where is He?” someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in the torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice inside myself answer: “Where is He? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows.”
In a deeply biblical way that Leonard Cohen would understand, a Jewish writer got at the deep mystery going on at the cross better than most of us Christians do. God in Jesus goes to the cross both for and with us. That knowledge does not erase our own suffering, but it does somehow make it more bearable.
Sharing Jesus’s Passion together helps us take in the depth of what is happening here. But it doesn’t necessarily answer the simple question, “Why?” Why did God in Jesus go through this in the first place?
The answer to that question lies in the way the Gospels tell us Jesus lived. In a world of enmity he displayed compassion. In a world of scarcity he fed people. In a world of suffering and condemnation he brought healing and forgiveness. The secular and religious authorities found Jesus’s way of living a challenge to their possession and projection of power. Someone living in Jesus’s manner could not help but pose a threat to those invested in the status quo.
Many years ago I saw Desmond Tutu being interviewed on the Today Show. Tutu said something about there being things worse than death. The incredulous host stopped and replied, “What, Archbishop, can possibly be worse than death?” Tutu thought for a moment and replied, “If I woke up one morning and said to myself, ‘You know, Desmond, apartheid isn’t so bad.’ THAT would be worse than death.”
As we gather at the cross today, let us look for ourselves in Jesus, and let us look for Jesus in us. In going to the cross, Jesus stands with and for us in all the various ways we suffer and fear and lose in life. You and I, with Jesus, hang on that cross today, too. You and I are there with Jesus, and Jesus is here with us. He shares all our suffering and sorrow. He calls us to live now as he did, knowing that giving in to hatred and fear is worse even than death. What happens here today is both horribly and hopefully true.
And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken long before the sky would open
Forsaken almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone. Amen.
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