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Notes -
On the archaic social technology of Good Friday
Today is Good Friday, a Christian holiday that commemorates the worst Friday ever. In a couple days, through a beautiful deus ex
machinahumanitas, the worst Friday becomes the best Friday. What significance did this event have in Christian Western history?There’s an old European myth about a young prince facing punishment for misbehavior. When the boy prince committed an infraction, his tutor would discipline him. But the tutor would be disgracing the majesty of the royal seat by flogging a future king, himself only a lowly tutor. How then did he discipline the heir apparent? He would take the boy’s best friend, and in the presence of the heir he would whip the friend for the royal’s crime. Seeing his own deserved punishment transferred onto his beloved friend (the “whipping boy”), the innocent friend a substitute for his own transgression, the heir would be overwhelmed with guilt, pity, and shame. The event would change the heir’s conduct even more than if he were the one whipped. And there is more benefit to this exchange: the heir learns to identify the pain of another as occurring because of his own misconduct, seeing that his conduct affects the whole kingdom while increasing his capacity for empathy — important wisdom for a man to have.
Compare this myth to one of the oldest writings on Good Friday we have:
We see that our princely myth and the Crucifixion share a similar emotional dimension. The Christian believes that “Christ bore our sins on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness — through his wounds we have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:24). This doesn’t just play out on Good Friday, though. It’s an event that recurs continually in the heart of the believer. It doesn’t work intellectually, but emotionally. Consider: were you to tell a troublesome heir in our princely myth that his crime deserves whipping, he would reply “yeah, so?” If you were to tell him that someone, somewhere, at some point in history was whipped for that very crime, he would reply “uh, okay?” But if you were to take his beloved and best friend, an innocent boy, and show him the consequence of his crime by whipping him in front of him, then the significance of the crime would be apparent to our heir, and then he would repent and change.
That is close to the operation at play on Good Friday. But in the Christian story, it’s not the friend who is punished for the prince, but the prince of heaven who is punished for his friend. It’s not the tutor who administers the punishment, it is the tutor who is punished, tortured by a crowd of sinners similar to his lowly friend. It’s not the dignity of the graceful prince that is safe, it is the grace of the prince that saves the sinner. And it’s not the honor of a future king that causes this process, but the compassion of a King whose son is given over to torment, so that the goodness and honor of God could be beheld by sinners.
As the central event of the Christian religion, this is the lense through which the West understood their moral concerns. And that’s pretty interesting, because their ideas are so distant from our secular beliefs now:
There is a serious, perfect moral standard that all must follow. The moral standard is objective, existing since the beginning of time. The failure to follow it deserves punishment, which Christ pays out of mercy.
Corporal punishment is a valid way to inflict punishment on malefactors.
A punishment may be deserved and yet withheld out of mercy or clemency. (Is “mercy” even a thing anymore? There doesn’t seem an interest in mercy for the contrite for social infractions.)
Humans are not born perfect, they require serious intervention to behave morality. This intervention was first moral law, and then a dramatic intercession by the Son of God. Noble savage et al conflicts with this idea. As does the equality of cultures. This cannot be reconciled.
Drama is used for a moral purpose. The crucifixion is intrinsically dramatic and the drama effects moral change. Our dramas no longer serve that purpose.
Friendship, love and mercy are the primary modes of morality, in fact required to understand the Cross (and so the Eucharist, and thus to be moral). It seems like the focus on morality has since morphed into “obeying peer pressure”, and a false “loving everyone equally” which doesn’t entail love as a feeling (but more an “equalizing” absence of love for one’s own group.)
As an aside, there is great music that captures the dramatic-emotional sense of the crucifixion. From Bach: “your grave and headstone shall, for the anxious conscience, be a comfortable pillow and resting place for the soul”. From Bach again: “Behold the bridegroom! Behold his patience. Look at our guilt.” And from the Syrian Fairuz: “as at the cross she bewailed what was done, to his heart hers was so atuned, both were pierced when they pierced the One.”
If you’re posting Good Friday music, why not the reproaches? https://youtube.com/watch?v=-i1VMXEMPzM&pp=ygUfR29vZCBmcmlkYXkgcmVwcm9hY2hlcyB2aWN0b3JpYQ%3D%3D
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