Torn Curtains

Good Friday Meditation – March 21, 2008

Matthew 27: 27 - 55

Christopher H. Edmonston

I.

“But Jesus, again crying out loudly, breathed his last. At that moment, the Temple curtain was ripped in two, top to bottom.” So says Matthew as he describes the death of Jesus.

For us the death of Jesus happens in our historical-imaginations, and is best envisioned through the eyes of the soul. On that Friday it happened 2000 years ago it was not imagined: it was painful and public. Rome had ordered it. The religious-class celebrated it. And the crowds that had cheered him on Palm Sunday past went to the streets to jeer him as they would the bearded-lady at the traveling fair: the Savior of the world become a freak-show.

Matthew though, gives us some details that are only partially included in Mark, and are not mentioned in Luke or John at all. Matthew tells us that tombs were opened and the curtain, the temple curtain, the sacred curtain, the shading of the Holy-of-Holies curtain is torn from top to bottom. Or to put this in other terms, the death of Jesus by Matthew’s reckoning and by the testimony of those he spoke with, does not happen in isolation. It physically alters the landscape. Matthew is saying in no uncertain terms that Jesus’ death, unlike every other death before it, and unlike every other death since it, has literally changed the world.

II.

We know this, don’t we? That death changes things. Find the spouse who said goodbye to a wife and a marriage and listen to them tell you about the silence in the house, the smells that go missing, the laughter and companionship which are absent.

But in this death, the death of Jesus, we have a cataclysmic act – in the same vein that a father tears his cloak upon hearing of the death of his child – the tabernacle curtain is torn: as though God himself has torn a garment. There is more than just silence at stake here on Good Friday. More than just mourning and grief are claimed. Matthew is telling us that in this death of Jesus THE CURTAIN, the curtain of curtains, is torn and the weeping comes from God. Unlike other deaths, where I fully believe God often rejoices with homecoming glee like the Father who welcomes the prodigal son, here God is mourning, here God is sorrowful, and here God is actively engaged in lament. It is a lonely, tragic moment. A moment which changes the landscape, the world, and the way we understand God.

III.

Good Friday is at the heart of our faith, even though it is a day that humbles us more than any other. It has long been a claim of Presbyterians that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves. Our salvation is completely dependent upon the merits of Jesus, and not upon any merit that we might claim. Good Friday reminds us of this truth as it spells out for us most completely the singular actions of Jesus. He is alone up there on that cross. He is alone as his life expires. We cannot take his place. Nor would any of us want to take his place. And so the curtain is torn to honor the One who goes to the cross for us; the curtain is torn to set apart his work and his sacrifice; the curtain is torn to show us that all has changed and to suggest that God never desires to suffer so intensely again.

And Good Friday humbles us because it calls us to say with one voice that while we are devastated that the curtain was torn, we are also thankful beyond words that the curtain was torn. The source of our mourning is the cause of our thanksgiving. Good Friday makes us admit this as no other day can or will.

Writing in the Westminster Collection of Christian Prayers, Jeremy Taylor prays in a most understandable way the double-sided tension that the death of Jesus brings to bear: “GRANT, O LORD, that in your wounds I may find my safety, in your stripes my cure, in your pain my peace, in your cross my victory, in your resurrection my triumph, and a crown of righteousness in the glories of your eternal kingdom.”[1]

Or perhaps the hymn states it best:

Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure,
By the cross are sanctified;
Peace is there that knows no measure,
Joys that through all time abide.

In the cross of Christ I glory,
Towering o’er the wrecks of time;
All the light of sacred story
Gathers round its head sublime.[2]

When the curtain is torn, the tear in our souls, the separation between God and us, is made whole; it is repaired; it is patched; it is mended. “By His stripes,” says Isaiah, “we are made whole.” And so we are reminded that Holy Week must necessarily be as difficult as it was – not for Jesus’ sake, but for ours.

IV.

Good Friday, brothers and sisters, makes us, more than any other day, humble before the throne of God. It makes us wonder – why does this have to be so hard for Jesus? On Good Friday we dare to ask, was I, and am I, worth it? Do I deserve to have God, to have Jesus go to these lengths for me? Speaking only for myself, each time I ask that question I am left with a slowly developing storm of anxiety. And I am thankful that God judges me on the strength of His mercy and not on the paucity of my witness.

Good Friday also demands that we see the courage of Jesus as proof of the singular divinity of Jesus. As C.S. Lewis so eloquently said it, in Jesus, and in the pain he endured, we have either the Son of God, which was Jesus’ claim about himself, or someone who was a madman. Lewis famously said, “You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.”[3] The cross makes us make this choice, and if we choose the faith of our fathers and mothers, then we must admire the courage of Christ, the strength of Jesus who goes to the cross not as a victim of surprise but as a willing participant in a plan whose strategies were set as the world was made.

As Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote in 1994, “THERE WAS no Stoic resignation, no Socratic dignity, nothing to make it easy or natural: Jesus looked at his coming death and saw it as monstrous and dreadful. What compelled the imagination of the early believers was precisely this—that he was obedient in spite of all, that he endured the nightmare for the sake of God’s mercy.”[4]

V.

When curtains are torn, mending never comes easy. Even if it is mended, the marks of the patching, the threads of mending, and the evidence of the embroidering will always be there. The tearing leaves a mark.

In the same way the mercy of God leaves a mark. And the mark is the cross. Don’t jump ahead to Sunday too quickly, as the cross demands the validation of the empty tomb. Don’t jump ahead – dwell here on Friday for just a moment. Curtains are torn. The world is altered. Mercy is shared and grace is delivered.

Jesus picks up the charges for the delivery and because of this benevolence his delivery becomes our delivery – from sin to grace; from despair to hope; from lost to found; from death to life eternal.

Even though we know the Easter Sunday good news of an empty tomb and a house with many rooms made in the heavens, we are, on Good Friday more than any other day in the life of our faith called to ask to this question and be convicted in unspeakable gratitude as we thank Jesus for courage and his obedience; as we thank God for the tearing of the curtain and the mending of our souls:

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
To bear the heavy cross for my soul, for my soul,
To bear the heavy cross for my soul.[5]

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[1] Taken from Christianity Today online – “Reflections – Death and Resurrection” compiled by Richard A. Kauffman – March 17, 2008.

[2] John Browning, 1825. Presbyterian Hymnal, Hymn 84.

[3] This is from Mere Christianity, pages 40-41.

[4] Taken from Christianity Today online – “Reflections – Death and Resurrection” compiled by Richard A. Kauffman – March 17, 2008. From Rowan Williams, Open to Judgment, 1994.

[5] Hymn 85, Presbyterian Hymnal. Walker’s Southern Harmony, 1835.