Below is the text of a Good Friday meditation I once did on the Michelangelo's La Pieta. This Sunday I'll be revisiting La Pieta once again, but in a different context.
Can God grieve? And if God can, how does God grieve? How does the
creator of all that is, of all that will ever be, experience grief? The events
of the day find their conclusion in Michelangelo’s Pieta, Mary cradling her
now dead son for the last time. The death of her son must have found
Mary breathless with sorrow, as it does to us all who have experienced
the wrenching pain of loss.
The stories found in the Scriptures tell of the sky growing heavy with
dark clouds, the temple veil that separated the holiest of the holies from
the world being ripped into two—signs of the grief of God, signs that
even God can shudder with the pain that comes from losing someone.
There is God, seeing Mary holding her eldest son; this is a God who now
knows of Mary’s grief, who knows human grief in ways that before this
moment were never possible—human grief has now become divine grief,
in this moment. This God knows loss, this God knows how deeply the
human heart can weep for a loved one, especially for a child taken too
early to the grave. The heavy stone of grief now rattles inside the
broken heart of God, like it does in our own hearts when we lose
someone we love—a lover, a mother, a father, a friend, a child to the
dark night of death.
And its not that God’s doesn’t know how the story will end; its not that
God doesn’t know that days from now, death itself will be broken in that
empty grave outside the city of Jerusalem. But just because God knows
how it all ends, it doesn’t take away the truth that death haunts even
God, that its power can even make the heart of God shudder with pain.
Certainly, that is true for us as well—we know how the story ends for us,
for others, for those we have loss to the grave—we know that it isn’t the
end of the story—but even though we know that life is the end of the
story, death still haunts us. Its sting may have been loss, as the
Scriptures tell us, but the one who stings, death, remains, and he
continues to inflict his awful damage upon the world, damage felt even by
the heavens. Even if you know the end of the story, like we do, like God
does, that more life follows life, and though the power of death has been
forever broken, it does not take away the pain of loss. We have only
known the ones we love the way we have always loved them, as flesh
and blood, bodied selves we could touch and feel, hold and kiss, and so
we grieve for the loss of these gifts of the body.
The heavens grew dark with mourning on that day two thousands years
ago, as Mary holds her son—like God, her loss seems insurmountable,
as Mary grieves the loss of the one she loves, the loss of the way of the
way that she had known him, warm flesh, warm blood, becoming colder
even as she held him. Grief changes you, sorrow takes its toll; so it true
of Mary, of us, and certainly of God. We Christians believe that the
cross means something, that what happened on that day two thousand
years ago changed everything—and we believe that it even changed
God—how could grief not change the heart of God?! Deep sorrow will
do that, it make you see the world differently, the shadows become
deeper, and the light becomes brighter, and because of Jesus, God saw
all of creation through new eyes, through the eyes of this divine child,
who now lays across the legs of his mother.
The deep and powerful grief of God has saved us, you and I, and the
whole world—God’s deep sorrow for this child Jesus has changed God,
and we are in midst of being made different because of that deep pain
found within the heart of God. Grieving reminds us that we are alive,
that we are connected to each other, sometimes in surprising ways—
Mary knew that truth, certainly—and so too it is with God. On that day, in
that stark moment on the cross, God understood us, God knew human
despair and sorrow, human grief and pain, and because of it, God saw
us differently, and we are given hope because we know now that we
have been known, deeply known, by our Creator. Still, the grief remains,
the sorrow still aches—how could it not?—even though we all know how
the story ends, we must experience this death to know the power of the
life that meets us on Sunday. It is the way of the universe, death and
life, life and death, forever dancing with each other, until that one day
when life will dance on its own—and all grief will melt away, and the first
one whose grief will fully give way to life is God, whose broken heart has
changed us all. So let it be, Amen
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