Death on a Friday Afternoon by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is the most recent book that I've read. I haven't read another book since, having finished it in January. I don't know that there's another book worth reading, quite frankly. Nothing that I've picked up since has held my attention. This is not hyperbole, nor overstatement. The bottom line fact of the matter is that I've never been so shaken or so profoundly upended by anything else I've read, seen, or heard.
I want very much to talk about it. Several times I've began to write about the book and the issues and ideas it explores but abandoned the attempt. Today I have resolved to try finally to put my impressions to words.
Until recently I thought I had a pretty clear understanding of Christianity in general and my own Catholicism in particular. Yet now, all that seems incredibly wrong. Not that I am no longer Catholic nor because I lack faith in religion or the Church, but because Neuhaus simply laid down arguments so compelling they leave my spirit in wonder. I'm almost ashamed of the childishness which passed for thought in me all these 65 years.
Neuhaus emphasizes the last words of Christ while on the Cross and what they might - almost what they must, but we have to be careful about putting our meaning into Our Lord's words, as even he concedes - and why they're so important. He urges the reader to spend some time on Good Friday at the foot of the Cross with Jesus, and not to rush to Easter so quickly, especially so that we consider His words as He was nailed to a tree.
Christ had to die, you know. That's something we tend to ignore, or at least brush past. The imagery is too disturbing. But He had to die to make right all the wrongs in the world. We can't do it, we humans. At our poor level of understanding we can't fully comprehend evil and as such can't fix things. "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do," Jesus begs on our behalf as He hangs there dying. Someone who knows completely what must be done has to do the job of atonement - at-one-ment, Neuhaus says - because things must be made right. It's simple justice.
But I do not do the book justice. So many things Neuhaus says are simply gems of theology which never occurred to me before. Some are more compelling in the human sense. To give an example, we generally see the Cross as very tall and intimidating. Yet Neuhaus asserts that it was about seven foot high; His Mother Mary and St. John the Apostle were almost at eye level with Him at the foot of the Cross. When Jesus says, "Woman, behold thy son...Son, behold thy mother," He was speaking directly to them in every sense.
Neuhaus comes dangerously close to supporting universalism, the idea that everyone will eventually be saved. I would never have given universalism the time of day before reading this book. I am still skeptical about it. But Neuhaus never says that universalism must be true, only pointing out that God works in whatever way God wants to work, and that we should be careful about assigning imperatives to Him. As such, and despite my philosophic doubts (I think it is fair to ask why we're put through any trials at all if we're to end up in the same place, though I do think that there may be a proper response to that), I am open to the idea that we may live in the hope that all find Heaven. That's a thought I would never have entertained not that long ago.
At times I had to stop reading because I was too teary-eyed to continue. We tend to think of evil as murder and theft and all those things covered by the Ten Commandments, but that isn't the whole of it. The young child who dies of leukemia - that's an evil. It must be made right. We can't take on the depth of that evil. Yet God can, by making it possible for that child to be reborn in the Great Glory of Heaven. Christ had to die because someone had to bear the stain of all evil. All evil.
And He gave himself up so willingly. Why didn't He call legions of angels to save Him from human clutches? Because it wouldn't have served justice. It would not save that child from illness, nor make up for it. It would have only brought glory to the god-man. But what good is there really in a god saving himself? Such a being would be above the world, not in it, and thus looking out for himself, not us. The Christian God insists He's here for us.
What may have hit me hardest reading Death on a Friday Afternoon was a quote Neuhaus used late in the book. It was from a hymn I sang in high school choir, the words of which always have stuck with me:
Those dear tokens of His Passion,
Still His dazzling body bear!
Cause of endless exaltation,
to His ransomed worshippers!
With what rapture, with, what rapture!
Gaze we on those glorious scars!
I can still sing it, though that would definitely not serve justice nor your ears. But the tune has stayed with me for fifty years now. It has run through my mind countlessly over those five decades. Those wounds, those scars of Christ, are the price of evil. And Christ paid it, making possible for each one of us the attainment of a greater good.
I still fail to say how deeply this book has shook me. But I think I get it now, the big, final It, the real Truth, even as doubts linger. I am in awe, I am humbled; I find a strange, exciting calm in me about what the future brings. I feel I have discovered a great truth which is nearly beyond imagination, nearly unfathomable.
I don't know what to think. And yet I find a clarity of thought I never imagined possible.
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