The Rev. Keri T. Aubert    April  10, 2009

Isaiah 52:13 -53:12

Psalm 22

Hebrews 10:16-25

John 18:1-19:42

Good Friday, Year B, RCL 

Human beings are said to have five senses with which to perceive the surrounding world: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Fingers contain some of the body’s densest concentrations of nerve endings. Therefore hands are among the body’s most sensitive conveyors of the sense of touch. The lightest touch of a feather sets off a chain reaction of nerve activity that leads directly to our brains.

Like the sensory organs we use for sight, hearing, taste, and smell, our hands communicate information to us from the outside world. Our hands also have the ability to affect the outside world. This ability is both a gift and a responsibility. The light touch of a hand upon a shoulder can still a child or comfort a friend or beckon a lover. That the raising of a hand in anger can instill fear in even a pet dog demonstrates the potential for harm when the object is another person.

Hands come in variations as extensive as all human variations: dark and light, wide and narrow, work-worn and callus-free. There are baby hands, teenager hands, adult hands, elder hands. Some hands are manicured. Some hands are twisted with arthritis.

We sometimes use our hands to touch other people’s hands. It is a powerful means of connection. When a newborn grasps your thumb, it can feel as if all that is possible in the world is present in their being. When a very old person grasps your fingers, it can feel as if the entire history of the world is present in their being.

The brief brushing of flesh that is a handshake has its own set of ritual rules. The usual brevity of a handshake punctuates the fact that, for us, handholding is limited to romance and children. In other cultures, even grown heterosexual men hold hands. In our culture, in which too many male hands are raised in anger, this would be a welcome sight.

Hands have 27 bones, and a person’s two hands contain 26% of the bones in his or her body. Each hand also has about 40 muscles and 40 tendons. All this makes them extraordinarily mobile and suitable for an endless variety of tasks. We use our hands to write, to eat, to carry.

Jesus used his hands for these things, too. When rescuing a woman accused of adultery from the crowd that would stone her, Jesus wrote in the dust on the ground. At the last supper, to identify the one who would betray him, Jesus handed bread to Judas. On the way to Golgotha, Jesus held the cross to his shoulder.

Before that, Jesus used his hands to heal. In the Gospel of John, when Jesus cured a blind man, he “. . . spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes.”[i] 

I don’t know the cultural rules on touching in Jesus’ time, but I imagine that he often touched others, and that he often accepted the touch of others. Also in the Gospel of John, “Mary took a pound of costly perfume,” “anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair.”[ii] This is Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus, the man Jesus raised from the dead.

Hers would have been very different from the touch that Jesus received in the last hours of his life. We can imagine that the Jewish police who arrested Jesus grabbed him and pushed him. We are told that a Roman soldier picked up a whip and flogged him. Human hands fashioned the leather whip that would perform a perverse form of touch.

When the Jewish police arrested Jesus, they bound his hands. It would be difficult to use bound hands for healing. Maybe that was the point. In the end, Jesus’ hands were a particular target of violence. One poet describes it this way:

How did he do it?
Open those good hands,
spread his five fingers wide
to receive blunt nails?
Hear the crack of bone,
delicate wingwork of phalanx and carpal?
Hang the weight of his whole self
from those soft clay doves
and trust them to hold?
To hold?

They flutter light.
Brush against the good wood.
His mother’s eye catches,
watches as she used to watch
beside her dreaming child
those white birds of paradise
gently reach
for some / thing lost,
some / thing left behind,
a kingdom he saw about to come.[iii]

The incarnation that began on Christmas Eve ends here on Good Friday. Jesus’ beautiful human hands are nailed to the cross. A soldier’s beautiful human hands hammered in the nails.

God gives us, too, a life of embodiment. It is our gift and our responsibility to decide what to do with it. All that we do is in relation to others who are also embodied. Individually and collectively, we touch and we are touched. We are seldom perfect. We use our hands to extend help and harm, to bring comfort and oppression, to convey love and hate.

The cross is the ultimate repudiation of violence. The cross says that we must neither wield violence, nor accept it. We cannot reach for the kingdom if our hand is holding a hammer. We cannot reach for the kingdom if our hand is being held up for protection. Most of us have good intentions but fall short. You might say that, in the wonderful and terrible complexity that is our human and embodied selves, we use our hands both to reach for the kingdom and to pound the nails.

Jesus’ hands were as fragile as our own. And so we dare to say that God understands.

In the wonderful and terrible complexity that is our life on earth, we sit vigil both with Mary and with the Roman soldiers. As Jesus hangs on the cross, can we forgive ourselves?