1 Corinthians 1:18-2:2
Troparion for Great and Holy Friday
Matthew 27:1-61

A Strange Land

Ours is a landscape of alienation. It has ever been so. From the first footfalls East of Eden to the present day, we have been aliens. We voice Moses' lament: "I have been a stranger in a strange land"  (Ex 2:22). So through this fog and night, we are driven on to find an ordered, lighted place and the solace of home, which only is God — God only-stable, God only-true, God only-life. Moses is our guiding saint. The world is Egypt: sensual, luxurious, and everywhere there are idols. They will not lightly release their hold upon us. Their many diseases have grown deeply down into our minds, our thoughts, and our imaginations. We are their creatures. This is our bondage.

Like Moses we seek the fire and light of God in the wilderness, far from the world. For only there is purity and truth and sanity. But to reach out for this truth, as Moses discovered, is to stir up the world's fury against us: even the might of great Pharaoh and the unconquerable armies of Egypt. Soon we find we are surrounded, for even God's people, our putative allies, have become agents of fury, betraying God. And we find ourselves isolated, even in mortal danger, with the Land of Promise constantly receding into a distance. A strange land. And Moses, the man of God, the stranger.

The pattern is held up again and again: to love God is to enter a landscape of alienation — as did Noah, who was derided and mocked; as did Abraham, who dragged his family through wilderness after wilderness, an alien from glittering Ur of the Chaldees; as did Moses, once prince of Egypt. Fearing this alienation, this awful sacrifice, the disciples ran, Peter denied God in the courtyard of the High Priest, and Judas betrayed the Master. For to love Him, to stand with Him, is to endure persecution, torture, and ignominious death. The place near to God is the burning point of the world's hatred. And the place of material safety — luxury, sensuality, and the pursuit of desire — is the place most distant from His Kingdom.

We live among idols today. Smart phones, television, the vanity of social networking, and the cruel tyrant of pornography, which has enslaved billions. A strange land.

But this land is never stranger than on Good Friday. On this day, each year we turn our hearts and minds and souls to God. We remember. We remember how the Son of God was mocked, tortured, and spitted on. We remember Him nailed to a Cross. We remember the mortal life ebbing out of Him. We remember His lifeless, blood-stained body taken down and wrapped in a sheet. We remember. We weep. We grieve. But the world takes no notice. "Could you not watch with Me one hour?" He asked. But most of the world does not know when or what Good Friday is. And St. Paul assures us (from our Epistle lesson),

What is it the world wants? What is its "religion" in that sense? I have asked many secular humanists what is most important to them. What do they value above all else? The answer is amazingly consistent over a period of decades. "Happiness. I want to be happy" .... as if happiness could be a goal. "But happiness," I reply, "is not a destination. It is a feeling that arises indirectly like peace of mind. You cannot seek it directly." Needless to say, those who have gone off to find happiness always return empty-handed.

Often they turn the question around and ask me, "How can you have faith in God in a world like this?" Or "How could God have made a world like this ... if there is a God?" I reply, "God did not make the world you mean: the world of betrayal, the world of selfishness, a world polluted from unbridled desire — desire for material things or for sensual life. God did not make this world. Humans did."

"Why can't you walk safely down any city street at night?" The answer is, "Betrayal: betrayal of other people and of God."

"Why do children go to bed hungry and see their parents reduced to desperation?" The answer is, "Betrayal." In fact, the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone on earth.

"Why is the world, its oceans, its rivers, and its air so polluted?" "Betrayal."

Even the tragedy of natural disasters and diseases. These effects come mostly through betrayal — the refusal of one man to look out for another. In 2010 I went to Haiti following the 7.0 earthquake, which reduced much of Port Au Prince to rubble and killed hundreds of thousands, crushing and maiming many more. But these people were not killed and maimed by an earthquake. They were the victims of betrayal. Only two years ago I lived through another 7.0 earthquake, and no damage resulted. The difference was betrayal, which continues today. I sat one afternoon with a volunteer engineer whom I had brought to Haiti from Boston, and we watched a Haitian man making cement blocks. He substantially reduced the required percentage of cement in the mixture of sand and water to increase his profit. No one could tell. The blocks were the same off-white in color, same apparent hardness, and same apparent weight. But in an earthquake, they will do what all the other sub-standard blocks did. They will crumble, and buildings once more will collapse and crush those living in them. Betrayal.

We are presently living though an unprecedented global pandemic. "What can we do?!" "How can we prevail against it?!" The answer is, "We need do nothing .... except care about each other." That is, by obeying the quarantine, we bring our neighbors safely through it. For it is not the disease we struggle against. The disease cannot infect the world. The disease will die out of its own accord. Only other people can infect the world. The plague we face is not Coronavirus, but rather a plague of betrayal that began in Eden and has swept over the human lifeworld touching every human heart in every generation. It is not inherited. We can say "No" to the temptation of breaking the quarantine just as Eve could have said "No" to the evil one.

"But some people will die!" you say? Yes, some small percentage who had other, underlying diseases, will die. But death is not a tragedy, not to a faithful man or woman. Indeed, death, far from being tragic, is the most joyful moment in the world ... in a world that is perishing.

Indisputably, the world suffers. 800 million people go to sleep hungry every night. Half the world's people live on slightly more than $2 a day. 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 per day. Three-quarters of the earth is covered with water; a tiny fraction of the resulting land is arable; a very small minority of the world's inhabitants control nearly all of its wealth; and most humans live in poverty, want, disease, and suffering. Yet all of this suffering might be relieved .... if we choose to relieve it. So why don't we choose this? Because it would mean less for those who have: less luxury, less pleasure, less desire for more.

In Haiti, I worked among the living saints and learned a great lesson. In order for suffering to be relieved, someone must suffer, must give of himself or herself, must subtract from herself or himself in order to add to others. Another lesson was that these same saints would never say that they suffered. Far from it! Many were some of the happiest people I've ever known. They did not seek happiness, but happiness came about indirectly .... like their peace of mind.

Not long ago I was reading about depression in the U.S. Anxiety and depression affect 40 million people each year in America. And I would venture to say that most of them would list happiness as their primary goal in life. One study I read offered profiles of the least depressed people. So who is not depressed in America, in effect it asked. And the answer is, an African-American single grandmother working two jobs. She has peace of mind providing for those she loves.

And where is God in this world of suffering? He is with us. That is One of His Holy Names: Emmanuel, God-with-us. Archpriest Gheorghe Calciu (Gheorghe Dumitreasa-Calciu), who was imprisoned and tortured for twenty-one years in a Communist Romanian archipelago, wrote, "Christ did not come to explain human suffering, or to eliminate it. Rather, He came to fill human suffering with His Presence."

The great Austrian neurologist Victor Frankl relates events he witnessed at the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz. As part of their torture, Nazi prison guards fabricated a story of a stolen loaf of bread. "Who stole this loaf ?!" they demanded. "If you don't volunteer this information, we will choose a volunteer!" After tormenting the prisoners, at length they chose a boy and then hung him in the presence of the assembled prisoners. Frankl heard one sardonic inmate whisper to a devout man, "Where is your God now?" The devout man replied, "He's up there. With the boy."

We who love God follow Him. We want to imitate Him. He is the Master. But as we read of our God and learn of Him, we discover that He is a suffering God. He suffered in Eden. He suffered before the Flood. He suffered in the Sinai wilderness. And, as the Prophets reveal, He suffered through an adulterous marriage to His people. Why does He suffer? Because He is faithful. Over and over again we read, from the Torah through Revelation, what we find in Psalm 94:

Surely, there is joy in the shining city, the city on the hill, the New Jerusalem, the Kingdom of Heaven! But, no. It turns out, Heaven is full of cares. Is not the Queen of Heaven full of cares for our sake? Some call her the Mother of Sorrows, for she is ever solicitous toward the billions of suffering people who have turned to her for comfort. And the saints in light? Do we not go to them constantly with our many needs and cares? And do they not hear us and intercede for us? It turns out that the saints in Heaven and the living saints on earth care. They care for each one they meet and, in like measure, suffer as they hold what each has for them to hold.

Today, we sit in vigil remembering our God, Who sent His Only Son so that He might be with us. And the Triune God, in God's human dimension, suffers. But why should God suffer?! God Almighty! Because He chooses to. Like a wealthy man who chooses to sit at the bedside of a beggar in a broken-down hovel, our God has chosen to be with us ... in a world that suffers because of our countless betrayals.

He is Almighty, but He cannot take over our world like a dictator enforcing quarantines with His secret police. That would nullify who we are as a free and choosing people, and it would nullify Who He is as a faithful God. So He must wait. We sit vigil remembering His Son's sufferings. And He must sit vigil waiting for us .... to choose. He waits for us to choose for each other over ourselves. He waits for us to be a servant to all. He waits for us to come to our knees and wash the sores and filth of the dying poor. And He waits for us to choose for Him, above all. For He, Who is both the Giver and the Gift, has chosen to suffer for us.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.