Poetry of the Passion 5: “Incarnation’s heaviest weight…”

Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis

Maybe He looked indeed
much as Rembrandt envisioned Him
in those small heads that seem in fact
portraits of more than a model.
A dark, still young, very intelligent face,
a soul-mirror gaze of deep understanding, unjudging.
That face, in extremis, would have clenched its teeth
in a grimace not shown in even the great crucifixions.
The burden of humanness (I begin to see) exacted from Him
that He taste also the humiliation of dread,
cold sweat of wanting to let the whole thing go,
like any mortal hero out of his depth,
like anyone who has taken a step too far
and wants herself back.
The painters, even the greatest, don't show how,
in the midnight Garden,
or staggering uphill under the weight of the Cross,
He went through with even the human longing
to simply cease, to not be.
Not torture of body,
not the hideous betrayals humans commit
nor the faithless weakness of friends, and surely
not the anticipation of death (not even, in agony's grip)
was Incarnation's heaviest weight,
but this sickened desire to renege,
to step back from what He, Who was God,
had promised Himself, and had entered
time and flesh to enact.
Sublime acceptance, to be absolute, had to have welled
up from those depths where purpose
drifted for mortal moments.
(Denise Levertov, New selected Poems, Bloodaxe, 2002, page 182)

One of the most important contributions to Western theology made by Jurgen Moltmann's seminal The Crucified God, was to recover confidence in the theology of the cross as a way of understanding the inner relations of love in the life of the Triune God, and to explore the nature of divine self-surrender through the experience of Jesus as God revealed in human flesh. The incarnation as an historic event, and as occasion for the outgoing redemptive love of God to a creation fallen, finite yet the object of eternal purpose and infinite love, opened for Moltmann and subsequent theological explorations, a rich seam of reflection on the nature of divine and human suffering. And in various occasions of reflection in his work, Moltmann takes with reverent seriousness and theological courage, the far reaches of meaning in the great cry of dereliction. The God-forsakenness of Jesus has its deepest echo in the heart of the Father, amplified by the Spirit, and borne as unutterable anguish constrained to the human words, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"

In his autobiography, A Broad Place, Moltmann tells of his experiences as a young soldier, the God forsakenness of young men cowering under air attack, and witnessing comrades shattered into oblivion before their eyes as bombs rained from the darkness. Such personal anguish can never be irrelevant to the developments of later theological reflection. In a border village in Austria is a beautiful modern church we visited some years ago while on a walking holiday. At the entrance is placed a War Memorial Plaque, in black marble, with a young soldier cradling his dying comrade. And in German the same words that are on countless similar plaques in British churches, "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

Good Friday is a complex intersection of emotion, memory, past pain, heightened awareness of loss, and for people of faith the puzzle we dare not try to solve, the holy enigma of God's broken heart, the tear of separation that signals ultimate bereavement, the grief of God. What makes it Good Friday is the love that is revealed yet mysterious, infinite yet personal, pushed to the utter limits of endurance, yet not giving in to

this sickened desire to renege,
to step back from what He, Who was God,
had promised Himself, and had entered
time and flesh to enact.

Levertov displays profound theological insight into the psychological anguish created by uncertainty, as inner resolve seems shattered by physical agony, and yet from somewhere deep in the truth of who God is, final purpose perseveres, "enduring the cross, despising the shame". Few poems idenytify with such precision, exactly what John meant when he said, "For God so loved the world….".