Good. Friday

One of the first classes I had at Columbia was Walter Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology class. One thing I learned from this class is the pattern of exile and homecoming or the progression of orientation-disorientation-reorientation. This theme is the theme of Exodus, but also the theme of the Abraham story, the Joseph story, and the greater theme of the prophets. As Christians we read the Old and New Testaments as this pattern writ large. And here at Eastertide, venturing from Lent to the Ascension, we encounter this pattern again in the Good Friday-Holy Saturday-Easter progression.
Even today I find reading his Old Testament Theology satisfying. In this class I began to take the Old Testament seriously: I had the evangelical habit of weighting my theological thought entirely on the New Testament at the time. Even though I had bought Breuggemann's Old Testament Theology in 1999, I had not engaged with it, or understood it, until in taking his class, being challenged by him, and becoming prepared to discuss with other students the book's content, I entered into a conversation: a description of dialogic truth.
Lately I've been reading from it as I go to bed at night. And I'm reminded that one important thing about God's speech to Israel is that people make a mistake when they treat God as just another actor on the stage. God does present himself as loving and sustaining, in solidarity with Israel, always faithful - but as Exodus 34:7b reminds, "who will by no means acquit the guilty." God reserves to herself a strangeness, a mystery. As God responds to the wicked in Psalm 50:21b, "you thought I was like you," the common mistake of humanity: to think that God is one fact among others, something to be investigated, experimented upon, and understood as acting in a predictable way. God, though, is elusive, as well as loving and merciful and just.
When God dwells among humanity in the person of Jesus, God continues to display unpredictable behavior, as well as accepting, healing, and challenging behavior. The cross is an example of this behavior par excellence, especially in that it is the recommended act in which we are enjoined to participate with him. He asks us to follow him, taking up our cross. What is a cross but an acceptance that people will act emotionally for us (as in Palm Sunday) and against us (as in Good Friday). A cross is not so much something we carry as something we discover - when we discover that we only need God's approval. A cross is also an intersection between desire and what we don't want, between love and abandonment, between life and death. Between chocolate cake and broccoli.