Tears From the Rock

The Church of St. Michael and St. George, St. Louis

 

TEARS FROM THE ROCK

 

A Good Friday Meditation

 

by Fleming Rutledge

 

 

Please turn in your program to the back page. I don’t know who chose this for your Good Friday service bulletin, but I thank whoever it was, because this poem by a 19^th century English poet speaks deeply to me. I hope it will speak to you also. Christina Rossetti, a devout Christian, is best known to many of us as the author of the familiar Christmas hymn, “In the bleak midwinter.” Her Good Friday poem is printed here in your program:

 

Am I a stone and not a sheep,

That I can stand, O Christ, beneath thy cross,

To number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss,

And yet not weep?

 

Not so those women loved

Who with exceeding grief lamented thee;

Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;

Not so the thief was moved;

 

Not so the Sun and Moon

Which hid their faces in a starless sky,

A horror of great darkness at broad noon—

I, only I.

 

Yet give not o’er,

But seek thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;

Greater than Moses, turn and look once more

And smite a rock.

 

The Biblical richness of these few brief lines is worth a number of sermons, this Good Friday. Christina Rossetti knew the Scriptures intimately. Let us reflect on her poem this noon hour as our Good Friday offering.

 

In the first stanza the poet imagines herself standing in front of the Cross, watching Jesus’ life ebb away in his agony—yet she does not weep. She is distressed and alarmed at her own lack of response. She might well be thinking of Christ as the sufferer in the book of Lamentations, who cries out,

 

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?

Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow....

(Lamentations 1:12)

 

Is it nothing to me? she asks; Am I a stone? Am I so hard-hearted that I feel nothing, that I cannot share in my Savior’s suffering? The implied answer is, yes, I am a stone. I am not even one of the Lord’s proper sheep, because I cannot shed a single tear in response to the gift of my Lord’s life.

 

But this is the normal human condition. We are people of stone, because of the reign of Sin. The prophet Ezekiel knew that. One prophet after another came to the people of God to warn them of their godless ways, but they did not repent. God looks at his people and sees hearts of stone (Ezekiel 36:26). After four hundred years of prophetic warnings, the Babylonians invade, the Temple is destroyed, and the people are carried off into exile in a heathen land. Humanly speaking, their case is hopeless. Many of the Psalms reflect the unhappiness of the exiles in Babylon who think that God has abandoned them.

 

On the eve of the Babylonian invasion the prophet Jeremiah exhausted himself with fruitless calls for repentance. He had little hope of making a difference. The Lord had warned him about those hearts of stone:

 

My people are skilled in doing evil [says the Lord], but how to do good they know not...The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt, who can understand it? (Jeremiah 4:22; 17:9)

 

            That seemed to be the last word on the situation.[1] The Book of Lamentations expresses the bitterness of the exiles, who speak in the voice of one person, the poet who has written the lament on behalf of them all:

 

I am the man who has seen affliction

under the rod of [the Lord’s] wrath;

he has driven and brought me

into darkness without any light...

He has made my flesh and my skin waste away,

and broken my bones...

He has walled me about so that I cannot escape...;

though I call and cry for help,

he shuts out my prayer.                       (Lamentations 3:1-8)

 

These words were well-known to all Jews in the time of Jesus. All his disciples would have known the whole Hebrew Bible more or less by heart. As they reflected back on the Crucifixion after Pentecost in the power of the risen Christ, the words no longer seemed to be about Israel in exile, but about Jesus himself. This connection has been enshrined in Christian memory since the beginning; Handel uses words from Lamentations in his Messiah. Jesus himself has become the Exiled One; he has taken on himself the sin, shame and disgrace of the people.

 

Yet still the poet cannot weep. The knowledge of her insufficient response plagues her. In the second verse she compares herself unfavorably to the women who mourned Jesus. In the first appearance of the risen Christ in the gospel of John, we read that Mary Magdalen stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she saw...two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain...They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” (John 20:13-14).

 

The poet Christina Rossetti compares herself to Mary Magdalen, and finds herself insufficient. I believe she is worried that perhaps her lack of weeping, her lack of “exceeding grief” (her words in her poem) means that the risen Lord will not make himself known to her as he did to Mary.

 

She thinks also of Peter. We heard about Peter in the dramatic reading on Palm Sunday, how he denied his Master three times and then, coming to himself as the cock crowed, he broke down and wept (Mark 14:72). Not only Peter, thinks the poet; even the thief who hung on a cross next to Jesus was more responsive than she. She laments for her dry eyes.

 

“Not so the Sun and Moon,” she continues. Even the heavenly bodies respond to the death of their Creator. They do not fail to grieve and mourn as they go into eclipse over the hill of Calvary—“a horror of great darkness at broad noon.” Only she is unable to shed a tear. “I, only I” stand like a stone.

 

Tears can mean many different things. Tears can be sentimental; such tears, by definition, exhibit emotion without insight. Tears can easily be elicited from people who enjoy feeling their own feelings. Tears can be purely self-indulgent, or manipulative. Tears can come from anger or frustration. But tears can also be a means of healing. Tears of grief held back too long can turn to bitterness. Thus Mary Magdalen’s tears at the tomb of the Lord are exactly right, models for us in our own bereavements.

 

The weeping of the disciple Peter, however, is our model most of all. He remembers how he boasted that he would never, never let Jesus down. Even though all these others flee, he vowed, I will never leave you. As we heard last night, he recklessly promised, Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death! (Luke 22:33) Peter remembers this , and he remembers how three times he said, I do not know the man, and the third time he said it with cursing and swearing. Here is the leader of Jesus’ disciples committing what is probably the worst example in history of taking the Lord’s name in vain. In every culture the betrayal of a friend is considered the worst of the worst. So the weeping of Peter is a sign of true insight. He knows exactly what he has done and how grievous it is. These are the tears that truly reveal the heart, that expose our true situation before God, that lay bare the craven weakness of our wills, that display the utter hypocrisy, vanity, and folly of all our human posturing.

 

But at the same time these are the tears that open the gates for our restitution and reconciliation. How often in ministry we clergy wish we could see even a hint of a tear on a face of stone! I remember one couple I was trying to help. The wife was in tears pleading for her husband’s understanding. He sat there with no expression, no reaction, no “affect,” as we say. All his wife wanted was a little understanding, a hint of a response, but he was out of reach. One tear would have been a signal that there was hope, but there was nothing.

 

Let us return to our poem. What hope is there for the one who does not weep, the one who is unmoved, the one who feels nothing? Am I a stone, the poet asks? I want to be one of the Lord’s sheep, but I am intractable, immovable.

 

“Yet give not o’er,” she begs; do not give up on me—“seek thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock.” She is thinking of herself as a lost sheep, wandering far into the land of “our own devices and desires,” unable to find the way back, unable to respond to the call of the Good Shepherd. The prophet Ezekiel spins out the image: Thus says the Lord:  My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill; my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them.(Ezekiel 34:6)

 

The poet also remembers the parable that Jesus told:

 

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost.” (Luke 15:4-6)

 

Her great hope, the poet realizes, lies not in her own heart of stone but in the promise of God. Once again Ezekiel:

 

Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned... I will vindicate the holiness of my great name...and the nations will know that I am the Lord... For I will...gather you... and bring you into your own land....A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And...you shall dwell in the land which I gave to your fathers; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36:22-28)

 

This great promise from the Lord makes it very clear that his mercy to us goes before our ability to respond to him. It is because we cannot respond that he goes looking for us. The poet finishes her prayer with a plea that she seems certain of, for she concludes her poem with a resounding challenge:

 

Greater than Moses, turn and look once more

And smite a rock.

 

Jesus is, of course, the one who is “greater than Moses,” and she is thinking of the episode in the Sinai wilderness when there was no water for the people of Israel and the Lord commanded Moses to strike a great rock with his rod, and water came forth abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their cattle (Numbers 20:11) We heard about that just last night, in the Psalm traditional for Maundy Thursday:

 

God cleft rocks in the wilderness,

and gave them drink abundantly as from the deep.

He made streams come out of the rock,

and caused waters to flow down like rivers.

He smote the rock so that water gushed out

and streams overflowed. (Psalm 78:15, 20)

 

There is a sense in which the poem goes nowhere; the poet seems no closer to tears than before. She is a stone in the beginning and a rock at the end. But she puts her confidence in the power of God to create a response where there is no response, remembering perhaps the words of John the Baptist to the self-righteous religious leaders: Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. (Matthew 3:9)[2]

 

It is not possible for me to know what brought you here today when most people from your congregation are not here. Perhaps you do not even know yourselves. But you may be sure that the Holy Spirit drew you. And you may be sure that whatever you may be feeling today, or not feeling today, God is able to make your response to him what he wants it to be, for God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham....A new heart I will give you [says the Lord], and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. The one who is greater than Moses is able to strike the rock of your heart and bring forth the springs of water welling up to eternal life (John 4:14) that only he can give. The good Shepherd, seeking after the sheep that went off wandering far from home, is able to bring the lost sheep into his fold again, rejoicing.

 

I am the good shepherd, he said; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away.... I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.... For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.  No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord....

I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again; this charge I have received from my Father.” (John 10:12-18)

 

Dear people of God, this is my last day with you this Holy Week. One thing I desire, and that is to leave you with the knowledge and love of our Lord Jesus Christ. Whatever your feelings at this moment, whatever the state of your soul, however stony the soil of your heart, it is you that he loves. Be confident in that love and in his power from the Father to transform your life and bring you home, rejoicing.

 

 

Hymn 313 is sung as a responding prayer:

 

Thou didst give thyself for me;

Now I give myself to thee.