Where's thunder when you need it?

Today, for a variety of reasons, I've been connecting with one of the Good Friday emotions we tend to downplay - anger.  Yes, that's right - it's Good Friday, and instead of being sorrowful or guilt-ridden, I've been just plain ole pissed off.  OK, some of it has had to do with certain situational realities of pastoring during Holy Week (e.g. feeling like absolutely nobody else around you cares about these intricate, involved, pain-in-the-butt to plan services), but as I've continued to reflect, I find myself moving past my own issues of the day...and yet still being genuinely angry.


But why?  First, a musical interlude, from what is perhaps my favorite work of choral music EVER - Bach's Matthauspassion.  This selection is the chorale's response to Jesus being bound and led away at Gethsemane...

Roughly translated, the first half is wondering why, at this moment, there is no thunder or lightning from on high - signs of God's wrath at the injustice taking place.  The second half is pure bile and anger, begging that the mouth of hell open upon and swallow the betrayer and his murderous blood.


In a conversation with a much beloved classmate, the subject of Miguel de la Torre came up.  De la Torre has written, among other things, a book that proved pretty profound in its shaping of my own life journey, spiritual convictions, and sense of call: Reading the Bible From the Margins.  The title sums it up; it's principally concerned with how people from marginalized communities interpret the Bible.  It blew my mind; it's well worth tracking down.  Around the same time that we were reading that book for class, a guest preacher came to TLU and delivered the sermon one Sunday night for our campus ministry's worship.  He spoke of seeing the suffering of a living Christ when he saw the plight of the marginalized around him, giving some specific examples.


And so, this Good Friday, I've been wondering where I see the suffering of the living Christ, the people and places in which we still see the innocent bound up, led away, and condemned by the powerful as their stooges still shout "Crucify him!"  Is that what we see in bombed out Libyan towns, in the faces of those suffering from incurable diseases, in the hollow stares of starving children in a world where 2% of the world's food supply is enough to feed everybody adequately, in the difficult decisions faced by vulnerable members of society whose access to healthcare is being jeopardized by corporations and the wealthiest of the wealthy exploiting tax loopholes?  Do we see the living Christ, suffering before us again, when we fail to acknowledge the humanity of 11 million people living in this nation without proper paperwork, whose "illegality" testifies not to their debased nature, but rather to our broken immigration system and unjust free trade policies?  Is the living Christ in our midst when we look out on futures destroyed by the greed and recklessness of unregulated Wall Street tycoons, or when we consider how much more money we spend on weaponry than on education, or on lives destroyed by substance abuse and addiction that we'd rather spend millions to punish rather than thousands to cure?


Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal - have mercy on us.  We crucify you anew every single day.