The house I grew up in in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1950 and 60’s had one art book in it. It was a thick volume entitled Treasures of the Great National Galleries, and it contained page after page of black and white plates of famous paintings from the national galleries in cities like Vienna, Madrid, London and Rome.
As a child I spent hours looking at this book, puzzling over this book, and memorizing images contained in it. And of all the images in the book, one in particular drew my attention more than the others.
It was a painting of the crucifixion, one in which Jesus and the two thieves on either side of him, almost entirely naked, hang on crosses above a teeming, violent crowd with spears and horses and swords.
At that age I had rarely been to church, so had no way of making sense of this image, but I returned to it time and time again, wondering what it could it mean.
Of course, you don’t have to be a seven-year-old raised outside the church to look at the cross and to puzzle over it. Jesus’ followers (to include our own St. Paul) began a long line of believers and thinkers and mystics and theologians and poets who have puzzled over what the cross of Christ is about, what God as victim of undeserved suffering is all about. And they have come up with a rich array of explanations, reflections, experiences, visions and poems.
Tonight I’d like to offer you one of my own and to invite you to let it in and to touch it as you behold the hard wood of the cross or as you yourself touch that wood later tonight.
To get to the language of my own reflection on the cross, I won’t be taking you to St. Paul, to John of the Cross, to any of the Desert Fathers, to Mother Julian, to Luther, to Jurgen Moltmann, to John Dominic Crossan, to name a few. I won’t even be taking you to commentators on the Gospel of John or on the Book of Hebrews. Instead I’ll be taking you into the world of the writer James Baldwin, more specifically, into the world of his story entitled “Sonny’s Blues.”
“Sonny’s Blues” is a story about two brothers who grew up in a place full of suffering: the Harlem projects in the 1940’s and 50’s. One brother, the older of the two is a teacher, a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of guy, a black man who has done all he can to distance himself from the pain and prejudice of his upbringing. With this, however, has come a kind of distance from his feelings and the people in his life that matter to him.
The younger brother whose name is Sonny has gone in the opposite direction. Fascinated by music at an early age, he has become a jazz pianist. But also for a time he became a heroin addict, a person caught in the web of his own suffering in a way that was self destructive.
And so Baldwin sets before us two different ways of responding to suffering: deny it and run the risk of losing sensation, losing the joy of what it is to be alive, or go so deep in it that it can destroy you.
Early on in the story the two brothers have a conversation about this, and we hear an explanation of what might be under self-destructiveness that comes out of the experience of undeserved suffering:
The older brother is exasperated at Sonny’s preoccupation with pain, telling him that he and everyone else should just learn to take the pain that life brings. To this, Sony replies:
“There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem--well, like you did something (to deserve it.) But… nobody just takes it.” Sonny cried, “That’s what I’m telling you. Everybody tries not to. You’re just hung up on the way some people try--it’s not your way.”
And so the question for us tonight is: What is your way of dealing with suffering, especially undeserved suffering, pain that’s somehow part of the landscape of your lives? Do you run from it? Do you go numb? Do you propel yourself into it at your own peril? Do you do something else?
If you’re at all like me, you’ve done it all and more. You’ve sped away and numbed out, and you’ve plunged into it headlong, finding yourself over your head.
So what kind of resolution, if any, is there? And to return to our Good Friday question, what does the cross of Christ, the undeserved suffering and death of Jesus, have to say to this?
Back to Baldwin’s story:
After the two brothers have their say with one another about suffering, they decide to stop talking and start walking. They make their way to a little downtown nightclub and this is where, I believe, we glimpse what might be one answer to our question.
They go to a little jazz club where the older brother watches and listens as Sonny and a small jazz combo play, and they play the blues. The combo starts—Sonny on piano, a man named Creole on base a few others on drums and other instruments. And as the older brother looks on, this is what happens:
“I watched Sonny’s face (as he played). And I had the feeling that everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him. (Creole) was wailing on the fiddle with his eyes closed listening for Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny, (wanting him) to leave the shoreline and strike out for deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing. He had been there and he knew.
And while Creole listened, Sonny moved deep within, exactly like someone in torment. And the face I saw on Sonny I’d never seen before. Everything had been burned out of it and at the same time, things usually hidden were being burned in by the fire and the fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there.
Then Creole stepped forward to remind them what they were playing was the blues. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys were up there keeping it new at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness and death in order to find new ways to make us listen. For while the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell; it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny’s blues. And Sonny played, filling the air with his life. But that life contained so many others. It was very beautiful because it was unhurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood at last that he could help us to be free if we would listen, and that he would never be free until we did.
The cross of Christ is God playing our blues, God being our blues, God risking ruin, destruction, madness and death in order to find new ways to make us listen—listen to the story of our lives and the lives of others, complete with all its undeserved suffering, its defeats and its deaths. To listen and perhaps to find that there is no place so low, so overwhelming, so down and out, so numb that God has not traveled there first, has not traveled there before us. God has played our blues, has been our blues.
But we’re not done yet, no we’re not done yet. For if you listen ever so carefully, ever so carefully, you will hear in the low, driving throb of these blues, the first few notes, high and haunting, of the song of Easter morn.
