Reflection on Holy Friday – The Vulgarity of The Cross
I was really too busy this Lent to allow myself any Sabbath.
But god is merciful, I found opportunities, mostly by circumstances which forced me, to sit back and reflect on Holy Friday (Good Friday).
The Cross I captured on my camera on Holy Friday
I found more and more we are getting used to a domesticated Christianity, one which addresses here and there our little sins but doesn’t want to have anything to do with the “real world out there”. It was as if we have forgotten the vulgarity of the Cross, a stumbling block to some, total absurdity to some. Christianity no longer offences anyone anymore. The Cross has lost its power to challenge and to provoke. We prefer the mild meek lamb to the revolutionary.
Have we exchanged the image of the prolektarian par excellence who has nowhere to lay his head for the idol of middle-class cynism? Have we traded the vulgar religion of a bastard who died a criminal for the decency of Caesar’s court?
Where is the counter-power-to-be within the Church? Let us remember Johan Baptist Metz - it was not between two candles on the altar he was crucified. No, the Crucified One was crucified between two rebel mercenaries.
Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.
Every now and then, we hear preachers said god could have used another way. Perhaps we may never know for sure, on this side of heaven, why exactly The Cross? But if I may make a guess, other than the accidental details of history, the Cross was, at Jesus’ time, the ultimate (and profoundly vulgar) icon of oppression.
This is no suprise, god has always been on the side of the poor and the oppressed. The Crucified One, who turned out to be the Crucified God was the ultimate identification of the compassionate Deity with the suffering Humanity. God was doing first and foremost on the Cross a living out the “i-anyone-of-you-does-this-to-the-least-of-them-you-are-doing-it-to-me” theology.
It was the sacred infused into the secular, divine embracing the vulgar, god standing together with man, the least of them, the bullied, the marginalized, the oppressed, the poor.
God was not afraid to get his hands dirty to go down to the filth of the earth whose righteousness are as good as dungs (or if you like King Jame’s English, filthy rags). Should we be?
I am a true-blood Penang "kia" (son of Penang) who love everything about my beautiful home-state, well, almost everything. :)
Formerly I served as the Special Assistant to the Penang State Executive Councillor (State-level ministerial post) in charge of Youth and Sports. I am now pursuing an MA in Philosophy at a local university.
I am also the Executive Secretary of the Network of Social Democracy in Asia (www.socdem.asia) and sit on the committee of the State-sponsored Good Governance and Gender Equality Society (3Gs). Since 2007, I also served in various capacities in the office of the Hon' Madam Chong Eng, a leading Malaysian woman Parliamentarian.
Politically, I had the privilege to help manage four successful political campaigns since 2007 and was involved in planning, campaigning and monitoring of eight state and federal level elections in Malaysia.
I am engaged with the love of my life, Jorin. Both of us worship at the Bukit Mertajam Gospel Centre.
