Lt. Stefen Jasienski was a Polish soldier during World War II. Captured by the Nazis, he was imprisoned at Auschwitz and ultimately executed in 1944. But, Jasienski left behind a lasting testimony to something far greater than the Nazi war machine or even the power of death.
In his cell in Section 11, he scratched two images into the concrete walls. One is Christ crucified: Jesus hanging on a cross, dying in front of what appears to be one of the death camp’s buildings. The other engraving is an image of the sacred heart of Jesus. Jasienski carved a figure of Christ with long hair, beard, flowing robes. In the middle of Christ’s chest, is the shape of a heart, its edge formed not by thin lines like the rest of the carving, but by a wide border that gives the impression that the heart is glowing or radiating some power. And kneeling beside Christ, arms embracing his waist, literally clinging to his Savior, is the figure of Lt. Jasienski.
Hidden in the cells of Auschwitz, hidden in that place of suffering, death and evil, deep in the bowels of that hell on earth, is the Crucified Christ, suffering our pain, his heart filled to overflowing, almost bursting with Love.
This is one of the central truths of Good Friday: God is not far removed from our plight. God is not absent. Instead, in Jesus the Christ, God enters into human experience, shares our lot, in order to display God’s grace and love and to save us from sin and death. This is the point of the doctrine of incarnation spelled out at the opening of the Gospel of John: The Word has become flesh and dwelt among us. God has come to us; literally, in John’s Greek, God has pitched a tent among us, in the person of Jesus, the man of Nazareth. This Jewish carpenter is the fulfillment of that ancient hope for Immanuel, God with us. As one of us, Jesus lived as we do, knowing joys and sorrows, and he died as we all must, though in a particularly tragic and horrible way.
But, Christ does not suffer because he must. He does not suffer because he is fated to suffer or because God requires someone to suffer for our sins. Jesus Christ suffers, says Douglas John Hall, “because there is suffering—that is, because God’s creatures, including human beings, are already suffering, because ‘the whole creation groans.’” [Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context, 152] The Incarnation is the supreme act of Divine solidarity with us and with all creation. In choosing to become human, Christ willingly subjects himself to “the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that Flesh is heir to.” [Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I] More than this, Jesus chooses to die. His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane—“let this cup pass from me…nevertheless not my will but thine be done”—shows that he was free to choose another course. But he does not; he chooses to suffer for us and our salvation.
Further, we may say, he died because of how he lived. His whole life was rooted in deep love of God and humanity. All he did grew out of this love. He preached it and he lived it out in his forgiveness of sinners, his healing of the sick, and his fellowship with the outcasts. This way of living ultimately led to his death on the cross because his words and deeds, indeed his very being was an expression of God’s grace and God’s authority—and both the religious and the political leaders were threatened by it. In this world marred by sin, the love and grace of God come as a challenge to our comfortable status quo and we resist, often violently. This is exactly what the chief priests and Pilate did; they acted to squash a threat to their power, a threat to the authority of the religious leaders and a threat to the rule of Rome. The way of Jesus was a challenge to the ways of the world. So, Jesus died because he loved, and the crucifixion is the concrete demonstration of the scandalous depths of that love—“God would rather die than stop loving us!” [Tom Graves, said in a Philosophy of Religion Lecture at BTSR in Fall 1996].
Thus, Good Friday tells us that God is to be found squarely in the middle of our suffering: the cross of Christ vividly declares that God suffers with and for us. God, observed Martin Luther, is hidden in suffering, hidden not just in the death, but also in the compassionate living, of Jesus. God’s love is a self-giving love that reaches out to us. It does not avoid suffering, but embraces the suffering that is part and parcel of both love and life so that God can embrace us with reconciliation, healing and hope. It is a power from which nothing in life or death can separate us. Just as God is present in the suffering of Christ on the cross, this same Crucified God is present with us as help and hope in our suffering. Lt. Stephen Jasienski’s carvings of Christ bear witness to the radical nature of this truth—that not even the hell of an Auschwitz can separate us from God’s love. It is that Divine love, made flesh in Jesus who was crucified, that Jasienski portrayed on the walls of his cell. For the God who is revealed in Christ is no stranger to the ugliness of human sin or to death. Knowing this truth and trusting this love, Jasienski clung to Christ.
It was also that same Divine love that David Brown[1] clung too in his own time of unutterable pain and loss. David lost his 14 year old son in a tragic accident. He was utterly devastated, almost beside himself with grief. Not long after the funeral, David went to a Roman Catholic bookstore. There he purchased a crucifix, a cross with Jesus, bloodied, beaten and dead, hanging upon it. When he got home, he grabbed a hammer and a nail, went to the kitchen, and hung the crucifix on the wall above the seat in which his son had always sat. Each evening, when his eyes fell on that empty chair, he lifted them up so that they fell upon Christ hanging dead on the cross. And David remembered that God knew his pain. God too had suffered terrible grief. God too had endured the death of a Son. [Jürgen Moltmann The crucifix did not take away David’s pain or explain his loss. But it gave him hope, strength and comfort. It reminded him that he was not alone, that Christ, the crucified and resurrected one, was with him. Many years later, that crucifix still hung on the wall, a constant reminder of the unfailing presence of God’s love, even in the midst of his pain. [Martin Theilen, What’s the Least I Can Believe and Still Be a Christian? A Guide to What Matters Most, 115]
In Jesus, we see that God does not abandon us. Phillip Krey observes, “In the suffering, crucifixion and death of Jesus, God is revealed where one would least expect to find God—on a cross and sealed in the grave. Because God is found there, we know where God may be found in our own lives: when we feel abandoned by God, when we are attacked by [sin and evil], when we find ourselves in hell.” [“Holy Saturday: Matt 27.57-66,” Feasting on the Word: Year B, Vol. 2, 332] The crucified God is with us in the midst of our suffering. In Christ, God enters into our human state of sin and suffering to help us, to deliver us, to save us. On the cross of Christ, says James Howell, “God gathers up all the violence and bloodshed of history and shares our forsakenness, [taking upon God’s self] our pain and suffering, [and then] shatter[ing] the specter of evil and the finality of death through his resurrection on the third day.” [Servants, Misfits and Martyrs, 172]
This then is the good news of Good Friday: at the very heart of God is a self-giving love that suffers with us and for us. “The crucifixion is … the very revelation of the heart of God,” [James Howell, Servants, Misfits and Martyrs, 172] the revelation of a love that compels God to come to us, to share in our suffering, so that it may be overcome and we may be saved from sin and death and raised up to live abundant lives in imitation of God’s love.
So let us, like Lt. Stefen Jasienski and David Brown, cling to the crucified Christ. Let us cling to Jesus, who knows our pain, our sin, our suffering and our death. Let us cling to the One whose heart is overflowing with God’s love, a love that is stronger than death and more fierce than the grave. Amen.
[1]While the story is true, I have made up David’s last name to avoid confusion with King David.