Death on a Friday Afternoon by Richard John Neuhaus

First published: New York: Basic Books, 2000

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Biblical studies; meditation and contemplation; theology

Core issue(s):Atonement; the cross; death; hope; Jesus Christ; Lutherans and Lutheranism; sacrifice; salvation

Overview

Richard John Neuhaus first came to national prominence in the mid-1960’s when, as a Lutheran pastor, he participated in both the Civil Rights and antiwar movements. Later, after a much documented conversion to Roman Catholicism and ordination into the priesthood, he emerged as a staunchly conservative Church commentator on social and political issues. In the early 1990’s, Neuhaus survived a catastrophic health crisis; a tumor ruptured in his intestines, and several mishandled procedures led to further complications. That near-death experience encouraged the theologian to explore the implications of mortality and specifically the difficult mystery of a Christian death. Those speculations led Neuhaus to focus on the words Christ spoke during the three-hour public execution on the cross (Christianity, he points out, is alone in centering its faith on the death of its God). The seven passages, as recorded by the four Evangelists, are: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”; “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise”; “Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother”; “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”; “I thirst”; “It is finished”; and “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Neuhaus devotes a chapter to each utterance. Drawing on a wide range of relevant biblical passages and traditional scholarship, Neuhaus explicates the import of each passage and extends its argument to reveal the mysteries that are central to the cross, mysteries that Neuhaus contends are not designed to be resolved but rather contemplated until they yield not answers but wonder. His exegesis is directed particularly to contemporary Christians who have not sufficiently examined the Passion or who have been persuaded by the faddish optimism of New Age revisionism to embrace the joy of Easter at the expense of confronting the complicated love at the heart of the ghastly sacrifice on Calvary.

Neuhaus’s premise is that Christians must begin by accepting that they are all, by reason of their pride, implicated in the sin that demanded divine intervention. Meditation on the Crucifixion, thus, is not a morbid exercise in sadomasochism or a clinical study of victimhood. Rather it is a profound speculation on the vastness of God’s plan for his creation and how God determined to set right the fall of Adam, to reassert the joyful dependency of humanity (Neuhaus contends the sacrifice on Good Friday is meant to redeem all creation), and to celebrate the mercy and love of the Creator. Although revisionist readings of the Crucifixion often dismiss the subtleties of the act by seeing Christ as a God playacting at death or by seeing God the Father as an unreasonable, even sinister paterfamilias tormenting an innocent son, Neuhaus sees Good Friday as a powerful reminder that Christians have only their helplessness to offer to God. He uses the figures of Mary and the disciple John at the foot of the cross to suggest the opportunity for the faithful of all eras to witness the glory of Christ’s surrender and, there amid the evident pain and agony, to find the premise of a sustaining hope. Only by accepting that witnessing role (and not hurrying to the obvious joys of the Resurrection) can Christians begin to approach the surrender to death itself as a Christian experience.

Neuhaus is perhaps his most powerful when he explicates the apparent despair of Christ’s disconcerting cry of abandonment, drawn from Psalm 22, accusing God of forsaking him. Neuhaus, dismissing the appropriation of the line as a bumper sticker for postmodern alienation, returns the modern Christian to the fullest implications of those last agonizing moments. He argues that in those moments, Christ accepted his role as a creature, and his words mark a joyful, albeit difficult, surrender to a silent but loving God. Glory, Neuhaus finds, comes from obedience, a position at odds with modern feel-good self-aggrandizing Christianity. God, Neuhaus argues, is very much at Calvary, thus providing that act of uncompromising surrender its widest possible context. The responsibility of the modern Christian (which Neuhaus draws from Christ’s distressed call for drink) is not only to accept the mystery of the cross but also to witness to that mystery, to practice the zealous missionary protocol to extend the word of God, to thirst for souls with a fervor that Neuhaus sees as flagging since the close of the great era of Christian evangelizing more than a century ago.

Thus, when Christ, shortly before his death, proclaims, “It is finished,” Neuhaus says that, far from indicating resignation, the words indicate that the project of redemption has been fulfilled, that the sacrifice of Christ’s love signaled that God has again invested hope in the human project. It is an act that cannot be revoked. Far from a scapegoat, Christ has mended the relationship between humanity and God in a conspiracy of love conducted through the agency of the triune Christian God.

Christian Themes

Throughout the Christian era, the seven utterances of Christ on the cross have been, as Neuhaus points out in Death on a Friday Afternoon, the subject of numerous interpretations, Catholic and otherwise, ranging from Ludwig van Beethoven to Samuel Beckett, from James Joyce to Pope John Paul II. Given the stark confrontation with his own mortality and his long publishing career examining the troubling implications of Christianity in a contemporary culture unwilling, or as Neuhaus fears, uninterested, in accepting the fullest responsibilities of its faith, Neuhaus brings to the genre a singular voice that offers a reading of these words that although solidly girded by biblical scholarship is immediate and accessible. To establish its relevance, the argument draws from personal anecdotes and popular culture without abandoning its gravitas. Although in the 1980’s Neuhaus had established a reputation as an uncompromising archconservative columnist for Commonweal and as the editor of provocative critiques of modern culture, he offers these chapters not as scholarly exegeses or as incendiary diatribes but rather as occasions for reflection, arguing that only in pondering the essential mystery of the sacrifice at Calvary (a God accepting the ignominy of such a brutal and public execution) can a contemporary Christian begin to appreciate the gift of hope that is central to the Christian conception of the universe as creation.

Thus, there is nothing groundbreaking in Neuhaus’s commentaries. He places the Crucifixion at the core of the Christian story, grounded in the Jewish concept of atonement, and then locates the agony of Christ, rather than the Resurrection, as the defining act of redemption for humanity. His reading of the implications of the Crucifixion, specifically the obligation of Christians to accept complicity in the need for their own salvation (to gather, metaphorically, at the foot of the cross) and the obligation, in turn, to witness the power of Calvary to those still unconvinced of its centrality in human history, gains its impact by being offered to a contemporary nominally Christian world too fearful of death, too obsessed with ego, too enthralled by the fetching busyness of today, and too easily persuaded by theological readings that have softened the Crucifixion.

God is unknowable, Neuhaus concedes, but Christians are invited to approach the unfathomable mystery of the execution of Christ with patience and faith and to see there amid evident hopelessness the beginnings of Christians’ perfect surrender to God’s unfolding plan for salvation.

Sources for Further Study

Brown, Raymond. The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave—A Commentary on the Passion Narrative in the Four Gospels. New York: Doubleday, 1994. A standard work in the genre of Passion commentaries. Although Neuhaus draws on commentaries since Saint Augustine, Brown’s reading, a traditional exegesis, is a frequent subject of Neuhaus’s critique.

Neuhaus, Richard John. As I Lay Dying: Meditations upon Returning. New York: Perseus, 2002. An indispensable companion volume that brings together eschatological theology with personal testimony by exploring the implications of mortality and Christianity through Neuhaus’s own medical crisis.

Neuhaus, Richard John. Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy and the Splendor of Truth. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Neuhaus examines the state of the Catholic Church, especially after Vatican II, and describes why he became a priest.

“Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-.” Contemporary Authors Online. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006. Overview of Neuhaus’s spiritual journey from Lutheran pastor and political activist to archconservative voice of Catholicism. Includes helpful biographical timeline and bibliography.