Good Friday Santo

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace.

In this world you will have trouble. But take heart!

I have overcome the world.”

John 17:33

As a dislocated traveler on the other side of the terrestrial orb, all of the holidays that we have celebrated in Argentina have left me feeling rather out of joint. My summertime Christmas, as you may remember, turned the familial celebration from inside to outdoors, and, in the interest of comfort, conviviality, and not dying of dehydration or water-shortage related ailments moved from day to night. While we may immediately recognize that the meals and rituals that families and communities celebrate in all corners of the Western Hemisphere in the name of joyful celebration and offering on December 24/25 take on a variety of forms depending on culture, I only realized during my time in Argentina that it also depends on climate (itself a determinant of culture). I asked the question “Do people tend to enjoy celebrations in hot or cold climates more?” and its corollary: “Do more people go to parties when it’s hot or cold?”. After a couple of comments from my stateside collaborators, my hypotheses on these questions were all cast in doubt and I ultimately threw up my hands and thanked God for the opportunity to develop a sharper sensitivity to the role of climate and weather in cultural production (translation: I’m even more curious about the way the weather affects the way we party.)

After passing through the Christmas season in a somewhat hazy state, product of the new experiences and observations as well as a strange low-grade fever that Angela and I passed back and forth for a couple of weeks, I eagerly awaited Lent for more new symbolism and rituals. Our Lent, however, has been less than conventional, even by Argentine standards. We missed an Ash Wednesday celebration (miercoles de cenizas), despite the fact that we were at a protestant seminary at a conference on Gender in the Old Testament. For some reason, in the dense gathering of pastors and church leaders from around the country nobody thought of organizing a local Ash Wednesday celebration (perhaps because most of these church leaders went back to their home congregations to hold services there, leaving us out of town people to fend for ourselves).

Without the usual Ash Wednesday service, I only slowly and partially entered into the Lenten frame of mind, one that for the typical Lutheran (dare I say, protestant, or Christian?) is a time of reflection and waiting. We censor our speech and our actions with an awareness that 1) most of what we do is a sin and our sins are about to cost Jesus his life; 2) Jesus and the historical Jewish communities went through similar periods of discernment; and 3) struggle and sacrifice are a part of the world, even if they are not part of the discourse of consumption-driven contemporary life, so we should consciously makes ourselves struggle at least a little bit just to see what its like. I know that some readers, some theology students especially, may feel like this is unjust to the Lutheran community, but I think it captures the paradoxical depth and superficiality of Lenten rituals quite nicely.

In some parts of Latin America, Lent is an intense time to be religious (religious = Catholic) because popular and personal struggles against injustice and marginalization intersect with the holy narrative and as Lenten reflection moves people to identify with Jesus’ sacrifice, hopes for salvation and resolution become accentuated. The need for salvation is then celebrated in extravagant ceremonies, processions and spectacles that require acres of flowers and fabric to properly equip. Resistencia is not one of these spiritual centers. While Buenos Aires and Asunción, Paraguay, are famed for their Semana Santa celebrations, Resistencia has maintained a pretty low profile. When I casually ask friends about Lenten and Easter traditions, they either blankly look back at me or say “Nada”. Despite the fact that a stereotypical anthropological assessment would be quite boring, our Good Friday was anything but.

Semana Santa is a traditional Christian celebration that stretches from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday, seven days of intense physical symbolism that reenact/remind/recall Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem after three years of ambulant ministry and his subsequent arrest, trial, and crucifixion at the hands of angry Jewish leaders and their worried Roman custodians. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of Holy Week in the Lutheran tradition are infrequently celebrated, but the local Catholic church held mass everyday, reading passages about Jesus’ last conversations with his followers before his tragic sacrifice would unfold. Maundy Thursday (what does Maundy mean?) is the paradoxically jubilant/morose celebration of Jesus’ last hours with his disciples, sharing with them the santa cena (Holy Communion, Last Supper, the Bread and the Wine) before wandering out to the olive grove to be arrested after Judas’ treacherous kiss. After a long night of trials, arguments, accusations, denials, parabolic answers and violent reprisals, the Good Friday dawn breaks and Jesus’ is presented to the Roman government. Despite Pilate’s best attempts to convince the Jewish leaders that what they were doing didn’t make any sense, he orders Jesus to be crucified in order to pacify a mob that was becoming increasingly agitated and, perhaps, revolutionary. This is how it came to pass that Jesus of Nazareth was taken to Golgotha to suffer a tortuous death on a cross alongside convicted criminals, the same sequence of events that we remember on Good Friday, the most morbid and depressed festival in the Church calendar. Gracias a Dios, the story isn’t left off here, but continues on to Easter Sunday, when Jesus’ body disappears from the tomb and Mary Magdalene delivers the good news about his resurrection and triumph over sin and death to the despairing (and mostly clueless) disciples.

The church has adopted a number of symbols and rituals in order to communicate the emotive and spiritual importance of all of these events, including the waving of palm branches and physically moving processionals, the dismantling of the altar on Maundy Thursday, the washing of feet, the stations of the cross (otherwise known as the Passion), covering windows with blackout sheets, singing single verses of hymns over several days to focus on the specific meaning (and relative difference) between the sentiments contained in the lyrics, etc. The range of symbolism and its relatively rapid development from joy to pain and back to joy (situated in a broader narrative of struggles for justice and understanding), has fascinated me from a very early age, making Holy Week one of my favorite events in the Church year, and while this year my Lenten experience was quite different from past years, Holy Week has not failed to challenge my assumptions about the Church and its place in the world.

This story should properly begin on Jueves santo, Maundy Thursday (seriously, what does Maundy mean?). When I went out to the barrio on Thursday afternoon, I was distracted by my somewhat unproductive day and concerns about what was going to be expected of me when I got out to the mission (I had no idea). After playing with the kids for a while, cleaning up a lot of spilled paint, eating some wonderful arroz con leche and closing up the after-school program, Angela and I wandered over to the Paez household, a wonderfully kind family comprised of four energetic kids that are always at the mission with us and their compassionate parents. After throwing around a Frisbee under the streetlight and twirling the kids around a bit, we went back to the mission to find the pastor ready for the service. As we got started, I was surprised to see that the small chapel filled up! Women and children from around the neighborhood showed up and filled up the eight benches; people who come every week sat next to their friends and neighbors that we usually just see out in the street. We had over twenty worshippers, dressed up and ready to worship together as a community. My knowledge of Latin and Greek isn’t very profound, but I was struck by the relationship between the words “community” and “communion” (or rather, between comunidad y comunión, but it makes sense in translation too). Gathering together, in common conditions and with similar hopes for salvation, we consciously and willfully come together through rituals, a kind of reciprocal relationship in which the people and the ritual work together to overcome differences in opinion and individual circumstances. As we left the chapel in silence after dismantling the altar, the seriousness of the moment didn’t linger long, and the laughter of the many children playing outside in the street accentuated the joy of seeing each other and many smiles and hugs and kisses were exchanged before retiring for the evening.

Now, it was Good Friday. After sucking down some mate to get our bodies and minds organically going in the morning, we headed out to the bus stop and joined the one other person on her way towards the barrio. Resistencia was, for all intents and purposes, shut down. Everything except for a few megabusinesses (Carrefour, the local pharmacy chain) was closed for viernes santo. Not even the local paper came out. The desertedness of the morning’s metropolitan vista was simultaneously discomforting and wholesome, like something out of a body-snatchers movie that made a town look completely normal. I was happy to see that a Christian observance was so important to so many people, but the way that that impact manifested itself was like something I had never seen before, Christianity taking people out of the world instead of committing them to it. Or maybe, instead, it was committing them to a different kind of world, one in which their families, neighbors and personal well-being took precedence over bill-paying and consumerism, one in which they didn’t need to travel across town to be at peace. Perhaps even in a globalized world staying home isn’t sitting out.

After a rather solitary walk from the bus stop to the mission, Angela assembled her flute and ran through some hymns with Raul as several people arrived for the service. While not quite as packed as the night before, the benches creaked under the shifting weight of several women and children, a few were apparently new to the chapel. The notes from Angela’s flute gave life to a celebration of death in a paradox that I’m sure wasn’t lost on anyone, as joy and sorrow mixed together under the sun (the mission celebrates weekend services on Saturday nights, so Maundy Thursday felt like the norm while Good Friday morning was oddly illuminated). To complete the picture, the service was punctuated by the entrance, exit and expectation of several barrio dogs.

The missionary experience as part of the ELCA is an odd one because it takes smart, capable and willing people that are used to being in control and situates them in a minefield of power relationships that requires a commitment to understanding interpersonal and international relationships. One of the missions of the YAGM program specifically is to equip young Lutheran leaders with the knowledge and theology produced by their companion churches, i.e. how Argentina’s view of the Good News and how it may or may not play out with and/or around a US context. I explain this to highlight the simple fact that Good Friday is Argentine.

Without embarking on his multipart sermons as usual, Pastor Raul highlighted the similarities between Jesus’ crucifixion and the desaparecidos of the last military dictatorship. Some 30,000 people were killed and disappeared by government men driving Ford Falcons from 1976 to 1983, with the complicity and approval of the US government’s anti-communist, neoliberal foreign policy (for more reading on this, see Naomi Klein’s fantastic The Shock Doctrine). Holding a thin, medium-sized wooden cross in his hands, Raul reminded the congregation of their shared experience of a stone-faced government structure that was responsible for killing progressive, justice-minded people in the name of keeping the peace, and the wounds that such a policy had left on generations of Argentines. Impunity and incompetency in government, fueled by mistrust, apathy and cynicism in the populace, unable to reinvest their spirits in the way that the young Argentines of the 1970s had done. These people know what it was like to witness the crucifixion and as we sat there in the chapel, my feeling of sorrow was punctuated in two ways: first by the loud explosions of sound that interrupted the gospel reading as kids outside through rocks onto the tin roof of the mission, a frequent expression of destructive boredom that replaces the profound emptiness of marginalized poverty with a brief moment of destructive productivity, and second, by the vision of the barrio and others surrounding it: people slowly walking and riding bikes, at the same time hopelessly and hopefully looking up to see a passing car, curious about where its coming from and where its going, thinking about what they have to do, but painfully aware that they don’t have the time or resources to get it all done.

After spending the afternoon with the Pastor and his wife, on the way home Angela and I had another vision of Good Friday, also distinctly Argentine, but in a very different way. In the Plaza 25 de mayo, the four square-block central square of Resistencia, a team of youthful actors were processing the Stations of the Cross, the vía crucial, accompanied by music and narration from loudspeakers wired up the light posts. Surrounded by hundreds young adults, families with children, most perched on papa’s shoulders, and older couples pouring mate as they walked, the Passion story became an odd spectacle of violence and repression with a very different political bent. Whereas Raul’s message in the morning service at the mission reminded the people that they had suffered pain at the hands of an unjust government that had marginalized them historically and presently, the band of young men clad in cardboard armor and shepherd-like sheets distanced the crowd from any experience of pain and suffering, offering as a substitute the pity for an actor that suffered nothing more than fake floggings at the hands of over-committed Roman impersonators. It might help to note hear that the vía crucial had to pass in front of the provincial government offices in its final phases, and that the cathedral and final site of the procession was recently opened after several months of renovations financed by the provincial coffers, and personally approved by the governor in the early days of Holy Week. This kind of ecclesial-official collaboration may not be novel or even necessarily harmful, but it certainly struck me as an odd juxtaposition of images on a day that I had thought Argentines understood all too well.

Ultimately, though, the two Argentine Good Fridays reveal the struggle that contemporary Christians have with Jesus’ sacrifice: was his suffering human or divine? Was he predestined to be tortured, or does his crucifixion serve as a lesson for social justice? Was he killed by Jews or Gentiles, his own or his enemies? The Easter story should earn a lot of postmodernity points for insinuating these questions without giving too many fixed answers, emphasizing instead the movement from pain to resolution. How we get there and how we got here, we will probably never know. But before the stone gets rolled away, it keeps hope locked up for a few days, and while it may be uncomfortable, it’s a common reality for billions of people around the world. The better we understand it, the more we experience it, the better we can relate with those individuals, which is what Jesus instructs his disciples to do before his ascension: go forth and baptize, make disciples and teach. We can only accomplish those tasks if we can establish trust, which first requires understanding, sympathy and compassion.