Holy Thursday
Dr. Yolanda Pierce finds both comfort and challenge in the spiritual “Were You There?,” which invites listeners to reflect on how they are present to Jesus’s death on the cross:
In that small Baptist church where I was the invited preacher for Palm Sunday, the choir sang, “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord)?” That beloved spiritual caused me to reflect theologically on the power of showing up and on the experience of the radical presence of God the song embodies….
More than two thousand years removed from the reality of Jesus’s crucifixion, this spiritual … stresses the reality of the current moment by daring to ask the listener, “Were you there?” With this emphasis on “you”—on those of us who could not have been physically present—it reminds us that the believer still needs to show up at the foot of the cross and to identify with the radical act of Jesus’s death and resurrection.
Pierce names examples of suffering where we are called to bring our presence and seek justice:
There is fullness of life when you show up, fully present, when people are suffering and where people are bearing the burdens of their own crosses. “Were You There?” is a reminder that to be fully present with the whole of humanity does not require us to enter the sanctuary or walk across the threshold of a church. The cross, Calvary, is a site of public spectacle. The rhetorical question “Were you there?” signifies the real pressing question about whether you will be present for lost and hurting generations.
To be present is to be wherever there is need. Were you there when the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina or when the earthquake shook Haiti? Will you be there when the next natural disaster strikes and the most vulnerable cannot find shelter?…
To be present is to be where people are suffering. Were you there among the hungry and the homeless, those in search of both their spiritual and physical daily bread?… Or will you cross to the other side of the street?
To be present is to be at the front lines of the fight for justice. Were you there in Selma and Birmingham, risking the dogs and the water hoses? Will you be there on Capitol Hill to fight for health care for the uninsured? Will you be there at your senator’s office to protest the cuts to educational funding even as another several billion dollars are appropriated to fight unjust wars?
The lyrics of “Were You There?” continue with the words “Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble! Tremble! Tremble!” I wonder whether we have lost our ability to tremble—to be deeply affected —in the face of injustice. I wonder whether we no longer tremble in the presence of a holy God who requires us to do the work of justice.
Reference:
Yolanda Pierce, In My Grandmother’s House: Black Women, Faith, and the Stories We Inherit (Broadleaf Books, 2023), 83, 84–86.
Image credit and inspiration: Vaishak Pilai, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, India, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The crude cross etched into the wall becomes the mark of our human impulse to name a scapegoat, revealing how easily we point toward another what we cannot bear in ourselves.
Story from Our Community:
I have long struggled with the image of Jesus “dying to save us,” but I have also struggled to describe what Jesus’s crucifixion means to me. Ineptly my consciousness settled on Jesus’s death as re-opening humanity to God’s intention of fullness for life. In the meditation from Cynthia Bourgeault, I read words that make sense of what I try to grasp: “The key lies in … reading Jesus’s life as a sacrament: a sacred mystery whose real purpose is not to arouse empathy but to create empowerment.”
—Shona H.
