The Weakness of the Short Distance Pilot

With a sincere tip of the hat to Jim Munroe:

Jim O’Neill was sixty-five years old when his Good Friday moment occurred. The year was 2008, the weather sunny as Jim strapped into his Cessna airplane for a solo flight. His life was in pretty good shape at the time, and he felt strong and happy during takeoff. Forty minutes into the flight — from Glasgow, Scotland, to Colchester, England — something alarming happened. All of a sudden, his vision failed. It was like a Venetian blind descended over his eyes, and he could not see a thing. At first, he thought that the sun had just momentarily blinded him. But he soon realized that it was much worse. He had suffered a stroke. Although he felt no pain, everything was a complete blur. Sitting there in midair, I can only imagine the panic he must’ve experienced.

In an instant, his life went from strength to weakness, from self-sufficiency to free fall.

Human weakness is on full display on Good Friday. By that I mean not only bodily weakness — that’s part of it — but weakness of spirit, too. It is a day shaped by faltering resolve and lack of courage.

For example, the disciples of Jesus. At the start of Holy Week, they enter Jerusalem as a unit, strong and together. Three of them tell Jesus that they’ll stick with him through thick and thin. Days later, when Jesus needs them most, they fall asleep. Then there’s Peter, who assures Jesus of his devotion and loyalty yet ends the week having denied his Lord three times. And that’s without saying anything about Judas.

Those are far from the only demonstrations of weakness we find in the Passion readings. What about Pilate? The text goes to great pains to trace the man’s losing battle (with himself). We watch as he not only compromises his principles but violates his office, succumbing to crowd pressure and doing what’s politically expedient instead of what’s right. I wonder if Bob Dylan was thinking about Pilate when he sang, “You always said people don’t do what they believe in / They just do what’s most convenient, then they repent.”

Today, we tend to romanticize weakness. Maybe we rebrand it as vulnerability or frailty. Maybe we trumpet our conviction that weakness is grounds for compassion rather than judgment. The last thing any decent person wants to do is penalize another for their weakness. This is a thoroughly Christian impulse, the sort that would make Tom Holland proud, and I sympathize with it greatly.

And yet, the human weaknesses we witness in the Passion account are not romantic. Nor are they benign. The weakness of these men causes real damage. The consequence isn’t merely that justice is miscarried but that the Son of God is brutally killed.

Naturally there is a temptation to distance ourselves from those men. Yet the same blood runs through our veins. Our weaknesses tell our story far more reliably than our strengths. I think of a man I know with a PhD and heaps of God-given talent who cannot stop drinking. I have watched his weakness for booze destroy his marriage and his career. I think of his daughter, who harbors far more resentment toward her enabler mother than her addict father. She detests what she sees as the weakness in staying in the marriage and not protecting her kids.

Weakness is everywhere, and addiction is a visceral case in point. I read a report this week that when states legalize sports gambling, bankruptcies go up 20–35%, mostly among young men. Moreover, gambling addiction correlates to the highest suicide rate of any traditional vices, since it is so easy to hide. Deaths of despair among young men have gone up so dramatically since 2004 that we’ve lost an incremental 400,000 men, which is as many American soldiers as we lost in WWII. These guys are simply not strong enough to resist the siren call of Fanduels or whatever it may be. The result of that weakness is horrific.

Today we remember that Christ himself was familiar with weakness. We read how, during Holy Week, he was shuffled from person to person, authority figure to authority figure, like someone without any rights or agency. Moreover, he was demeaned and treated as a criminal — beaten, imprisoned, ridiculed, crucified. The Jesus of Good Friday is not Zeus or Caesar or Superman. He is not the God of wish fulfillment; He is who Isaiah calls the suffering servant.

In the liturgy our church follows from the Book of Common Prayer, the prayer before Communion spells out how God deals with human weakness — by becoming weak himself:

When we had fallen into sin and become subject to evil and death, you, in your mercy, sent Jesus Christ, your only and eternal Son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all. He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.

Back to Jim O’Neill and his personal Good Friday. As he hangs there in mid-air, sight darkened, heart panicking with certain death before him, the story takes an unexpected turn.

Somehow, in response to Jim’s emergency, air traffic controllers had contacted a Royal Air Force pilot named Paul Gerrard. Gerrard brings his own plane to within five hundred feet of O’Neill’s plane, and begins to talk to Jim. BBC News in England made available the recording of the final minutes of O’Neill’s flight. Here is exactly what Paul Gerard says.

You’ve missed the runway this time … Let’s start another gentle right-hand turn … Keep the right turn coming … Roll out left …  Left again, left again … Keep coming down … Turn left, turn left … Can you see the runway now? …

So you cannot see the runway? … Keep coming down … Keep coming down … And then finally, “You are safe to land.”

Jim O’Neill touched down in a near-perfect landing.

On Good Friday we acknowledge the inescapability of human weakness. We acknowledge the terminal consequence of that weakness, the incremental effect that our minor betrayals and major addictions have on the world and our own lives. We lament the pain and the damage our weaknesses cause — recognizing that Christ’s outstretched arms would not have been nailed to the cross were our species built of stronger stuff. That includes you and me.

Yet we also acknowledge the possibility of a God who does not shy away from our weakness but gambles his own life to rescue those in free fall. Who comes to us with those same open arms, as if to say, You are safe to land. Amen.