Tag Archives: Good Friday

Good Friday

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You notice, don’t you, the anniversaries of important events? Not just weddings and birthdays, but funerals, anniversaries of difficult diagnoses, the dates when tragedy struck or an accident happened. Our bodies remember, too. 

And so I find it’s not a surprise that Holy Week and especially Good Friday, feels heavy the world over. There’s a cosmic echo we just can’t shake, this ultimate tension that is imprinted on our internal calendars, on the time keeping of the whole world; we know in a deep part of us that something happened, something big, on this day. 

Today we remember and re-enact the pivotal moment of time. Two thousand years ago, today was an experiment. What would happen if evil killed God? What would happen if God didn’t use his God-power and just stayed, just died, along with us?

The love of God incarnate had never been tested this way. What would happen to the fabric of the universe? Would God’s love win? What would that winning look like? 

It didn’t look the way the disciples assumed, with swords and uprising and political revolution. It didn’t look like the Pharisees expected either, with peaceable conformity and cultural-convention-concerned movements. I wonder if it is the way that we suppose it is, either. I wonder whether the hints of resurrection in our own lives, whether the victory of God in our  midst, is in a form that we recognize and celebrate and follow. 

I’ll be honest, brothers and sisters. The odds aren’t in our favor. More often than not in Scripture, the people have it all backwards. More often than not in Scripture, the disciples get it all absolutely wrong. More often than not in Scripture, the prophets are murderd and the world turns away from the truth and the principalities and powers and contemporary victories are on the side opposite God. 

Indeed, in the end, on this day, Good Friday, the disciples abandon Jesus. Peter denies Jesus three times. At Golgotha, there were the women, and according to John’s account, himself as well. All like sheep had gone astray, each one to his own way, and he bore on himself the iniquity of them all. 

How could it be that winning, that victory, could look like death on a cross? This is not at all how it ought to have been. Power is security and luxury and leisure. These are the rewards for work well-done. That’s the lesson that the Pharisees took from the Old Testament, surely. But that’s not the message that Jesus bears. 

Jesus’ method is the same as his message, and the God revealed in Jesus Christ came to be with us. For thirty years, for 90% of his life, he spent his time just being. Growing up with friends and loved ones in Nazareth. Learning the family trade from Joseph his father. Going to synagogue and growing in wisdom and serving his community. He spent 9% of his life, those three years of itinerant preaching, teaching and healing – some call it his active ministry, but I wonder whether perhaps the whole of his life is an active ministry. And when he was in Jerusalem, when he was on the cross, he did the bit that only God could do, no human could endure the cross for our sake, but him. He stretched wide his arms upon the cross that everyone might come within the reach of his saving embrace. 

We see God’s love in this: no matter the cost, God in Jesus Christ stayed with us. Even when death came to pierce his hands and feet, Jesus would not abandon humanity. Even when he was ridiculed and striped and given the death of a criminal, Jesus did not call upon the powers at his disposal to save himself – because to do so would be to abandon his humanity, to pull the God card and not stay with us as his creation to the very end. 

On that Friday afternoon two thousand years ago, the world ended and we feel its echo, its grief, even today. Everyone wondered then: is this what winning looks like? Perhaps we still wonder today – is this all there is, is this what winning looks like? Our bits of grief rub up against this most grievous day, our pain at brokenness, illness, injustice, loneliness in our lives, is irritated and cracked open at Jesus’s sacrifice this day. Grief touches grief, and there is no day in the history of the world more full of grief than this one. The fears and sadness and wrongness of all the world is held by Jesus’ arms today. 

And back then, on that hill outside Jerusalem, even those who believed that somehow God would make good of this tragedy could not imagine how to come out the other side of this darkness. 

And maybe that’s you today. Maybe you wonder how you will come out the other side of this darkness. Maybe the way ahead is just pitch and obstacles and grief too deep for words. Here is the good news for you: God has been there, too. God is there with you now. God will lead you through this darkness and  oblivion because he has trod this path before and it does not scare him. He has overcome death and brought life, and he will do the same for you in whatever temporal battle you are facing today, and at the end of your own life, and at the end of the life of the world. 

my view in Easter

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just over a year ago, a clergy colleague said to me, “You’ve got to go through Good Friday in order to get to Easter Sunday.”

I’ve known since last April that this year’s Holy Week and Easter would be a turning point for me; last April, I had a very painful ending to a job and place I had started to love very much, and this last year has been a trudging road toward a new, good normal.  It’s not that I’ve necessarily arrived somewhere now here in Easter week, but that Lent and Holy Week were a big looming hill that I’ve crested–April 2014, and though I’m aware enough of God’s work to keep me dependent on Him, I feel like I can see beyond for a little ways, and oh my goodness, is the view lovely.  I want to share a bit of my view.

Last June, I showed up on Trinity’s doorstep bedraggled, emotionally and spiritually.  I’ve spent a lot of my first year trying to “balance” self-protection (having suffered deep burns in my formative first year of full-time ministry) and priestly vocation.  Parishioners did not take offense, but patiently loved me, offered themselves, gave encouragement–they showed up.  On Sunday, as I walked in procession through these dear people, I realized how I’d fallen in love with them; how their love had given me balm to heal.  They showed me that even in the midst of pain, the best way to be is honest and real and unprotected–“balance” as such doesn’t exist, and ought not be sought.

As a two-clergy family, we have to work hard to find non-“work” friends.  It’s a good thing that most of our community comes from our churches, but it’s also comforting, on the road to healing, to have a few friends who you know truly only put up with you because they really do like you for you (this is my own trust issue, not a commentary on the faithful friends I’ve been given through Trinity).  The first time one of these now-friends said, “Hey lady, you’re looking different today; you doing okay?”  I almost cried & hugged her.  Someone who had no social contract to notice me decided to notice anyway (it happened to be Ash Wednesday, so yes, I was a little tired).

Less than a week has passed, and already I’ve been shaken to the realization that it’s not a storm that I’ve come through and left on the other side, but a shift into a new way of being.  In doggedly pursuing healing in the last year, I’ve been learning to notice things–notice and relish the faces in the Easter Day crowd who you’d last seen pained and in hospital; notice and celebrate the tears welling up while you process through the middle of this loving crowd who has shown you Jesus; notice and be curious about the super-tight feeling in your stomach that won’t go away–don’t try to figure everything out, or to label every passing experience, just notice it, be present to it, say “Hello, you’re here right now, and I’m here, too.”

This is a more vivid, larger, and more painful way to live, being present.  But that’s what God is about.  God is so determined to be present with us that he came to sit with humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, and he continues to be present with us through the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Comforter comforts us in all our troubles so that we may comfort those with the comfort we ourselves have received from God (something like 2 Cor. 1:4).

 

Jesus stays, Jesus stays.

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“Crucify him!  Crucify him!”

Last Sunday, we played our part, joining in the dramatic reading of the events leading up to Jesus’ death.  We yelled “Let him be crucified!” along with the jealous crowd (Matthew 27).  Someone told me afterward that she always waffles about whether or not to say those words out loud with the rest of the congregation; it makes her uncomfortable, and it just sounds so horrible.  I knew what she meant–I closed my eyes this year when I joined in the shout; I just couldn’t bear seeing the angry crowd in front of me, it felt so real.

The horror is that it is real.  In dozens of ways, we shout “Crucify him!” every day.  When we respond in anger, when we deceive and rationalize, choosing the easy way out instead of the truth, we turn our backs on the reality that God offers us.  It’s like throwing God’s playbook into the trash and letting the door slam as we walk away.  We insist on our own way and our own wisdom, just like Adam and Eve in the garden, just like Jesus’ disciples who were scattered in Gethsemane’s garden–just like every human throughout time; except for Jesus himself.

What a strange God we worship.  What kind of God leaves his abode to come down to this broken place called earth?  Once arrived, what kind of God takes on the limitations and stresses of human life, living inside the confines of a human being?  As a human, what kind of God endures a fraudulent trial leading to trumped-up death charges and a humiliating spectacle of an execution? What kind of life is that? What is he revealing to us about the truth of love?

As Jesus hangs on the cross (as he did at this very hour), people mock him; someone asks, “If you saved others, why can’t you save yourself?”  Another says, “If you’re really God, the way you say you are, why don’t you come down?  If you did, we’d surely believe you then!”  Can you imagine the temptation Jesus might have faced?  Indeed, in the garden with his disciples the night before, he has already laid his cards out with his Father, begging that he not actually have to go through with the whole thing, desperate to find another way out.

Abandoned and hanging on a cross, Jesus, the Son of God, stayed.  While he was spit on, ridiculed, beaten, and nailed, he refused to turn his back on the people who were torturing him.  Jesus never pulled the release valve, Jesus never left us.  He was committed to showing humanity what love means by never turning his back on us even if that meant that he would have to die.  There was finally nothing else left for Evil to try except to force God’s hand by threatening him with death if he didn’t give up on people.  Jesus stayed.

The same crowds who had shouted a few days earlier that he was their hero turned quickly into the angry, jealous crowds who pushed at him to crack and then turned their backs to let him die. How often do we experience the same swift change in our lives?  Our best friend suddenly becomes our most effective attacker; our well-ordered life is shaken into a disaster; the most reliable part of our day is ripped out from under us, leaving a gaping hole.  We all suffer abandonment that leaves us wondering which way is up.

Though we may not know which way is up, or how to keep moving through the mess of life, or how to withstand the attacks of someone we love, Jesus has shown that God will stay right next to us.  Staying meant death, but Jesus chose not to use his power as God to get him out of the mess humanity had made around him; he only ever called upon the power of God to help others, never himself.

Jesus still calls upon the power of God to help us, even though we’re just as fickle and cowardly and arrogant and skeptical as the crowds who surrounded him at his death.  Jesus never left them alone, even when the price to stay was death.  Even though we turn our backs on God, he will never leave us alone. Jesus stays, Jesus stays.