I think Good Friday is such a confusing day. Is it a day of mourning, or a day of rejoicing? Is it a day to be sad, or is it a day of forgiveness? It is all of that. It is time out of time, it is unexpected, in it the system is broken, Jesus is broken, we are broken. What is good about Good Friday?
I think what is good about Good Friday is that it shows us
that death is real, and that there isn't just one death that each of us must
die, but there are many. Over and over we must die to that which is killing us,
over and over, to truly be ourselves, we must lay down all that gets in our way
of the loving relationship that God desires with us. And that is good, and very
different than what the world tells us is good. And it is different for each of
us, the stuff that gets in our way, the idols we worship, the dependency on
ourselves, security and safety. God says, lay that down, and don't pick it up
again. Walk with me, depend on me.
We live this day, and many days, in the reality of this
cross. You have been carrying your cross around with you all during lent. The
cross that reminds you of God's love for you, the cross that reminds you that
it is through death, and for Jesus, death on that cross, that you receive full
and new life. The cross that reminds us of Jesus' brokenness, of our
brokenness.
Good Friday shows us that something must die before the
green and growing thing can take root and bear new life. Good Friday shows us
that forgiveness is about pruning that which is dead anyway, so that God can affect
in us the new life that God promises. Good Friday shows us that the work Jesus
does on the cross matters, that God's love for humanity, and the healing that
love affects, saves us.
Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane is Lord, not my
will but yours be done. Giving up our will is not a bad thing. In our culture
that is all about you, all about what you want and when you want it, obedience
becomes a bad word. But it is being who God wants us to be that is a good
thing, and that requires that we die to whatever it is that holds us hostage,
whatever it is that is killing us.
Good Friday shows us holy dying, it is not easy, but it is a
part of life. You see, the truth is that being human means being born to die.
Again, none of us gets out of here alive. Jesus’ life, and suffering and death
on a Roman cross not only show us how to do it, but Jesus, on that Roman cross,
takes our place. On this night we remember all this. We enter into the story of
the passion. We hear the story in the voices of those who were with Jesus
that terrible night. We do so not to glorify Jesus’ death or any other death,
we do it so that we may be healed, we may be reconciled, that we may have the
absolutely new and abundant life that God offers in the life, suffering, death,
and resurrection of Jesus.
The people who populate this story, and the events of this
passion, the betrayal, the lies, the apathy, the bad luck, allow each of us to
enter the story. You and I are these people, we are people who have betrayed
and been betrayed, we are people who have lied and who have been lied to, we
are people who have shown apathy, and we are people who experience just darn
bad luck. We are people who have experienced sadness and pain, we are people
who feel isolated and alienated at times. We are human beings who live in the
muck and mess of this life. What we do together this evening, and the foot
washing and holy communion of last evening, even the joyous resurrection we
will celebrate together tomorrow evening, doesn’t take away the reality of the
muck and mess in which we live. We carry these crosses, they are part of who we
are.
So what does happen when we walk the way of the cross with
Jesus, when we enter into the events of this holy week and this holy day? Why
do we all show up all these evenings to walk the way of the cross with Jesus?
We grow toward Holy Dying and transformation happens. I surely hope we are
changed by our encounter with the people on the way, the people in the stories,
and by the amazing love that God has for us that we know because God is willing
to be one of us. Because only a God who is willing to be one of us, a God who
has such faith in us, is a God in which I can place my love, my loyalty, my
attention.
What changes? Jesus does not fight violence with violence,
hatred, or revenge. Love wins. Jesus takes on all of our betrayal, all of our
lies, our apathy, all of our pain, sadness, loneliness and isolation, and Jesus
defeats it, not by resisting it with the sort of violence that was visited upon
him, but by absorbing it and removing it through the power of love.
And Jesus’ dying on the cross looks to the world like
failure. Jesus suffered, Jesus died. But Jesus did not fail. Jesus redefined
death and life. Death does not have the final word; death does not have the
victory. The Word of God has the final word.
What Jesus did on the cross was to make it possible for us
to have new life, a life that our words cannot begin to describe, a life that
our minds cannot begin to imagine. What Jesus did and does is to make it possible
for us to be make whole, to be put back together again, to be loved wholly and
completely.
Winning and losing have no meaning in Jesus’ Kingdom; love
and forgiveness are gifts. Success and failure have no meaning in Jesus’
Kingdom; sharing and walking together are gifts. Isolation and alienation have
no meaning in Jesus’ Kingdom; relationship and connection are gifts.
Death is real and grief hurts and sometimes we just have to
sit in the silence and cry and wait. Can we do that? Can we sit in the pain and
loneliness with those who suffer? That is what this Good Friday is about. We
have some experience in this. It is very like when we sit with our loved ones
in hospital, as the result of illness or accident, waiting, quite unsure of what
to do or what to think, silence and sadness and tears, are our only
activity.
Too many Christians want to go straight from the garden of
Gethsemane to the garden of the empty tomb without going by way of the hill of
crucifixion and the stone-cold body. It seems too painful to sit in silence,
waiting and grieving. And yet nothing of the reality of Christ’s victory over
evil on the cross, or our faith in the resurrection to come soon, must be
allowed to shield us from the awful brute fact that Jesus died. And that death,
that brokenness, makes us whole.
One of the things we don't do tonight is to bless the bread
and the wine, tonight we eat the leftovers. Tonight, our bread and wine also
are broken.
I would like you to hear these words, written by our son,
Tom. "Child of God, take this and eat it. It is broken for you because you
are broken. Let it nourish you; let it sustain you. It is Christ. Always strive
to be like Christ, who was broken to heal our brokenness." Amen.
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