Good Friday

[preached at Church of Our Saviour, Killington, VT]


Before going to seminary, I was assigned to work in a congregation other than my own. It was part of what my former diocese called, ‘Ministry-Study Year.’ Aspirants for Holy Orders were asked to leave the comfort of their sponsoring congregation and learn about life in another congregation. I was assigned to one that was an hour and a half away.

When Maundy Thursday and Good Friday rolled around, the rector said that I could spend the night in the rectory, rather than drive all the way back home after the Maundy Thursday liturgy. In that way, I could participate in the overnight watch, which took place in the church’s funeral chapel, a rectangular room off the apse where vigils before burial took place. The congregation filled it with the Easter lilies whose fragrance overwhelmed the small space.
The priest, already ordained some twenty plus years at the time, warned me ahead of time that he got ‘weird’ on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. I had no idea what he meant but said that it would be OK.

As Maundy Thursday turned into Good Friday and I walked alongside him, I understood what he meant. It wasn’t that he got weird; rather, he was in deep grief and agony. It was clear to me that he was mourning the death of his love, Jesus. Jesus was the centre of his life and every year he had to go through the passion, crucifixion and death of the one he loved more than anyone else in the world. It was wrenching to watch. I have never meant anyone as Christo-centric as this man and his love for Jesus speaks to me still.

Even for myself, Good Friday is more a day of emotions than rational explanations. By the time I reach today, I have spent four days hearing about abandonment and betrayal, as depicted in John’s gospel. It is almost more than the heart can bear because it reaches such core human emotions. Moreover, on Good Friday, our liturgy provides so many visual cues that, if we choose, we never need to reach into the theological whys and wherefores of what Good Friday is about. Sometimes, really, that is best.

Looking around the church here, I am struck by its starkness. The altar is bare, having been washed last night. The icons and statues are keeping one another company out in the parish hall. The dossal became the frontal for the altar of repose. The cross simply lies on a table where it was placed last night. The aumbry, with its door flung open, exposing its gold interior, reflects its emptiness back at us.

The hardest part of this liturgy for me comes at the end of our communion from the reserve sacrament. After consuming all that is left over, we blow out the candle that for 364 days a year serves as a reminder that Jesus is present in the form of bread and wine. The wisps of smoke that curl upwards nearly bring me to tears each year. When the smoke disappears from sight, I know there is no more ‘Jesus’ present and my heart breaks. It is a feeling of such desolation that I can barely breathe. The world becomes less for that loss. And the final collect for the day sums it all up in its prayer that God be with us in our last moments.

Given my heart’s predisposition toward understanding Good Friday and the Passion, my mind, usually in dominance, turns off. It doesn’t really need to know why this had to happen; it accepts the cross because it knows the cross leads to the resurrection. The heart believes the mystery of the day and that is good enough.

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For some, though, the heart’s acceptance isn’t sufficient. The mind wants to know what the theology behind Good Friday is all about. Even 2000 plus years later, we are still struggling to articulate a theology of the cross.

We encounter God on this day — God as the crucified One and the loving, grieving Creator and the Spirit of comfort and challenge, who binds the whole event together. It is the crucified One who takes center stage today. And so Good Friday is God’s Friday. (1)

Part of the truth we confront today is, in the words of Bishop Chilton Knudson, that we also are crucified, made into Christ through baptism. We share through our baptism with Christ the narrative of the cross which becomes part of our story and, in fact, rewrites it. The cross is the central narrative of our story and it encompasses the losses in our own lives through death and endings whether of jobs, health, relationships and ultimately, life.

As we engage more deeply with these realities, rather than flee them, we stare at the cross — challenges, loss, grief — and it stares at us. If we remember, in Martin Luther’s words, ‘I am baptised,’ then we also remember what comes after the cross. The nature of the cross identifies us and shapes the world. Life is dying, rising, struggling and resolving. We find the cross in each little death and rising.

Because of the incarnation, not the cross, Christ has compassion for those who suffer. Being part of humanity was his lot; he was acquainted with grief long before Calvary. The cross is God’s ultimate solidarity with us, the loss, the whole catastrophe.

The cross asks us to struggle through death to new life in a way that is not cushioned. In its own mysterious way, the cross represents the affirmation of all that is painful, sorrowful, and grievous in our lives. These realities are gathered together in God’s merciful words and gracious looks. Through the cross, the scales are tipped for ever for that which is life-giving. (2)

With those promises of God’s accompaniment with us, we can bear to stand at the foot of the cross without turning away. In the words of Leonardo Boff,

Our cross of every day…

We don’t have to ask for it,

we don’t have to look for it.

It arrives, it sets itself up.

It makes us suffer. It makes us die.

Invariably. Inexorably.

Our cross of every day…

It makes us think, look for meaning.

It expands the conscience.

It calls for hope.

It brings knowledge. It makes us live.

Our cross of every day…

the font of life and resurrection. (3)

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In this week that is one more paradox after another, we reach the greatest paradox of them all: God so desired to reconcile the world to God’s self that God became one of us, uniting God’s self with us to the point of death so that we, too, might be resurrected. The hard wood of the cross is best for feeding the fire of love. Therein lies the good news on this day of juxtapositions called Good Friday.


END NOTES
(1) Feasting on the Word, Year A., Vol. 2, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. (Louisville: WJK 2011), 291.
(2) From meditations given on Holy Tuesday, 19 April 2011, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Burlington, VT.
(3) Leonardo Boff, La Cruz nuestra de cada día (Mexico D.F.: Ediciones Dabar, 2004), end jacket, LAC translation.