Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Isaiah 52.13-53.12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10.1-25; John 18.1-19.37
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On a grey Good Friday, with snow flurries off and on (this is Vermont, after all), we enter closer and closer into liminal space, where heaven and earth come closer and closer and, eventually, touch. We touch the mystery of life and death and get a glimpse perhaps of eternity, which awaits us all.
Once again, the usual—and perhaps comforting—rituals of the day have been put aside because of the pandemic. I know that in other parts of the world of Christian expression, people have worshipped together last night, stripped the altar, set aside the reserve sacrament for today, kept vigil by the Altar of Repose where the sacrament sits, but where I am worshipping virtually, we are doing none of these actions.
Instead, the liturgy has been pared down to its barest form: words. The Good Friday office in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer is rich and stands on its own.
It begins abruptly, but we need to remember that the service is a continuation of the Maundy Thursday liturgy from last night. Good Friday is the hinge between Jesus’ life and his death and resurrection. We begin the liturgy with the recognition that Jesus is still alive; we end with him dead.
We always hear from the Gospel according to John. Its description of the actors in Jesus’ Passion remains problematic in its anti-Semitism, and is a sermon unto itself. Likewise, the many theologies about why Jesus died on the cross are problematic: they range from God needing to substitute Jesus on behalf of humanity; humanity being so depraved that the only thing God could do was kill God’s Son on our behalf to the cross being God’s self-emptying love in Jesus, a love that exceeds our comprehension. Again, the theologies are too many to consider here.
The Solemn Collects we pray uniquely on Good Friday are powerful in their petitions that cover every aspect of our common life together. They end with the collect we pray at ordinations, at the end of the readings of the Great Vigil of Easter (just tomorrow night or early Easter morning), a collect that offers a vision of hope: ‘Let the whole world see and know that things which were case down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord….’
This is but a synopsis of what we pray on Good Friday. This year, however, I want to focus on our mortality and what we can glean from Good Friday
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If there is anything we have had to face this year, it has been our mortality. The COVID-19 pandemic that has turned our lives upside-down has snatched away over 553K of our citizens and 2,83M souls world-wide. The early days were terrifying in the acceleration of mortality; now, 54 weeks later of lockdown in Vermont, have we become inured? The 21 February front page of the New York Times had the devastating graphic of what 500K deaths looks like and was described thusly:
From afar, the graphic on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times looks like a blur of gray, a cloudy gradient that slowly descends into a block of solid ink. Up close, it shows something much darker: close to 500,000 individual dots, each representing a single life lost in the United States to the coronavirus, signifying a staggering milestone that the nation is reaching in just under 12 months.(1)
Thus, we come to Good Friday, when COVID-19 cases are alarmingly rising in Vermont, the positivity rate is going up, despite Vermont having the nation’s highest rate of vaccinations. We are not out of the woods yet; we still have a long way to go. Death still surrounds us at very close proximity.
We have so much to grieve… the loss of our former lives, the uncertainty of the current moment, those people lost to COVID-19 and everyone else who has died, whose deaths perhaps have not received the same amount of attention and this grief is all wrapped up in the yearly existential grief of Jesus’ death on the cross, something that, if not understood intellectually, we grasp in the depths of our hearts and being.
This year, more than ever, I am purposely conflating Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ death with the Day of the Dead (2 November). Ultimately, Jesus’ death leads to the promise of the resurrection, which we will celebrate in two days on Easter. We cannot have Easter without today. So, I wrap together the deaths we know with the death of Jesus.
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In prior years, for the portion of the Good Friday liturgy, the Veneration of the Cross, I offered an expression that is more in line with the Orthodox liturgy and, perhaps, more accessible to people’s experiences. Instead of walking up and touching or kissing a cross, I invite people to approach a cross lying on a bier, take a rose from the vase in front of it, and place it on the cross, the way one might cast flowers into a grave, such that they land on the casket or urn. The cross I have used is a Salvadoran painted cross. Jesus’ halo is red and yellow and the sun rises above it. Over the years, I have been moved to see how people have chosen to place their roses. Some years, they leave his face uncovered; other years, they completely cover it. Regardless, I believe that in the veneration of the cross, they leave their collectives griefs and losses with Jesus.
Maybe this gentle gesture is something you can do today to remember those whom you have loved and see no more, and be still with Jesus, whose death on the cross is part of the great mystery of our faith. You can take a cross, place it on a clear table, perhaps on top of some material, light some candles and then place flowers on it. Then be still in the silence and depth of the moment.
(Above: after people have prayed at the cross; Below: roses in the vase form a heart.)
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The final collect of the Good Friday Office says it all:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death. Give mercy and grace to the living; pardon and rest to the dead; to your holy Church peace and concord; and to us sinners everlasting life and glory; for with the Father and the Holy Spirit you live and reign, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
NOTE
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/insider/covid-500k-front-page.html
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