Good Friday
Here we are, Good Friday. Today’s a difficult day, with challenging words read, prayed and sung. I struggled mightily in preparing words for this evening. I tried on a few different approaches, strategies for unpacking tonight’s readings from John gospel, for engaging with the story of Jesus’ final hours. After many aborted attempts, I settled on honesty. Mom always said it’s the best policy. So here we go.
In my darkest moments, I can’t help but wonder if all this is just an overly elaborate, albeit profoundly morose, charade. It’s as though we somehow believe between the hauntingly beautiful music, the dramatic readings, and the indicting prayers we are trying to convince ourselves that though life may be difficult and painful, that Jesus had it worse.
I wonder if nights like tonight are simply the culmination of our attempts to fool ourselves into believing that there’s a point, a plan, a purpose to the suffering we see around us. I wonder if we are all engaged in this clever ruse to convince one another that yup things could be worse, and in fact God’s been there. As if somehow that makes all the pain, suffering and anguish we see on the news, experience in our lives, and feel in our hearts okay.
I hear the story of Jesus, serenely heading towards his death, and I think, this can’t be real. Honestly, who does that? Who blithely marches to their own execution, carrying the instrument of their own death and then at the point of death says, “It’s finished.” Finished? What’s finished. You died, that’s it.
At my dark times, I wonder if we keep holding onto something, something that once had meaning, something that most people have given up on long ago, as evidenced by the empty spaces around you.
Yet at other times, I hear this story differently. I hear these difficult, challenging words and promise and hope shimmer through. Sometimes there's an overwhelming, palpable sense of the depth of God’s love, that draws close. I am awed, not just by the claim that God is presence in our humanity, but by how fully Jesus enters into it.
I hear the words of tonight’s scripture and take comfort in the promise that no part of the human experience was foreign to Jesus. Not the love and the joy, or the tears, betrayal and isolation.
In the good times, I see Jesus, not orchestrating his death, but at peace with it. Confident in what it will accomplish. I trust that what Jesus is about here, on the cross changes the world forever. These are the good times. But too often they’re fleeting.
Perhaps you’ve felt this too. A difficult mix of trust and doubt, of confidence and wavering.
Confronted with this tensions, with a world so full of pain, with a story that seems too difficult to believe, I want to run and hide. We want to retreat into that which is safe and simple, familiar.
Which is why I find God’s activity in Jesus so strange and confusing, both in my dark nights of the soul and when this all seems good.
Whereas my every inclination is to escape the difficulty and pain of this life, Jesus enters in, fully and recklessly. And I can’t wrap my head around it.
Theologians throughout history have long sought to make the case for God’s transcendence, or God’s holy otherness. They have sought to make the case that God is somehow completely and essentially different from the rest of creation.
Sitting in a Nazi prison cell during WWII, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with this very notion of God’s transcendence. In a world ravaged by war and genocide, Bonhoeffer found comfort not in an all powerful or all knowing God, but in a God who is completely present for the other. He found hope, promise, a future in a God that goes beyond the boundaries of self, pouring out his own life for the world he made.
Put it another way, whereas we seek to abandon our humanity, in Jesus, God fully embraces it. Drinking in the sourness and the bitterness of the world, taking it into himself. God’s otherness, God’s holiness is revealed in his willing embrace of all which he is not, and all that we are.
As Jesus story comes to its peak in a few short moments, we’ll hear Jesus utter his last words, “It is finished.” Shortly after, the soldiers pierce his side and blood and water pour out of the wound in his side. Blood and water, this is the stuff of life, and Jesus extravagantly pours it out for the whole world. It’s poured out for those see it clearly, and for those for whom it seems a little too hard to swallow, and for all of us who live somewhere in between.
