Good Friday

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, which greatly limited my full participation.

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 small rectangular room off the apse where vigils before burial took place.

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 clearly was a man in deep grief. I have never meant anyone as Christo-centric as this man. 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.

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 one chooses one never needs 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 (I remember the first time I ever saw a church totally stripped; I was in sixth grade and it was our first Good Friday in the church, and not at the elementary school. It frightened me). The marble slab inset in the middle of the altar always looks like a mortuary slab. The aumbry, with its door flung open, exposing the linen lining, always looks like the inside of a coffin to me.

The hardest part of this liturgy comes at the end of our communion from the reserve sacrament. After consuming all that is left over, I 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.

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.

+

For some, 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.

Last year during Holy Week, there was quite a flap over in England about atonement theology, that is, what was happening on the cross anyway? The British tabloid, The Telegraph, blared in its headline: ‘Easter Message: Christ did not die for sin.’ The newspaper reported that Dean Jeffrey John said in a BBC interview: ‘In other words, Jesus took the rap and we got forgiven as long as we said we believed in him. This is repulsive as well as nonsensical. It makes God sound like a psychopath. If a human behaved like this we’d say that they were a monster.’ The blogosphere went crazy with people supporting or attacking John on these few words cited in the newspaper.

'As we know, headlines and sound bites don’t cut it. What he said further along in the BBC interview is this:

The cross, then, is not about Jesus reconciling an angry God to us; it’s almost the opposite. It’s about a totally loving God, incarnate in Christ, reconciling us to him. On the cross Jesus dies for our sins; the price of our sin is paid; but it is not paid to God but by God. As St Paul says, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Because he is Love, God does what Love does: He unites himself with the beloved. He enters his own creation and goes to the bottom line for us. Not sending a substitute to vent his punishment on, but going himself to the bitter end, sharing in the worst of suffering and grief that life can throw at us, and finally sharing our death, so that he can bring us through death to life in him...

'...On the cross God absorbs into himself our fallenness and its consequences and offers us a new relationship. God shows he knows what it’s like to be the loser; God hurts and weeps and bleeds and dies. It’s a mystery we can hardly glimpse, let alone grasp; and if there is an answer to the problem of suffering, perhaps it’s one for the heart, not the reason. Because the answer God’s given is simply himself; to show that, so far from inflicting suffering as a punishment, he bears our griefs and shares our sorrow. From Good Friday on, God is no longer “God up there”, inscrutably allotting rewards and retributions. On the Cross, even more than in the crib, he is Immanuel, God down here, God with us...'

+

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.

[I wrote this last year but never preached it so tweaked it to bring it up to date. Photo: view of the chancel last night]