Good Friday
Wonderings:
I wonder if you’ve had a big experience of grief?
I wonder what you’re grieving right now—maybe it’s a big thing, or maybe it’s a small but meaningful thing?
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for Good Friday in our Lectionary.
Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; John 18:1-19:42
Let us speak, and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
In these holy days, we are trying to place ourselves in the disciples’ place. We are moving day by day through the wonderful intimacy of their last supper with Jesus, imagining how it might have been almost overwhelming—too much—to have Jesus wash their feet. Overwhelming—too much—to have him offer them his own body as food, to hear him say, “remember me.” We tried to put ourselves in the disciples’ place, recreate the specialness, even the too-muchness of that experience last night by sharing pita and prosecco as the elements of our Eucharist. With the taste of those bubbles still in our mouths we realized, like the disciples, that Jesus’ over-the-top actions were his way of saying goodbye to us. We realized too late that this supper together was the last.
So let us continue that imagination tonight. We are the disciples who went to the garden with Jesus, and witnessed his betrayal. Who maybe wanted to fight, to free Jesus, but saw that Jesus was committed to the path of nonviolence, wherever it led. We are the disciples who watched Jesus led away in chains, who watched him suffer a show trial, who stood in the crowd and did nothing as others shouted “crucify him.” Maybe we were so scared of the mob that we played along, and shouted it too.
We are the disciples who watched our teacher and friend and savior beaten and spit upon, who watched as he was nailed to the Cross, and suffocated to death, mocked as a criminal. And we did nothing. Could do nothing.
I would invite you to take this imagination even one step further: to imagine that we are the disciples who do not know that resurrection is coming. Who know this only as the end.
So tonight is a night for grief. And grief does not need to make sense. If you yourself have lost a loved one, or been with someone who has, you know that especially in those first hours, those first days of grief…we’re all over the place. Laughing one moment, making practical arrangements in the next, and in the next, we’re on the floor, sobbing. And that’s ok—that’s to be expected. Our grief does not need to add up, does not need to be tied up with a bow.
Tonight is a night for lament. Grief is what we feel; lament is the spiritual practice of honoring that grief, giving voice to those feelings, letting them be real, letting them flow through us. And I would wager that for most of us, lament is not a familiar mode, not a comfortable mode. We’re so often told to dust ourselves off, to buck up, to stay positive, even in the face of death and terrible loss. We’re told to look for the silver lining, and when all else fails, to just power through.
But scripture is full of honest lamentation, giving voice to grief’s complexities and contradictions. In Psalm 22, the Psalmist shakes one fist at God and screams “why, why, why?” And with the other hand calls for rescue and comfort: “help me, hold me, stay with me. I trust you.” These were words that Jesus knew by heart.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night, but I find no rest.”
And in the next breath, “Yet you are the Holy One, enthroned upon the praises of Israel….You took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother's breast. I have been entrusted to you ever since I was born.”
Tonight we can feel both these things, and everything in between. We can feel the full freight of our own hurt—our own heartbreak and despair at the way life has kicked us right in the most tender place, the ways we’ve been wounded right in the place of our most courageous openness.
And tonight we might also remember the saving deeds that God has done, and to say—come on, God. Do it again. You kept me safe upon my mother’s breast. You are God. You make all things new. Do it again.
Whatever it is that you’re carrying tonight, this year—whatever came up in the time of wondering—let it be part of your lament, and trust that God is big enough to take it. It is ok to rage at God, at God’s absence, at our own powerlessness. It is ok to ask for God to make a way out of no way—even if that feels foolish or naive. It is ok to be pissed off and ok to be needy and ok to feel lost in it all being too much. Tonight we can see-saw back and forth between all the things we feel because we are in grief, and grief does not need to make sense.
A word of warning: we need to practice lament to help us process our grief honestly, because without it, our grief can curdle within us and poison us.
We have an example of that right in the passion narrative we just heard in John’s Gospel: John and his community were grieving their own losses, and grasping at ways to make meaning of that in the way they told the story of Jesus’ last days.
As we know, John of course is the gospel that insists again and again that God is love, and to follow Jesus is to learn to love one another. And at the same time John and his community were looking for somebody to rage against, somebody to blame for the death of Jesus, for the persecution they felt in their own context, 50 or 60 years after the death of Jesus, likely out in the backwaters of Galilee or Samaria. And so they picked their fellow Jews—their second cousins, their aunts and uncles who lived in Jerusalem and in Judea. It was THEM, John writes, the ones in the centers of political and cultural power, who called for Jesus to be crucified. Hoi iudeoi, John wrote in Greek—the Judeans.
John’s grief doesn’t make sense. He insists on the commandment to love, and in the next breath he allows for all this hate. In the pain of his grief, he looks for somebody else who deserves to feel pain. And that desire to pass on pain has poisoned generations and generations of Christians. Because when the New Testament was translated into Latin and then into other languages, hoi iudeoi was not translated as “the Judeans.” It was translated as “the Jews.” So for centuries, especially across Europe, the celebration of Good Friday coincided with a spike in antisemitic violence.
But we were there, when Jesus was beaten and whipped and spit upon; we were there when they pressed the crown of thorns onto his head and mocked him as a pretender king. We were there when he suffered terrible pain—and we saw with our own eyes that Jesus refused to pass on that pain. Because Jesus knew that no one ever heals by wounding someone else. He knew that justice can only be achieved when someone is willing to break the cycle of victims who become violators who create victims who become violators. And in breaking that cycle, Jesus holds up a mirror to us at our worst—shows us the way we hurt others rather than process our pain; punish others rather than help them heal.
And we pray for that cycle to be broken now, in our own time: in Israel and Gaza, in Iran, in Sudan, in our own criminal justice system, in our own families, in our own hearts.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night, but I find no rest.”
“Yet you are the Holy One, enthroned upon the praises of Israel….You took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother's breast. I have been entrusted to you ever since I was born.”
Amen.
