Good Friday April
3, 2015
Gen 22:1-18
Ps 22
Heb.10:1-25
John 18:1-19:37
Ponder
in our lifetime when we have had to partake of the sudden and unfortunate
violent deaths of people who had an impact on the society at large. Some of us are old enough to remember the
deaths of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Because these deaths occurred we assumed that there were people in our
society who did not want these people around.
The deaths of these people made us think about the stability of our
society to be able to continue to function without instigating a wider break
down of law and order in our society.
These deaths were profound deaths for us because we sort of thought that we
were a bit more civilized than the rest of the world. How could such things happen in our country
where we supposedly used our system of laws, our legal system and our freedom
to vote to resolve any disagreements which we might have with each other?
On this day, we ponder the death of Jesus. We know that the death of Jesus did not have
much immediate impact upon the Roman Empire.
In the reports of Roman historians, there is but a scant reference to
Jesus of Nazareth. The Jewish historian Josephus
who has been highly re-edited by later readers, does tell about the life of
Jesus but the death of Jesus was mainly an event which was most poignantly felt
by a relatively small group of his disciples.
One wonders how such a death which impacted such a small group of people
has come to be the most commemorated death of all time. Why do we still commemorate the death of
Jesus today?
I believe that the life of Jesus was so unique and that his impact upon
people was so profound that the grief of his death created the powerful
conditions for his reappearance in his post-resurrection life. He was so profoundly unique that his death
could not take Him out the lives of his followers and He has remained forever. The Roman Empire which gave a dismissive yawn at his death was taken over
by the appearances of the Risen Christ in the lives of so many in the Roman
Empire that by the time Constantine ascended to be the Caesar of the Empire, he
had to recognize that the Risen Christ was the King and Caesar in the hearts of
most of his Empire.
As we live in the aftermath of the success of the continuing post-resurrection
appearances of the Risen Christ throughout the world and in our lives, we still
cannot minimize the profundity of the death of Jesus on the Cross. We cannot minimize the deaths of people in
our lives and the profound losses which are experienced by so many people each
day in our world.
Our belief and experience of the resurrection appearances of the Risen
Christ cannot give us such a resurrection pride that we lose the capacity for
empathy and for deeply feeling death and loss in our lives.
This is why Good Friday must be observed. Death and loss cannot be minimized or
trivialized. We cannot rush to a
spiritualized existence and deny the importance of how good and right and
necessary it is for us to be in our bodies comprised by five senses and
memories and the loving ability to attach ourselves to favorite people who are
very difficult to lose accessibility to.
We gather today to honor death and loss, because we are made to be
people who deeply feel love for one another and for the beautiful earthly
home. If God so loved the world, then
some of that love for our world and people in our world has been so profoundly
shared, that when we lose what we love, we know a profound grief and this grief
must have a Holy Day. Good Friday is
such a Holy Day; it is as it were, the Funeral of all Funerals.
At a funeral, one tries to appreciate the meaning of the person that one
has gathered to memorialize.
All Four Gospels memorialize the suffering and the death of Jesus on the
cross. This re-visiting of his death is
done differently by each Gospel community who wrote about it. From the Gospel communities we have a
collection of the seven last words of Christ.
These words which are projected upon the dying Jesus on the Cross give
us an indication of the meanings of his death and life. And so we ponder the meanings of how the
writers of Passion Gospels understood the last words of Jesus.
The First Words of Jesus from the Cross:
Jesus said, "Father Forgive them, for they do not what they are
doing." Jesus could offer
forgiveness because of human ignorance.
If God is the smartest of all; everyone else is but ignorant in
comparison. And so human acts are often
driven and motivated by “not knowing.”
If the citizenry knew that they were killing the son of their beloved
king, would they do it? Today as we ask
for forgiveness for our ignorance, we also ask for wisdom for ourselves and for
the people of this world to learn how to practice God’s love and justice.
The second Word of Jesus from the Cross: "Jesus said to the second
thief who repented: Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise." Paradise
sounds like a pretty comfortable place for someone who has been convicted to
die for his criminal activity. But the
point is this: Jesus was not rewarding crime; he was rewarding repentance. Repentance creates paradise. Repentance is evidence that our hearts are
turned toward God. And that turning of
our heart is the very conditions for paradise.
Paradise is more a condition of the heart than a place. Repentance makes each of us a place that can
be called “Paradise.”
The Third Word of Jesus from the Cross: When Jesus saw his mother and
the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, "Women,
behold your Son? And he said to the
disciple, "Behold, your mother!"
One can imagine that the life of Jesus was hardest on his mother Mary. He was called mad, crazy, demon possessed, a
winebibber, a law breaker and much worse.
For his ministry, he was convicted as a criminal in the horrendous
method of capital punishment. The
religious authorities approved of his death.
How could Mary be proud of her son?
How could Jesus be a responsible son, if his trouble did not allow him
to stay around and take care of his mother?
From the cross we see that Jesus is proclaiming a new kind of community;
one that went beyond flesh and blood.
When he asked his mother to accept his disciple friend as her son; and
when he asked his disciple friend to accept Mary as his mother, he was
instituting the reality of the family of the Spirit where sons and daughters
were not born just of flesh and blood but of God.
The Fourth Word of Jesus from the Cross:
And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, Lama
sabachthani." which means, My God,
My God, why have you forsaken me?"
In some of the Passion accounts, Jesus does not sound so confident and
in control, like he appears to be in the writings of John’s Gospel. In these words, Jesus is God’s Son but he
feels forsaken by his Father. Certainly
there are many occasions in the history of humanity when it has seemed that God
has forsaken people in events of pain, loss and tragedy. In these times we are not so sure we really
wanted God to grant such radical freedom in this world for such negative events
to occur. But these events are the
consequence of the radical freedom that exists in the world. And even God’s Son and God the Father bear
the consequences of such radical freedom.
And it means God suffers with us in our suffering.
The Fifth Word of Jesus from the Cross:
Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said, "I thirst." We need water to live. The flogging, the bleeding and sweating, had
not only made Jesus weak and anemic, it also made him dehydrated. He desired life. He desired to replenish his fluids. Indeed, wanting life to the very end, is a
most human impulse. Certainly we respect
the one near death, who truly wants to live.
If death and the afterlife were so inviting, why would we bother to stay
here? There must be an important value
about wanting life until it is taken out of our hands.
The Sixth Word of Jesus from the Cross: When Jesus had received the
vinegar, he said, "It is finished."
'No it is not finished Jesus. You
needed to stay around longer and teach us more and befriend us more. You died before your time! How can you say that your life work is
finished at the age of 33?" If Jesus had
lived longer, his followers would have been so dependent upon his physical divine
presence, they never would have awakened to the divine presence within
themselves and to their own identity as sons and daughters of God. In this sense, Jesus knew that he was
finished; he died out of this world in order to be reborn into this world and
not just within one body but within the lives of everyone who wants the
presence of Christ.
The Seventh Word of Jesus from the Cross: Then Jesus crying with a loud
voice, said, "Father unto thy hands, I commit my spirit." Jesus faced the same dilemma that all will
face in death. We cannot fulfill the
task of the ultimate preservation of our lives.
God the Father creator, is the One who must recreate our
lives again in a new way. Jesus had
faith in the One who could recreate and preserve his life in a way that his
followers could not. Committing our
spirit to God is the last act of our lives, and believing in God’s ability to
preserve is our faith in the resurrection.
As we contemplate the passion of Jesus Christ today, let us be thankful
that through his death, we can value living.
And through his death we are invited to live better to finish the
purpose of our lives on this earth.
Amen.
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