April 2, 2010
Good Friday isn't always a popular day in the church calendar, as you can see from the numbers that come to church today! I can't see as I blame people, either, for Good Friday is really a difficult day. They say that, as a culture, we tend to avoid things that are difficult, like pain and death, and, frankly, that's what Good Friday is all about: pain and death.
In our society, we have lots of ways to avoid the painful things we are going through like televisions with thousands of channels, commercials that tell us that this cream will hide the tell-tale signs of aging, and even in our religious institutions we tend to avoid death by telling people that the deceased has "gone to a better place".
Today Jesus takes our cultural notions about pain and death and turns them on their head. Not that he's saying that pain and death are good—but that they are necessary for life. Those of us that avoid the hard stuff: that avoid dealing with the hurts of our dysfunctional childhoods; that won't face the baggage from our previous marriages; or that won't deal with the conflict in our relationships; who won't deal with pain, or won't feel our pain, avoiding it with alcohol or constant distractions, are avoiding those places where God is ready and waiting to meet us. Jesus on this day reveals to us a God who was so willing to take on our human condition that he was willing to feel pain, and betrayal, and abandonment, and ultimately death; all parts of being human and not parts of being God. He encountered these things, lived them, and died them in order to show us that God is there with us too. In the most painful situations we can imagine, God has been there, God is there, and God will always be there. There is no place that God is not willing to go for us, that is how great God's love and care is for us. And in being there with us in the pain and grief, not in taking it away—for we know that ultimately we cannot avoid pain, suffering and death—in being there and letting us experience it, we can move to a new and resurrected life.
We hear in Psalm 22 the cry of the psalmist, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" and yet in verse 9 of that psalm we hear a surprising, "yet you are the one who took me out of the womb and kept me safe on my mother's breast". The psalmist tells us God is like the midwife who delivered us—brought us out of that place, childbirth, that is the closest connection between life and death we have all felt—the closeness to death of both the mother and the child that the moment of new life brings. It is God the Midwife who will deliver us, literally and metaphorically, God will pluck us from the realm of death and bring us to a new life—a new birth into the light! Isn't that an amazing image for those of us who have given birth and also for those of us who have seen or been a part of that birth giving process?
But today is the day to dwell on entering that pain, whatever it may be in our life. For some of us it is actual physical pain; what Jesus felt. That pain may be our own, or it may be in the helplessness we feel in being with a family member or friend who is in pain and finding ourselves absolutely helpless. For some of us it is psychological pain, the pain and stigma of mental illness or depression that we just can't crawl out of, or the pain of relationships that just keep getting worse and again we are powerless to be able to fix things. And some of us know the pain of a child who is lost or hurting and again we are powerless to help the way we want to. Powerlessness is part of being human and Jesus shows us, in entering that powerlessness, that ultimately the only one who truly has the power is God: we can trust in and count on that. Because no matter how afraid we are, Jesus assures us we do not go through it without God. No matter how lonely and abandoned we may feel, ultimately we are not alone: God is there.
This day we are assured that as we take up our cross and follow Jesus (the cross of caring for family members; carrying those broken places in ourselves; or in experiencing the death of a loved one or facing our own death) it is only in carrying our cross and following Jesus that we can know eternal life—the cross is the way.
Behold the cross—it is our salvation.
