Good Friday
15 Apr 2022
Good Friday is the most solemn of liturgies. Perhaps it best stands on its own, without the need for extra words. Yet it is a deeply disturbing liturgy that pleads for some resolution in our minds and in our conscious.
I don’t think it is useful to talk of guilt or culpability. This is not a time where we try to decide who was responsible for the death of Jesus. I must say, however, that making the claim that “the Jews killed Jesus” is patently wrong, historically and theologically, and we must own the culpability of Christians in the rampant anti-Semitism that has so damaged the message and meaning of Jesus, who lived and died a faithful Jew.
What, then, should we say?
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Perhaps we could enter the world of those who were around Jesus. By doing so, we can name our own grief. Who among us has not lost a friend, relative, or someone we knew or cared about? In these past two years we could not even be with those who died; did they feel forsaken? We have all been hurt and unable to grieve or lament. Now is the time to name those hurts and losses. This is what Good Friday allows us to do.
Jesus’ disciples responded to his impending death with their own forms of grief. Judas, perhaps in anger or maybe in fear, abandons the cause and betrays its leader. Peter lashes out with a sword, using violence to defend the non-violent. Later he denies being part of such a movement, caught up in both fear and shame. Others simply melt away; we do not know how they dealt with their grief. The women, although helpless to intervene, stay with him, even to the end, ever faithful. Near strangers, perhaps numb to their own feelings, take the process of burial into their own hands.
Others respond as did the religious leaders, unwilling to make the choices themselves. A petty Roman official caves to an angry mob.
Grief is what informs how people acted during the crucifixion of Jesus. It makes people do strange things; or perhaps on second thought not so strange. We first think that it can’t be happening, then we respond with the resources that allow us to survive in the moment: anger, denial, fear, disappointment, finally, much later, acceptance. The stages of grief.
Where is the good news in this day? I don’t find it in thinking or believing Jesus was killed because humanity is awful. I find it in the solace that God experienced the loss of God’s own son, that the ultimate grief was God’s to experience. And it was God, in the form of Jesus, who died. Jesus the god/man died for us; God endured our own suffering and the feelings of loneliness, helplessness, and forsakenness. We all share this.
For me, the message of Good Friday is that we must live through our griefs and must do so in community with one another, sharing each other’s burdens. Jesus, the Christ, died; he was killed because he had a message that was too radical and dangerous to be tolerated by the powerful. But we know this was not the last word.
Tonight, I invite you to open yourselves to your own grief and to the grief the followers of Jesus felt. Let it all pour out.
But know that death and all that is evil do not have the last word.
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