Today is a day I suspect many of us would rather not remember. Just five days ago,
on Palm Sunday, we shouted with joyful anticipation, “Hosanna!” Blessed is the king who
comes in the name of the Lord!” We expressed our hopes for a new future marked not by pain,
suffering, affliction, and sorrow –but by the reign of God and the restoration of creation. We
longed to be made whole and for the wrongs of this world to be righted. Recognizing our
inability to save ourselves and to make this world into the one we hope it will be, we placed our
hope in Jesus and named him as the one who would make things right. Last night we gathered
to remember and celebrate Jesus’ final meal with his friends – a meal we share every time we
gather around the table for Eucharist. And even though we know how the story goes, I suspect
each year we hope that the story will change, and we won’t have to deal with the loss of Good
Friday. This day hurts, not just because we remember the death of Christ 2,000 years ago, but
because, just like Jesus’ followers thought that hope had been lost on the cross, we too
experience the loss of hope in life.
I had a friend in seminary who celebrated her 29th birthday. Although birthdays are
often joyous times to celebrate life with friends and family – to recognize and remember
another year gone by on this journey of life – my friend hated birthdays. They were for her
another reminder that life was not unfolding the way that she had planned. As each birthday
passed, she heard the ticking of the clock and saw the unchecked list of things she thought
would have happened by that point in her life. You see, in high school, my friend was diagnosed
with a condition that was likely to prevent her from ever having children. Every birthday, she
was reminded that another year had gone by and her hope of being a mother was left
unfulfilled. Rather than being joyous celebrations, each birthday marked the loss of a bit more
hope that things were ever going to change.
Our hopes for and visions for life are often those of Palm Sunday and Easter. We either
want things to go to plan and for Jesus to meet our expectations, or, when we recognize that
our hopes are unfulfilled, we want to experience resolution, resurrection, and new hope
without first acknowledging the very real presence of grief and loss. We don’t want to
encounter Good Friday because it is here that our hopes and dreams and expectations are
shattered. It is here that the broken parts of our lives, of our world, are impossible to ignore.
And that hurts. I was raised in a Christian tradition that didn’t walk through Holy Week. We
skipped straight to Easter – never having prepared ourselves for Holy Week during Lent, never
having walked with Jesus to the cross through the days of Holy Week, never having tasted the
bitterness of death before experiencing the sweet hope of resurrection, never having walked in
darkness before we saw the glorious light of Easter morning. We would simply shout with the
Prophet Hosea and the Apostle Paul:
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?
It is tempting to jump to the end of the story like that. It is a lot easier to avoid the pain.
But we deceive ourselves if we pretend like the world doesn’t hurt, that loss and death don’t
stare us in the face. The reality is that we know this day all too well – and it certainly doesn’t
feel “good.” We feel the searing loss of Good Friday when…we lose someone we love. When a
child dies before a parent. When bombs fall and wars rage. When a parent, child, or friend is
caught in the seemingly never-ending despair of addiction. When a job is lost. When individuals
and communities are dehumanized. The list could go on.
We know pain. We know loss. We know rejection, suffering, and the apparent absence
of God – and it is hard to find anything “good” about it. So why do we call this, the darkest of
days, when the Light of the World was extinguished, when the powers of hell appeared
victorious, when divine silence seemed to echo across the universe, why do we call it good?
As Christians we proclaim that God became human and lived as one of us – walking,
eating, laughing, sleeping, crying, feeling joy, sorrow, and anger. That is what we proclaim at
Christmas – that the eternal entered time, the creator entered creation. At Christmas, we
remember that Jesus lived with us. On Good Friday, we remember also that Jesus died with us.
We remember that Jesus not only drank the cup of human life, but that he also drank the bitter
cup of human death.
And because of that, no sin, no hurt, not even death, the darkest of human experiences,
can separate us from the love of God. When all hope seems to be lost, when not even the faint
light of the resurrection can be seen, we are not alone. It is in this place of utter despair,
anguish, and helplessness
that we find Jesus on the cross, suffering with us and suffering for us and this still tired and
broken world. As we encounter the places of brokenness, loss, and hopelessness in our lives
and in the world, we find Jesus there, too. In order to experience the renewed hope of Easter,
we must first walk through the darkness of this day. But we don’t make that journey alone.
In an interactive Holy Week service I have done with and for youth in years past there is
a question asked about one’s hopes and plans for the future.
What if God has something greater in store? Would it be okay if things didn’t happen the way you planned, but instead you received more than they know to ask for or imagine? This is the promise of Easter. That God will but the broken pieces back together and everything will be redeemed in the end. But in order to get there, we must first let go of the stories we have written for ourselves. God is inviting us into a life where, through the restoring sacrificial love of Christ, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” – but we aren’t going to get there by ignoring the loss or hanging onto the way we wanted things to be.
My friend’s 29th birthday year was the first one she had enjoyed in a long time. No, she
hadn’t been cured. She hadn’t checked anything new off her list of things that she hoped would
happen…She allowed herself to grieve. She allowed herself to feel the loss and to not pretend
like everything was okay. Because everything was not okay.
Whether by choice or by force we have all lost something or someone dear to us. We all
have our share of unfulfilled expectations. When we realize that we are not able to make ourselves whole, it is there that we find Jesus on the cross, sharing in the all-to-frequent pain of human life:
“So marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of
mortals…he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his
appearance that we should desire him.”
This is not the Jesus of our Easter celebrations. As The Message translation of the Bible
puts our Isaiah text for today, “Who would have thought that God’s saving power would look
like this?” The hope of Easter is not that life won’t be without pain, suffering, death, and loss –
it is that those things are not the end. They are not the end of the story; death doesn’t have the
final word.
The way to Easter – to new life, new hope, to all things being redeemed and made
whole – takes us through the way of pain and loss. And we are invited to share in that journey –
to experience that the mystery of our faith leads from death to more life than we could think to
ask for or imagine. Before we remember that all shall be well, we must sit here in Good Friday –
in a place where all is not well. But even in this place of loss and death, we are not alone. Christ
is with us in the darkness as we wait for the light of resurrection to appear over the horizon.
And that is “good.”
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