Almighty God, we
pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ
was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer
death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
We gather this
afternoon at the cross—the symbol we approach to offer up and contemplate the
meaning of our suffering. Human life is
characterized by goodness, community, and love.
It is also marked by aggression, loneliness, and loss. The story of the Garden of Eden is as much an
expression of our wish as of our memory.
We long for an existence without the presence of sin, death, loss, and
pain. But our experience of the world
tells us otherwise. Human beings bring
Jesus—God incarnate, exemplary human being—to the cross. And here we witness
the worst kinds of suffering that human beings can inflict on each other.
In a BBC Radio interview, the writer Amy Bloom talked about growing up the
granddaughter of Eastern European Jews who had fled the pogroms in Lithuania for
the U.S. early in the twentieth century. To the surprise of the host,
Bloom explained that her grandparents never talked about their lives in Eastern
Europe before coming to America. “How do you explain their reticence?” he
asked. She responded,
“They were not part of the Oprah
generation. They didn’t feel that if you told everybody how terrible your life
had been, somebody would give you a car. They thought that if you told
everybody how terrible your life was, they would probably ask you to go
back.” [BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves 3/8/10]
You and I inhabit a
culture where so many people complain so vocally about their problems. But on Good Friday, it is not wrong for us to
consider our own suffering. Because we have imaginations, we can construct a possible
life without struggles or trials, persecutions or pains. And because we are limited and finite, our
experience of life will usually fall short of achieving those dreams. If the cross means anything, it means that
God has taken on and experienced our sufferings and our losses. So if God has experienced human suffering,
that suffering must now count for something.
God knows what it is like to be you and me. It is OK to acknowledge that life doesn’t
always give us what we want from it.
Today is the day in
the church year when we walk with Jesus from arrest and trial to his death on
the cross. Like Amy Bloom’s Eastern European Jewish grandparents, Jesus
as we meet him in John’s Gospel does not say much about how terrible his life
has been. But even seeing it from the outside, as we do, we know that
this is not the ending to his story that Jesus had asked for or imagined. But it is one he could have predicted. The choice, for Jesus, was always about
keeping faith with who he was, doing what God had appointed him to do. As one who loved and healed and taught and
gathered people to his open table, Jesus risked offending the systems that
would keep people subjugated, alienated, and alone. As one who loved life and lived it
abundantly, his very exuberance proved a dangerous way to live in an oppressive
and fearful climate. But even a cursory
reading of the Gospels will convince you that Jesus loved the life that Good
Friday demanded he lose.
As you and I take
our places at the cross today, let us remember that we are engaged in a drama where
the ones with power seek to deploy it while the one with real authority refuses
to use it. Jesus is given over into the hands of wicked people not
because God is cruel but because God stands with those who get run over by
life. God refuses to wield weapons against us. And God reaches out
to us to lead us into a new way of being with each other. A way, in the words
of Northrop Frye, “based on trust instead of threats.”
In the crucifixion
of Jesus, God has experienced human suffering at its most painful and
profound. God has stood with us in the
worst kind of human experience. This act
of solidarity means two things for us.
First, it means that the one we pray to is not some distant powerful
cosmic king. The one we pray to is a
lonely, dying man of sorrows and griefs. That one hears us in the way a cosmic
king couldn’t but a fellow sufferer would.
Second, it means that God calls us to stand together with Jesus and with
all those who suffer. So, because of the cross, these two things are now
true for us. The God we pray to is one who knows what it is to be us, to be
weak and fragile and lonely and lost. And that one goes with us as we
walk with Jesus to his death and then on to new and risen life.
Here is how Paul
puts it in a reading from his letter to the Philippians that we read earlier
this week:
Let the same mind be in you that was
in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of
God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of
death--
even death on a cross.
Jesus went to the
cross because he knew that it was more important to take the form of one with
no power and no status than it was to insist on his own dignity. It was
more important to Jesus to stand against the forces that destroy life and
belittle human beings than it was to have the titles and symbols of power which
Caesar and Pilate and Herod so desperately claimed. Jesus did not want to
die. But the freedom and compassion with which he lived gave him no other
choice. And it is because he emptied himself to death on a cross that you and I
can choose today to live as he did—a life based on trust instead of
threats--too.
It is toward freedom and compassion, toward trust and hope, that God beckons
you and me this Good Friday. We can live as free and compassionate people
because Good Friday is not finally tragic. We can live as trusting and
hopeful people because love is more powerful than death. The story does not end
today. What comes next is Easter. Here is Paul again:
Therefore God also highly exalted
him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the
earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
[Philippians 2:5-11]
Almighty God, we
pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ
was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer
death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment