Good Friday
March 21, 2008
The Rev. Susan Richmond
St. James, Cambridge
They are Us
This is the second time this week that many of us have heard “the story”—the story of Good Friday. Sunday it was Matthew’s version and today we heard it from John, but anyway you cut it, it is not an easy story to hear much less to be part of. Yet if there is one thing we know today it is that this story is our story. The events it recounts, are not only familiar, they are deeply imbedded in our souls as Christians. In fact, ff we are honest we know that this central story shapes our lives and our worship week after week throughout the year. But even saying that, we also know that this story does not, and cannot, stand alone.
Good Friday is not meant to be lived in isolation, any more than can the stories of Jesus’ healing ministry, his sermons of justice and peace and the abundance of life, or even the resurrection. All these stories weave together to make up the fabric of who we are as Christians. It is far too easy to get ourselves bogged down and stuck in one part of Jesus life or death or even resurrection without taking into account the whole.
Our intentional walk through Lent leading to Holy Week, Easter, and towards Pentecost forces us take a broader view of what it means to walk with God through life. But lest we narrow our view from the breadth of that story, our church forces on us an ever wider view as we draw in the Hebrew scriptures, reminding us not only of Jesus life as a Jew, but of the covenant relationship God has had with God’s people reaching back to the creation of the world. It is a wide lens we are given and one that it is almost impossible to hold together—especially on this most holy of days. And yet it is important for so many reasons that we try to keep that bigger picture as we listen, and live, these last hours of Jesus’ life.
As we were preparing for this service, Pat and I discovered a long paragraph in the Good Friday bulletin for the last few years, reminding the congregation of the dangers some of the language used in the Gospel of John has posed for the way we understand this story and this day. In particular, that blurb referred to the use of the words “the Jews” and the ways that Christians have twisted those words in order to justify anti-Semitism and hatred to our Jewish brothers and sisters. Pat and I read and re-read that paragraph and grappled with its wording. After some days with it, ultimately I decided to take it out, not because it did not raise an issue of which we need to be profoundly aware, but because I came to realize that in reading and wrestling with it, I was totally in my head being taken away from the very essence of this moment –this moment when Jesus is brought to the cross and nailed there, suffering, struggling with his humanity and ultimately his death. That paragraph took me away from Jesus and from where I stood on that day—from where I stand today.
It took me away from the mirror that is held up to each one of us as we live into what it might mean to embrace this story claiming our own place in the mob on the side of that road, or as one of those not even present that day. If I had to guess, even for those of us who believe we might have been there throwing down palm branches and cheering Jesus along on the road into Jerusalem, there is a part of us that acknowledges that we might very well have been too frightened to show our faces anywhere near the lynch mob that called for his death. Or if we are at all honest, we might wonder if we would have been one of those religious leaders intent on keeping the status quo and peace in the city in the face of a government bureaucracy that we felt powerless to change.
This day, of all days, we realize none of us comes away unscathed or innocent. Whether we chose to stay home or whether we were calling for his death, each one of us was –each one of us is—culpable in some part for the death of the goodness of creation and the love and justice that is God in this world. Sounds pretty harsh, I know, but it seems to me that that is why we come here today-- to acknowledge the painful truth that each one of us participates in the death of the world.
On Tuesday night we had a vestry meeting at which Tom Tufts lead us in a few moments of worship. Each of us was asked to think of some pivotal situation in our lives when we first realized that our lives had taken a turn from childhood innocence to have our eyes opened to the fact that in the larger world, all was not right—a moment when our world view changed from innocence to a kind of sadness or puzzlement that the world was not necessarily safe or as it should be. That question has haunted me all week, first, because I realize that some children have never known in their lives the safety and security that so many of us take for granted. Some children, here and around the world, do not know that it means have an assurance that there will be food on the table or roofs over their heads, and in fact, may grow up knowing that not much is right in the world.
But Tom’s question was a good one for each of us to ask, and I recalled at least two times when my own safe, predictable world view shifted. The first was when I was 10 years old in Greensboro, North Carolina. If you remember, Greensboro was one of the first places that African American students chose to sit-in at lunch counters in the early 60’s—the beginnings of to what came to be known as the civil rights movement when the complacent comfortable southern whites were confronted with the hatred and bigotry that had permeated that part of the country from its earliest days. For me, those first sit-ins days came as a shock. Having a father from Minnesota and a mother from the south who lived quietly with a different world view from many of their closest friends, I grew up oblivious to the racial tension all around me. Racist language was never permitted or spoken in our home, but soon it came to be scrawled on buildings and on signs. Even more upsetting, I began to realize that family friends who had loved and nurtured me could hold views and speak words that broke my parent’s hearts. I could hide from their anger and bigotry but I could not reject these people who had loved me and supported me in every way possible. My world shattered a bit during those days and I was confused and angry and sad. All politics aside, listening to Barack Obama this week in his nuanced speech about his relationship to his pastor Rev. Wright, I thought about that confusing time in my life. It took a kind of bravery for Obama not to reject his friend outright while acknowledging the evil nature of some of his thoughts and words.
The second time I recalled from Tom’s question came years later when I was in high school. There was to be a birthday party for one of my friends. She was quite popular and being invited felt like a big deal. Several days before the party I remember asking my friend Raffie whether he needed a ride—Raffie’s dad was the rabbi at a local synagogue and we had been good friends for years. Raffie just laughed at me as he told me he wasn’t invited. Shocked, I asked why not. He explained that the country club where the party was to be held would never allow him to set foot in it. After all, he was Jewish. Going home, I confronted my parents with outrage and became even more indignant as I realized that while they did not belong to the club, they too had been to events there. Teenage righteous indignation boiled over into fury—condemning every last person who belonged to the club. But that anger turned to dismay and sadness as I realized that many of these same “club” people were my friends, and in fact my boyfriend’s family.
What to do? I railed and skipped the party, but my heart broke a bit that day. It broke in the same way that all our hearts have broken as we recognize the end of our innocence—as we come to understand the depth of the brokenness of our world. Getting older, it has continued to break as I realize just how much I too contribute to the death of the world and of life. This day, it is we who must face that we are the ones who cry “crucify him” as we pound the nails in the cross.
It all can happen without even realizing we have a hammer in our hands. Nails are pounded into the cross as we close our eyes to hunger and poverty—as we are afraid to even look it in the eye, much less give of our time, and talent, and money to alleviate it. We hammer away when we don’t speak up when sexist or racist jokes are told and we remain silent, or when we consume more than our share of earth’s resources. The noise of the nails can drown out the cries of those dying from war and famine and disease around the world. We strike nails deeply in the wood when we refuse to love and forgive each other—even those closest to us.
This is the day when no one walks away innocent, and his is our time to acknowledge that—not so that we can wallow in guilt-- but so that we can let go of all that mires us down and holds us in that place where were are immobilized by our past. With eyes open, today we come to the cross, kneeling, sitting, standing and pounding the nails end, knowing that God did and God does absorb it all. All we are and all we have done, can be left at the cross.
What will God then do with it? Now that is the miracle and mystery of Easter. But today is not the day rush ahead any more than we need to to face ourselves. Easter assurance makes us brave, but Good Friday can move us home to God
Amen
