Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12

March 21, 2008

Every year, when Holy Week rolls around, I find myself wondering what the disciples – Peter, James, John and the others – would have thought, standing at the foot of the cross, if they had known we would eventually begin calling that day “Good Friday.” It’s pretty jarring, isn’t it: Jesus tried, humiliated, beaten, killed. Good Friday? How could it be?

I’ve heard people say, mostly ministers at services like this, that it’s only Good Friday in a retrospective sense. That is, the actual horrible nature of the day Jesus was crucified, is redeemed, it is made “good,” only by looking back at it from the standpoint of Easter. If Easter didn’t happen, on the third day, there would never have been any possible way to find goodness in this agonizing day. And, I get that. Theologically speaking, I understand that the crucifixion and the resurrection are two sides of the same coin. Jesus could not be Jesus, as we know him, without both dying on the cross and rising from the tomb.

But, I can’t help wanting to put the brakes on just for a bit. I don’t think it’s quite right, I don’t think we really live into the events of this day as they happened, if we grab too quickly for the redemption that we already know will be waiting for us on Sunday. Good Friday is good only after Easter arrives. And we should be careful not to get ahead of ourselves. Today is not Good Friday. When Sunday arrives, today will have been Good Friday but only because we will once again discover, to our astonishment, that the tomb has somehow managed to lose track of the body of our Messiah. But for the moment, today is not Good Friday. Today is terrible Friday. Today is broken hearted Friday. Today is the Friday we stand at the foot of the cross, with Mary weeping nearby, and witness the death of all our hopes and dreams.

Have you ever read a description of what happens to a human body when it is crucified? I will spare you the details, but trust me, it’s hard to imagine a worse way to die. People have always been extremely creative when it comes to devising ways to make other people suffer. And right now, today, in the midst of this service, in a symbolic way, that’s where we are; right in the middle of Jesus’ suffering.

I have a worship book in my office that describes how we should set up a church sanctuary for a service like this. Listen to these words: “No colors, flowers, images, or decorative materials should be used on Good Friday except, perhaps, representations of the way of the cross. The Lord’s table, pulpit, and lectern should be bare of cloth, candles, or anything else not actually used in the service. The cross remains, but it … should be veiled if possible. The veil may be made from mesh or cheesecloth dyed a deep hue of red, [purple, gray or black.] It covers the cross … completely and may be gathered at the bottom, [but] because of the transparent nature of the veil, the cross remains visible even though shrouded. [Thus] the veil, by partly concealing the cross, also calls attention to it.”

My friends, that’s what we’re all doing here today; calling attention to the cross. We’re not whitewashing it. We’re not scampering quickly past Golgotha with our eyes turned away. We’re not going straight from palm fronds to Easter lilies with nothing in between. We’re calling attention to the cross. For the moment, we’re staying with the suffering. Why would we do that? Why would any healthy-minded person want to dwell on anything so dark and morbid? Well, I can give you my answer to that question in one word – compassion.

Where does compassion come from? It comes from our having suffered. It comes from our knowing, from personal experience, what suffering is like. Pain, fear, confusion, guilt, embarrassment, shame, failure, abuse … we know these things. We might wish we didn’t. We might wish we’d never had the experiences that made them known to us. We don’t usually like to dwell on them any more than we have to. Still, we know them, intimately. And even though suffering isn’t something we would wish on anyone, once we’ve been through it to some degree, we often end up putting it to good use. It gives us a way to empathize, to feel in our own hearts some of what other people are going through when they suffer. And that’s compassion. The word literally means, to suffer together with those who suffer.

This might sound strange, but I can’t tell you how grateful I am, to Jesus, for the suffering he endured. I would never have wished anything like that for him. There’s no way he or anyone else could ever deserve that kind of treatment. Every year, right in the middle of Holy Week, my heart just breaks at hearing the story of his torture all over again. Even so, I’m grateful for that story.

Not because he was “suffering for my sins.” I’ve always had trouble with that idea; that God would be so mad at us for the horrible, wretched, sinful people we are, that He would demand the crucifixion of Jesus as punishment on our behalf. I’ve never been able to square that with the loving and forgiving Father that Jesus himself taught us to worship. No, I’m grateful for Jesus’ suffering for a different reason. Our notion of God, our Christian notion, is unique among all the great world religions, in that we believe God, in Jesus, knows our suffering; knows it, not only in some abstract, intellectual, cosmic way, but by having personally experienced, in our human form, some of the worst suffering that people are capable of inflicting on one another.

I’m grateful for it because every time I find myself slipping into my own darkness, every time I lose my way, every time I fall flat on my face, every time I suffer any of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as Shakespeare put it; I have but to remember the cross, and I know Jesus is there with me. Our notion of God, is that God gets it. God gets what it is to be human. God, according to the story we tell, is compassionate. He has borne the same griefs that we bear. He has carried the same sorrows. Which means, to me, that no matter how we might feel, we are not now nor will we ever be lost to God in our suffering. And for that, as crazy as it might seem, we have the cross to thank.

Amen