Good Friday 2013

Good Friday 2013 We need Good Friday. We need Good Friday because all the rest of the year, we can convince ourselves that we understand God. But Good Friday is a stark and shocking reminder that we most assuredly do not and cannot. Eugene Peterson, the translator of The Message, says it well when he writes, “Who would have thought God’s saving power would look like this?” We need Good Friday because it reminds us that we do not have all the answers. We need Good Friday because it shocks us; it wakes us up; it reminds us that we need to pay attention. We need Good Friday because we, too, know something of deep sadness, of frustrated expectations, of lost hope. We need Good Friday because the song of Israel that Jesus, who is God with us, sings from the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—echoes in our own hearts at different times and at different seasons, too. We need Good Friday because we long to “hold fast to the confession of our faith without wavering”; we need Good Friday because we desperately need to be reminded that “he who has promised is faithful.” We need Good Friday because we, too, have kept watch as one we love is dying. We watch as one we love is in agony, and we discover ourselves to be truly and utterly helpless. We need Good Friday because we too have our funerals and we get worn down by the senseless suffering, by the grief, by the loss, and by the heartbreak. We need Good Friday because we also need to be reminded that even though this old world seems to be broken beyond repair, God is carrying out God’s plan of salvation: “things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made…” We need Good Friday because even though we cannot make Eucharist on this sad day, we gather together to eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus who loves us and who gives himself freely to us and who is with us always, even today. We need Good Friday because even today, especially today, we take solace in communion with God and with one another. We need Good Friday because today we get to see what it means for Jesus to be ‘fully human’. We need Good Friday because we and the whole world need redemption, even if we don’t fully understand how it works, or even what it is, we know that we need it. We need Good Friday because as Richard Rohr writes, “This is exactly how Jesus ‘redeemed the world by the blood of the cross.’ It was not some kind of heavenly transaction or paying a price to an offended God, as much as cosmic communion with all that humanity has ever loved and ever suffered. If Jesus was paying any price it was to the hard and resistant defenses around our hearts and our bodies. God has loved us from all eternity.” We need Good Friday to remember, on this day of all days, “that God has loved us from all eternity.”