Good Friday 2015

Good Friday—2015 There is a temptation that we face this day. It is understandable; our liturgy even seems to encourage it. Our temptation today is to think that this day, Good Friday, is about us. It is not. Good Friday is about God. As one Episcopal priest puts it, “The Bible is the love story between God and humanity.” It’s important to remember always, but especially today. Another saying, from a French parable, says that “the crucifixion is that moment when God’s heart falls out on the floor, and we trip on it.” In the Passion story from John’s gospel, we see a much more stoic Jesus than in any of the other gospels. This is a Jesus who knows exactly what is happening. This is a Jesus who “strides through the Good Friday passion account in divine and human majesty.” ( FOTW Theological perspective p 306). Jesus in John’s gospel utters three mysterious statements from the cross. “Woman here is your son. Here is your mother.” “I am thristy.” “It is finished.” Theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in his book Cross-Shattered Christ writes about this reticence saying, “…I believe the reticence of the Gospels as well as these spare words from the cross is not accidental. Instead, that reticence is a discipline given us by God to draw us into, to make us participants in, the silence of a redemption wrought by the cross. In the world as we find it—a world that seems to make belief in God some desperate irrationality, Christians are tempted to say more about what we believe than we can or should say…In his book Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles our Judgment, Rowan Williams observes that ‘God is in the connections we cannot make,” a wonderful remark that reminds us that our desire to say and know more than the silence scripture forces on us manifests our uneasiness with the mystery of a God who would be known through crucifixion.” (Hauerwas pp 39-40). Today we are invited to dwell for a while in silence, ‘in the mystery of God who would be known through crucifixion’. We contemplate the mystery that is the heart of God, fallen out on the floor for us to trip over today. We remember today that “mystery does not name a puzzle that cannot be solved. Rather mystery names that which we know, but the more we know, the more we are forced to rethink everything we think we know.” (Hauerwas p 15) In closing I leave you with an excerpt from the poem Mercy by John F. Deane (from which the title of Hauerwas’s book comes) to reflect upon: Mercy Unholy we sang this morning, and prayed as if we were not broken, crooked the Christ-figure hung, splayed on bloodied beams above us; devious God, dweller in shadows, mercy on us; immortal, cross-shattered Christ— your gentling grace down upon us. (Taken from Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ (p. 10). The poem appears in Deane's book Manhandling the Deity.)