Good Friday 2018

Good Friday 2018 March 30, 2018 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? * and are so far from my cry and from the words of my distress? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; * by night as well, but I find no rest. “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.” It’s no mistake that 2 of our four readings for today are poetry. Poetry, through its space, its absence, it sparsity, often expresses for us what prose cannot. It reveals without having to explain. It echoes without having to say. I’ve been reading an anthology of poems over the last couple of weeks. It is titled Love, Remember: 40 Poems of loss, lament, and hope by Malcolm Guite who is an Anglican priest and himself, a poet. In the introduction, Guite describes the purpose of the book: “This book is written to give voice both to love and to lamentation, to find expression for grief without losing hope, to help us honour the dead with tears, yet still to glimpse through those tears the light of resurrection.” He continues, “It is written in the conviction that the grief that we so often hide in embarrassment, the tears of which some people would want to make us ashamed, are the very things that make us most truly human. Grief and lament spring from the deepest parts of our soul because, however bitter the herbs and fruits they seem to bear, their real root is Love, and I believe that it is Love who made the world and made us who we are.”i (Similar, I think, to what we do here on this day together.) One of the poems in this anthology that has captured my imagination this week is titled Onlookers by a poet named Luci Shaw. It has two layers to it: how we are all onlookers, outsiders to each others’ griefs and suffering and also it captures the scene of Jesus’s crucifixion from the perspective of the onlookers. Onlookers By Luci Shaw Behind our shield of health, each of us must sense another’s anguish second-hand; we are agnostic in the face of dying. So Joseph felt, observer of the push and splash of birth, and even Mary, mourner, under the cross’s arm. Only their son, and God’s, in bearing all our griefs felt them first-hand, climbing himself our rugged hill of pain. His nerves, enfleshed, carried the messages of nails, the tomb’s chill. His ever-open wounds still blazon back to us the penalty we never bore, and heaven gleams for us more real, crossed with that human blood. ii I’ve been especially struck by the lines: Only their son, and God’s,/ in bearing all our griefs/ felt them first-hand, climbing/ himself our rugged hill of pain. We remember this work of Jesus in “bearing all our griefs” today, not just as we hear the reading of John’s passion, where a rather triumphant Jesus strides through all of the scenes of his crucifixion. We remember this work especially when we read together Psalm 22, hearing echoes of Jesus’ last words in the less triumphant gospel of Mark that we read this past Sunday. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Truly heart-breaking last words for Jesus. I read recently that it was standard practice in Jesus’ time to cite the first phrase of a text in order to refer to the entirety of the passage.iii So, while Jesus certainly could have intended for his last words to be words of heart-break, joining in and bearing the griefs of all who have felt themselves separate from God (really, that’s all of us) he could also have been pointing his onlookers toward the totality of Psalm 22. The echoes of truth that show that even though our griefs, our sufferings isolate us, even that we can offer to God in prayer, and God does not ever truly forsake us. This psalm that Jesus speaks, which starts so starkly, ends on a triumphant note proclaiming God’s power and attention which go so far as to even “deliver a people yet unborn.” The poetry of Psalm 22 gives us a new way of encountering the Paschal Mystery—Jesus’s death and resurrection—and experiencing the intersection of that with our own ongoing deaths and resurrections throughout our whole lives as we, too, flow between the waves of lament and rejoicing, of agony and alleluia. Surely, he has borne our griefs… Today, may you have the courage to name before God your griefs, your infirmities, knowing that they have all already been held and felt by our Lord Jesus on the cross. May you offer them to God’s love, to be transformed in and through the resurrection. In closing, I want to share with you another of Luci Shaw’s poems from the Love, Remember anthology. Our Prayers Break on God Luci Shaw Our prayers break on God like waves, and He and endless shore, and when the seas evaporate and oceans are no more and cries are carried on the wind God hears and answers every sound As he has done before. Our troubles eat at God like nails. He feels the gnaw of pain on souls and bodies. He never fails but reassures He’ll heal again, again, again and yet again.iv i. Guite, Malcolm. Love, Remember: 40 Poems of loss, lament, and hope. Canterbury: 2017, ix. ii.Ibid. p 99 iii.Feasting on the Word Commentary. Ed David L. Bartlett and Barbara B. Taylor. Westminster: 2008, Pastoral Perspective on Psalm 22 by David J. Wood. p 290 iv.Guite, Malcolm. Love, Remember: 40 Poems of loss, lament, and hope. Canterbury: 2017, 65.