Good Friday, 2008

Goodbye. Goodbye Love. Goodbye Friend. Goodbye Jesus.

Goodbye is such a loaded word, but that doesn't keep us from saying it all the time. Sometimes sad, sometimes hopeful. Sometimes pained and sometimes necessary. Sometimes we say it just to be polite, but sometimes it’s heavy and cloaked in finality. Sometimes we avoid it all together. The word comes from the Old English term “God be with ye.” God be with you. A lovely way to send someone off… “Go with God.” Over time, “God-be-with-ye” morphed into g-o-o-d-b-y-e.

Same sort of thing happened with the term Good Friday. The Old English possessive word for God is godes and today was called “Godes Friday.” It kinda morphed along the same path as “goodbye”, and so eventually, “God’s Friday” became “Good Friday.”

I know that when I learned this little tidbit I was relieved. It’s nice to know that there isn’t a Religious Holiday Naming Committee out there who thought it’d be jaunty and fun to call the execution of our Lord good. The point is that this day belongs to God. And though we believe that God is so, so good, we also know that putting God to death isn’t so great.

..…Don’t you think it should be raining outside? Let’s just go back to bed. Sleep through this dark, damp, sad day. Stay in. Make some tea. Hibernate. Let’s just close our eyes and dream today away. A cup of tea and a nap seems nicer than living out this story. The man we love, the One who has made us whole and healed, is hanging from a cross and dying a horrible death, and the pain that he is in right now is too much. We cannot bear it. It cannot be good.

And yet. This moment, this pain, this tragedy that we can’t even begin to bear…This Friday is the essential ingredient to the Gospel. It is The Good News.

It might not immediately resonate with you if you’re like me—privileged and healthy. But the extreme, profound suffering of Christ does resonate to the core with so many. Today is the day that the people in the world who are most marginalized, the people in the world who seem to have no hope, those who have suffered more than we can ever, ever imagine… Today is the day that they—you—we—all of Creation—gets to step into God’s Grace.

God doesn’t exist contrary to the suffering of the world, nor does God exist parallel to it; rather God exists in the darkness of the world. Right now, hanging from that cross, God is piercing the darkness of the whole world.

God is with refugees and orphans, with victims of violent crimes, with those who live in the fear of occupied territories. God is there. God has not ordained the most heinous disasters—God is suffering through them. God is there. There is a worldwide poverty crisis, and God is in the middle of it. Weeping, too. Hate crimes, terrorism, tornado disasters, massive fires, every war in history, the current war, wars to come, the AIDS crisis. God is there. Suffering. Every child who dies, every divorce, every grief, every trouble. God is there. Every playground where the skinny kid is beaten bloody, every ounce of depression, every single cancer cell, every hint of insecurity, every bit of doubt, every morsel of self-loathing. God is there. Are you Lonely? Empty? Dark? Lost? God is there. Holding your hand. Dying with you. Dying for you.

And this death, this execution, is not just for the sake of the poor and the oppressed. Jesus is hanging on the cross for the oppressors, too. For the very people who commit violence against him, Jesus is dying. Jesus is dying for the people who do us wrong and cause us pain, and Jesus is dying for the people we hate, and Jesus is dying for your worst enemy. Jesus is dying for us even though we aren’t exactly saints, either. No one—no one!—gets to be exempt from the Love of that man hanging on the cross. Everyone gets salvation.

So, here we are. Exposed. Mortal, vulnerable, pained, human. We are standing at the foot of the cross, and we have to say goodbye to our Jesus for now. The One who loves us to death is dying to save us. We can’t fix a pot of tea and pretend like this isn’t happening.

So, behold it. Behold this moment. Behold this death. Look into its eyes. You have never seen Love like this before.