March 25, 2016, Good Friday

We are accustomed to avoiding death. We speak of death in whispers. We have a sanitized experience of death in our hospitals and in our funerals. We try to surround the topic of death with euphemisms, so that it has no meaning for us. We speak of passing away to a better place when we have no desire to think about it and we hope that day for us is as far away as possible.

Even our theology can be a way of avoiding the truth for us. We speak of Jesus conquering death, and putting our sin to death – all very objective and theoretical.  We think about angels and clouds and pearly gates. We think about far away hopes and worry about far away judgments. We hope God loves us and we trust that it will all work out.

I suppose we look for a good death. We also look for meaning – and we rarely find it. Death is a waste. It is final. There is no benefit or reward. The best the living can do is to move on and put the pieces of life back together into something that resembles a new normal.

Every once in a while, something happens to break apart our well-crafted illusions. Sickness comes home when we hear a difficult diagnosis. We lose a job or we don’t get into our favorite school or an important relationship breaks down. Someone close to us dies and we have to readjust our lives. I think this is why we feel so deeply when there is a terror attack in a western city. The people who are injured look like us. The buildings that are devastated look like neighborhoods we recognize. Death comes near and we cannot pretend otherwise.

The gentle words of our theology seem insufficient to protect us. We are afraid. We have lost the certainty that everything will be OK because it looks as if nothing will ever be the same again. The passion of Jesus does not reassure us. Jesus is tortured and betrayed. His disciples and his friends are scattered and devastated. His enemies are indifferent as they return to their lives of dominance and cruelty. Jesus gives in to death. A few onlookers marvel at his courage and his humanity.

Jesus doesn’t offer us a moral fable. He doesn’t explain the theology behind his actions, or give us slogans to comfort us. Jesus bears a cross. He lets himself be whipped. He watches his friends desert him. He feels the pain, the loneliness, the last breath, and he dies. There is no metaphor or symbol. There is real death – the death that we will all experience – whether or not we are ready.

We have many possible responses. We can be horrified. We can be grateful. We can choose to set it aside for a more palatable moment. Somehow this day of loss and sorrow is a day of blessing. Somehow this shows us the depth of God’s love. Perhaps we can only know how much something means to us when we have lost it. Is this how much we love God? Is this how much we love life?

The good part of Good Friday is in how we share in what Jesus is doing and in what is done to him. We are the mockers and the torturers. We are the fearful and the betrayers. We are the murderers and the soldiers taking orders. We are also the mourners. We are the friends and the mothers. We are the guilty and we are the victims. Jesus is dying for each of us. We are dying with him.

We are participating in something that is really happening all the time. We can no longer hide from death. We can no longer avoid our responsibility. We also know that Jesus is right beside us. He has walked this path. He shows us that the way beyond is by walking through – then what we will find at the other end is real as well.