Time for Death - Marie Alford-Harkey, M.Div.
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Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
Good Friday 2014
Marie Alford-Harkey, M.Div.
Time for Death
Tonight, the story ends with "they laid him in the tomb." Tonight, we remember what it is like to feel abandoned by God, and friends, and family, and what it is to abandon those we love. Tonight we remember what it is like to betray and to be betrayed. Tonight we lament, we mourn, and we grieve. Tonight we confront the injustice of a system that still kills its prophets, that still kills goodness.
On Good Friday, we enter into the story of Jesus knowing that he's about to die, knowing that the authorities are coming for him, knowing that they're going to kill him because he's been preaching and teaching concepts that upset the Empire, and threaten those in charge.
We enter in to the story with the disciples. They had been following him for three years. They had come to believe that he was the Messiah, that he could make everything ok, stilling storms, raising the dead, feeding crowds, and healing lepers. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the end was near, the disciples held out hope that some miraculous event would save Jesus.
But it didn't.
Jesus was executed, brutally, in front of all his friends and his mother. This public execution was meant to strike fear in the hearts of all who were following this crazy Rabbi, all who were starting to dream into reality a new kind of Empire based on love, not fear. It was meant to stop that movement in its tracks. No one challenges systems of power the way Jesus did and gets out alive. Jesus died, brutally and publicly on that cross. And that's where the story ends… tonight.
No wonder Good Friday services are never as well attended as Easter. Certainly it is easier to skip over these horrific events and move straight to the resurrection. After all, we are an Easter people. Every Sunday we proclaim, "On the third day he rose again." We already know the end of the story.
And yet… we need Good Friday. We need the time recall that things are not as they should be, that justice seems absent, and that the problems of the world seem unfixable.
Tonight especially we must start by calling out the anti-Jewishness of what we just heard. With the news of Nazi-looking flyers being given out to Jews in Ukraine instructing them to register themselves and all their property with the government or face deportation, tonight we must name the sin of anti-Semitism. The flyers are a hoax that were created to discredit political opponents as anti-Semites. But that doesn't make them any less reminiscent of the Holocaust, or any less terrifying to the Jews who received them.
Based largely on this account of the passion, too many Christians for too many years have blamed all Jews for Jesus' death. Certainly, the author of John's gospel is blaming the Jews of his own day for Jesus' death; he has a political axe to grind. But we know from history that crucifixion was a tool of the Roman Empire, not limited to Jewish authorities. We also know that those who wanted Jesus dead were those in power – some Jewish authorities, some Roman authorities, all who were threatened by Jesus' power-upending message. And we know that Jesus himself was a Jew and his followers were Jews. As scripture scholar Donald Senior has said of the gospel of John, "A Gospel whose one message is a proclamation of love should not be used in such a way that it drips hatred and prejudice into the life blood of the Church." And so on Good Friday especially, we Christians must repent of the harm done to Jews in the name of one of their own who preached love.
In fact, on Good Friday we must take the time to lament so many ways in which power is abused:
the manipulation of our political systems by the wealthy few, and the shaming of the poor that takes the place of the humility of washing each other's feet.
gun violence, and our unwillingness to sheath our weapons and heal our society with sensible laws.
the fear that leads those in power to wash their hands of prophetic troublemakers.
the systems that instill fear in us, that lead us to betray that which we love the most.
And on Good Friday we must take the time to mourn. We grieve our own losses – the death of someone we love, the betrayals and disappointments we have suffered, the pain of watching the people we love suffer.
In the churches I grew up in, we did not observe Good Friday. On Palm Sunday, the preacher would tell us about Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey to cheering crowds and waving palm branches. Jesus' passion and death received scant attention.
And then, one week later, we went straight to Easter. Our pastors always told us that Easter was the most glorious celebration for Christians, bigger than Christmas. And I tried to feel that way. I loved singing "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," and I tried to make that feeling into some kind of holy joy, but the message of Easter never really resonated in my soul.
I wanted to believe it was our most important Christian holiday, but my heart wasn't in it. I always ended up feeling guilty because this event that was the heart of our faith held so little meaning for me. It seemed like a fairy tale, or a superhero story.
When I became an Episcopalian, I realized that the soul was missing from Easter for me because I had never experienced Good Friday.
Resurrection means little if we have not felt death's sting.
In an interview about her new book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor says
I cannot sell out the Christian message, which at its heart says that when the bottom drops out and you’re screaming your guts out at God, there’s more. It says that if you are willing to enter the cloud of unknowing and meet God in the dark—maybe even the dark of a tomb—you might be in for a surprise.
The great hope in the Christian message is not that you will be rescued from the dark but if you are able to trust God all the way into the dark, you may be surprised.
This is the great truth of human life – there is no resurrection without death. And while we may learn to trust that there is more, tonight we cannot see it. Tonight we are in the tomb.
We may be an Easter people, but we cannot get there without making time for death.