4/10/20
There was a movie that came out in 1980 called “The Long Good Friday”. It was about British gangsters, and was a wonderful film; but it comes to my mind on this day not because of anything that happens in the film, but simply because of the title. Our community, our country, and our world are living through a time of fear, and anxiety, and a sense of helplessness, and we can’t see the end of it. It feels like a long Good Friday.
Well, it’s not that. Let’s get our bearings: let’s remember who we are, and what we’re doing here. The coronavirus pandemic is a terrible affliction on us all, it’s causing massive suffering around the world – especially among the poor and the powerless), and it’s going to last what seems like a long time.
But it will pass. And this day – Good Friday – is something else; it’s a day on which, as people of faith, we give our attention to something infinitely greater. This is the day on which we behold what, for us Christians, is the great mystery of human existence. Today we behold the one who came to tell us that the kingdom of God – the world that proceeds directly from God’s being, a world of love and peace and joy and justice and hope – today we behold the one who came to tells that that world can be here, now, among us. Today we behold the one who came here to tell us that and to show us how to live that way: how to open ourselves to God’s kingdom that is right here waiting to happen. Today we behold that one whose life, whose whole being, was dedicated to that purpose; and to doing it purely out of love of God, and love for us. Today we behold that one whom this world chose to reward for all of that with death on the cross. Today we stand at the foot of the cross; we behold, and we mourn. And we mourn that the world does it over and over and over again.
And when we say that about “the world”, we should be careful not to kid ourselves about something. I was sorry to miss our regular Palm Sunday this year (I doubt there’s been another Palm Sunday in the last 237 years when there wasn’t a congregation worshipping in this building.) I was sorry for all the reasons we’re coming to know all too well about how we miss doing church with each other; but I was especially sorry because that particular service contains what for me is one of the single most powerful moments in the church year. It’s the moment when, in the reading of the passion story, in which a number of us speak individual parts, when Pilate asks the crowd what he should do with Jesus, it’s the entire congregation – clergy included, all of us – who shouts, “Crucify him!”
It’s so powerful to me because, in that moment, we own the fact that we do it. Not somebody else – not “they” – it is we who condemn Jesus to death on the cross. And if that sounds too extreme, if we think we wouldn’t have done that 2000 years ago, we should think again. We should think of all the times in our lives when the new life of God’s kingdom has been on our threshold, staring us in the face, waiting to be let in, and we’ve either ignored it, or actively shut the door: out of ignorance, or unwillingness to be inconvenienced, or simply because it was new, and unfamiliar, and therefore wrong. Sometimes these moments are big, and sometimes they’re so small they’re barely noticeable: but we all know that, no matter how tiny the seed that God plants, it can grow infinitely, and when we flick it aside, we can’t know what it is we’re condemning to death.
We stand here, at the foot of the cross, beholding our denial of the living presence of God among us: a denial which, for some unfathomable reason, we cannot help but collude in. That’s the great mystery that we behold today: we stand here, and we mourn; and we ask for God’s help, not knowing what God could possibly do about it. Amen.