Telling Her

a Sermon for Good Friday, Year C
Text: John 18:1-19:42

God of Hope and Wonder, you give us this day that hurts us each year as a reminder and as an opportunity. Be with us now and through the weekend as we mourn the loss of your Son. Amen.

If you have ever had to follow a tough act—you can begin to understand what it is like to stand here at this moment. To follow the reading of the Passion. This gospel humbles and silences us.

Perhaps because it is haunting and frightening that many are moved on Good Friday to talk theologically about sin and forgiveness, using big words like atonement and Christology; using this talk to pull us away from feeling sad and guilty. Even the name Good Friday comes to us with a cruel irony that is certainly unavoidable in this space. The cross, our symbol begins to feel heavy on our chests and burn in our eyes when we think about it. When we hear those words: “There they crucified him,” we can’t help but think about the grim reality of what is going on this story. We can’t help but see in this the earthy, human reality of what took place. Humans put our human-born Messiah on a human-made torture device and killed him.

Sunday, I mentioned a book, The Last Week, which covers the final days of Jesus’s life. When the authors get to Good Friday, they describe the crucifix itself. We might envision it as tall planks of wood, rising high into the air. The cruel truth is that the victims are only a couple of feet off of the ground. The upper body high enough to draw carrion birds to pick at the flesh, while the lower limbs close enough for stray dogs to tear at the feet. The reality of crucifixion is that it is disgusting. It is demoralizing. It is torture. And in Roman occupied territory, as Jerusalem was, it was the most frightening act the state could use against the people.

I’ll tell you today is the hardest day to be a Christian. Not because I have to endure this story, the emotions, the fears; but I have to think of some way to tell my daughter this story. This time around, she’s a week away from 2 and I know she won’t get it. I’ll tell her something about God’s generosity and Rose and I will go about our year feeling thankful that we don’t have to really talk about this. But when do I tell her? When do I tell her that people killed God? When she’s four or five? And when do I try to explain this story that is both sacrifice on Jesus’s part and cruel viciousness on humanity’s part? That we can’t really tell the story without both parts. When will she be mature enough to understand it?

Perhaps in a more basic sense, part of the reason most of us are afraid to talk about the crucifixion is that it isn’t “appropriate subject matter”. This story isn’t G-rated. In our culture, there is no proper place for us to have a conversation that involves talking about torture, mockery, and execution to a general audience. Even the evening news makes close-to-home cases a mixture of scintillating true crime and clinical depictions of tragic events. We can’t talk about the ugliness of humanity in the way it deals with difficult subjects. One memory that is etched in my mind was back in ’96 (I think). It was after the final game of the NBA finals when the Bulls beat the Jazz and the 11:00 News came on and they were covering the sentencing of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber. He had been given a sentence of execution and they were showing this crowd that was pushing against this chain link fence, apparently there to keep the crowds away from the proceedings and I remember hearing the words screamed with hate; faces distorted in hunger for the kill. They were giddy and joyful and had crazy animal eyes. And I sat down overwhelmed with shock and sadness and shared guilt that maybe I could be part of this. Maybe I could be transformed into a being of pure evil and hate. And I cried…confused and hurt. I shut the TV off and sat in silence and I cried.

Today is the day we confront death. We have to. We confront death in the form of loved ones that we’ve sat with, we’ve cried over, we’ve held in our arms. It’s the day we confront all of the stages: knowledge of impending death, the torture of the coming death, the strange details of death, and finally, loss. Maybe that’s why we feel compelled to skip on to Easter. But don’t. Not this time. Stay for a little longer in this moment. Because its here, in loss, in grief, that we get to experience anew this “Good” day.

So let’s stay away from theology and explanations of why this had to happen, just this once. And let us sit with ourselves in this moment, in all of these emotions.

As I see it, I won’t be able to talk to my daughter about Good Friday with integrity without learning how to feel it. How to feel death and loss. Until I can share with her some of my experiences. And to do that, I have to deal with my own stuff. And I don’t think we’ll ever do that if we simply see Good Friday as the day God balanced the checkbook or the day Jesus rescued prisoners from the Underworld or whatever interpretation you want to throw out. At its root, at its deepest level, Good Friday is about death—and talking about death. It’s about sharing in a story that is hard to tell and hard to hear. But we share it anyway.

May our own experiences of death and loss give us a new sliver of wisdom of God’s sacrifice for us. Amen.