Sermon by Garrett - March 25 - Good Friday

“The dripping blood our only drink, the bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think that we are sound, substantial flesh and blood— Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.” (TS Eliot’s Four Quartets)

...And yet we call this Friday good. Good? I want to pull back the curtain on that word and think about what we might be saying when we refer to this Friday as “good.”

Do we mean the same thing by good as God does? Think with me back to the opening chapter of the Bible: God says good on the heels of life and abundance; he looks fondly at creation bursting with life. Good, so this story tells us, has to do with creativity and freedom; with blessing and delight.

Can we honestly take this word that God has uttered and apply it to this Friday?

What if you had been there in the circus-like madness of the day? Jesus has been thrown from one court to the next like a pinball, from Caiaphas to Pilate out to the crowds, and back to Pilate, only to die in the shadow of a city that he came to save. This was all preceded by an unforgettable night of exiled panic in a garden, the pandemonium of an innocent arrest....and the betrayal of his closest friends.

Good?

There would be something cruel if we were to go back in time and visit Mary Jesus' mother or John, or any of those others who had experienced the wrenching loss of a friend, and tried to stitch meaning into their experience; that despite appearances God was actually at work in it all; that this was a good day…

No, not good in any ordinary sense of the word.

St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic of the 16th century, talked a great deal about the experience of death; we've probably all heard of the dark night of the soul; the experience of deprivation where all the glittery meanings and stories that the soul formerly held on to are exposed as vapor. The soul is unmoored from all it knows; there is only darkness and disorientation.

There is in all of us, I suspect, an initial aversion to such experiences as St. John describes: we prefer the straightforward, the tranquil: we normally like Fridays. But not this one. We much prefer when life is neither too mean nor not too nice - but just rolls along without too much drama.

We might even prefer days that are totally repetitive, we’d rather be Bill Murray's character in the movie Groundhog Day, to the fluctuating and unpredictable.

But as much as we'd like to immune ourselves from it, the inevitable comes, we are unhinged; we are thrown onto life’s judgement seat: we can't disentangle from a family members addiction; we are separated from our bodies by illness or depression; we are exhausted and burdened by the worlds hurt.

And as much as we'd like for it not to be, something like St. John's dark night sets in: the God who was so good to us previously is nowhere to be found.

Darkness becomes our only companion - We are left with questions that all spiral heavenward sounding something like those pain-riven words from Psalm 22, “My God my God why have you forsaken me?”

Our Hebrew ancestors knew a great deal about this dark night of deprivation and loss of faith. We really have to look no further than the first few verses of the Bible to see what they thought about chaos and evil: they tell us that save God's meaning-giving and creative word there is only chaos. "Darkness covered the deep." Apart from the generative activity of God, they tell us, is nothingness. There is God and then there is nothingness.

But that's not quite what we are talking about on this Friday. It's not God on the one hand and nothingness on the other: as if neither has anything to do with the other.

What we see happening in the events leading up to the death, not to mention the death itself, is God entering into the nothingness Godself.

The beginning of John's gospel is unforgettable: God breathed, he exhaled his Word into our darkness and deprivation - the Word became flesh, and breathed life into the private hells of the world. This is not something that merely happened 2000 yrs ago.

This is today. God breathing forth his Word in our darkness: there is no corner of the human experience - whether it's in Belgium or Bethel Park - that is cut off from transcendent light and love.

It’s basically what it means to be a Christian too: to associate oneself with a God who withholds nothing but instead plunges to the edges, to boundaries of the mess we’ve made, going to the very heart of darkness.

God breathing forth his life and word, as he draws in, inhales the darkness of our world, of our lives.

Whatever else we have to say, we must admit, this is a dark and mysterious Friday.

And yet, I hope we are sensing a strange goodness in all this – what I mean by that is that the darkness of this day might hold hope for the darkness of the entire world to enter in.

There is no darkness, no dimension of our lives or of the world that is not invited to be assumed, drawn into the darkness of the cross – which some have said is the darkness of God himself.

One of the very great theologians of the early church spoke much about the darkness that exists in God. He believed that the closer one grew to God the more and more one lost contact with one’s senses - the light of one’s reason is extinguished and darkness blankets the mind. There is a loss of control, and an uneasiness grips the soul.

Let me say, this is not the Dark night of the soul he is speaking of, but a baptism through prayer and contemplation into the mysterious God of this day.

And as this happens, we learn that....

Beyond, beneath, and behind the darkness that is within God; surrounding and enveloping it is boundless love; the darkness of this day, opens out onto the inextinguishable love of God.

God inhaling the nothingness of our world, of our lives, and exhaling, breathing back upon us, his unbounded love.

Sin and pain and frustration drawn into God’s heart and filled with his life and love.