Good Friday, 7 p.m. service Today is Good Friday.  What, we might ask, is “good” about Good Friday?  It seems like a cruel oxymoron, because this is the day on which the church observes Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion on a Roman cross.  It might seem more accurate to call this day “Dark Friday” or even “Bad Friday”.
    
There is nothing light and warm and fuzzy about Good Friday.  And, that my friends is the good news. Because the truth is, life is not always light and warm and fuzzy. The truth is that suffering and death are part and parcel of what it means to be human. My hunch is that most of us sitting here this night have known suffering and death in a deeply personal way. And, if we haven’t yet, we will.

Suffering confronts our illusions and shatters any myth we may have of invulnerability. Death exposes our limits and painfully reminds us of our own and our loved one’s finitude.  

It can be so very, very difficult to face the finality of death. It goes against every fiber of our being. Some time ago, I met with a young boy whose mother had recently died after a long illness.  We sat in my office in companionable silence. As we’d done in previous sessions, he sipped his hot chocolate and I sipped my hot tea. Suddenly, he said to me, “I tell myself that my mom is on vacation and so I’m just waiting for her to come home.”  I told him that I understood and that was a perfectly normal thing to do. He seemed relieved as his small body heaved a huge sigh and he settled back in his chair. Our minds will go to great lengths to protect us from what our hearts cannot bear.  

So how in the world do we bear what our minds tell us is unbearable? Two words from Scripture can point the way.   Jesus suffered. These two words may be the most human words in all of Scripture. They may also be the words, which are, when life seems to have become unbearable, the words that really save us.  

In her book, In Search of Belief, Benedictine nun and author Joan Chittister writes, “the suffering of Jesus may be the one proof we have that Jesus was really human and that humanity, whatever its pain, can transcend the burden of it”.  Why?  Because there is nothing that we can suffer that Christ does not know has not shared, cannot somehow transcend.

So how do these words enable us, as members of Christ’s church, to be with one another when one of us suffers?  And, more to the point, how do these words enable us to sit with a child who has lost his mother, or a mother who has lost her child to death or any other number of tragedies? How do we bear our own and one another’s Golgothas?

We can do so only because we know we are not alone.  We have a companion on the way.  The suffering of Christ gives us insight into our own lives, lends us strength for our own journeys and enables us to journey with others.  We can walk through our own Golgothas only because we know God in Christ is with us and for us.

But we do have a choice. We can choose to deny our own and others suffering. And, in so doing, we can let suffering devour us.  

In one of her poems, Emily Dickinson refers to the death of an unidentified “great hope,” and her attempt to deny this devastating loss.  She realizes however, that “not admitting of the wound” had dangerously enlarged it.  In the words of the poem,

    Until it grew so wide
    That all my Life had entered it.
    
This is the terrible possibility inherent in our suffering.  It can remain forever merely suffering, unadmitted, unshared, and left to grow larger and larger.   Suffering can swallow us hole, as the black holes in the universe are said to swallow light itself.  I’m sure that some of you know or have known what it is like to feel as if your life teeters on the edge of complete darkness.   

Holy Week reveals the depth and breadth of sufferings and heartaches that life brings us.  Jesus suffered the disillusionment that comes with superficial success -- remember the cries of “Hosanna” last Sunday?  Jesus suffered emotional breakdown and physical exhaustion.  He wept in the Garden, full of fear, depressed to the point of darkness and discouragement, awash in failure.  It had all been for nothing.  It had all been ignored.  In Chittister’s words, “The God who whispered in his heart all his life was silent now.”

Jesus suffered. And his suffering forever changed human suffering.  There is nothing that we can suffer that Christ does not know has not shared, cannot somehow transcend. Knowing this, we can throw in our lot with hope, and trust that light overcomes darkness. And in so doing, we can bear our own and others sorrows. Jesus died in disgrace, a criminal of the state.   And he died without a curse on his lips. Again from Chittister, “We learn from the suffering Jesus that life lived in concert with God is, even at the moment of total destruction, the only strength we need to survive it, soul intact, heart unshriveled.”    

The cross is what Good Friday is all about. The cross reveals the depths to which God will go, even into death itself, to be with us and for us. If this is our belief, than we can bear the pain, survive the tragedy, walk through the darkened valley.  We can do this trusting that through our suffering we will discover new meaning for life and a strengthened faith, because God in Christ shares our suffering and thereby redeems it.  Amen.


The Reverend Dr. Deborah L. Silver
Assisting Priest