Preparing to enter Good Friday

O come and mourn with me awhile; O come ye to the Saviours side, O come together, let us mourn, Jesus, our love, is crucified.

Have we no tears to shed for him, while soldiers scoff and foes deride? Ah! Look how patiently he hangs: Jesus, our love, is crucified.

How fast his hands and feet are nailed, his blessed tongue with thirst is tied, his failing eyes are blind with blood: Jesus, our love, is crucified.

His mother cannot reach his face; she stands in helplessness beside; her heart is martyred with her son’s: Jesus, our love, is crucified.

Seven times seven he spoke, seven words of love; and all three hours his silence cried for mercy on the souls of men; Jesus, our love, is crucified.

O break, o break, hard heart of mine! Thy weak self- love and guilty pride his Pilate and his Judas were: Jesus, our love, is crucified.

A broken heart, a fount of tears, ask, and they will not be denied; a broken heart love’s cradle is: Jesus, our love, is crucified.

O love of God, o sin of man! In this dread act your strength is tried; and victory remains with love; for he, our love is crucified.  

I love that scene from Father Ted. The old priest Father Jack driven by anything he can drink, has drunk too much floor polish. Father Ted and Father Dougal think he is dead. They keep vigil with his body in the crypt prior to his funeral. Ted says “Funny, one moment you’re there, the next… Someone once said that life is just a thin sliver of light between two immensities of darkness. Makes you think. Dougal says “It does, Ted. About what?” Ted, angrily: “About death, Dougal, about death. To which Dougal, sitting in a crypt with a corpse says “that’s a bit morbid isn’t it? What started you off thinking about death?”!

For many Christians, today is too much. “What started you off thinking about death?” they want to say. So they avoid this day and come back on Sunday. Good Friday and thinking about death and a Cross and blood and sacrifice and suffering is not what we need to be doing. But, what is Easter Sunday without today? What is new life without death, and what does Jesus rise from? Darkness, death and defeat. Christianity for me is about hope – hope that the worst the world can do to you, the worst the world can send you, the worst day you are having, the crappiest time you are facing, and the day when no one understands you, Christ is there with you and will lead you through it to new things. But we have to live it with him. We die with Christ to rise with Christ.

           
Jesus knew the reality of death. It was not as that poem we often read at funerals says “nothing at all.” Remember he wept at the death of his friend Lazurus. He knew what death on a cross would be like. That’s why he is in agony before it, and on it he cries out to God, if it is possible take this cup from me, yet not my will, but yours. But let’s voice that we don’t want it. What got you thinking about death?

The problem is we have forgotten what sort of death Jesus would beat. I found in a history book Good Friday sermons by Bishop Lancelot Andrews given in Whitehall before King James I in 1604 and 1605. 

These words show me why some people want to avoid thinking about it:
“Our very eye will soon tell us no place was left in his body where he might be smitten and was not: his skin and flesh rent with the whips and scourges, his hands and feet wounded with the nails, his head with the thorns, his very heart with the spear point, all his senses, all his parts laden with whatever wit or malice could invent, his blessed body given as an anvil to be beaten upon.  They did not whip him, they ploughed his back and made long furrows upon it, they did not put on his wreath of thorns and press it down with their hands, but beat it on hard with bats to make it enter through skin, flesh, skull and all; they did not pierce his hands and feet, but made wide holes like that of a spade, as if they had been digging in some ditch.”

If such seventeenth century descriptions of the scene make us shudder today, and we’d rather not hear them, perhaps they help us remember that Jesus is not some remote and far off figure but one who knows real human affliction. That’s the heart of the story of today – he knows, he endures it, and he will beat it.

So two things I take from doing Good Friday.

First, I remember in Jesus we have someone who knows what suffering and death are. He doesn’t avoid them, and he is with us in our times we struggle. What do you need Jesus to do for you today? How is Friday “Good” for you? It is from the Cross that Jesus invites us into life. He says to the man next to him “today, you will be with me in Paradise.”

Paradise can only be entered through our abandonment of all that we are, through death itself. God’s way is all about life – life after death, but also life before death. The cross is a sign we are to enter the death places of the world and be Christ there, for that is what he did for us and asks of us.  You’ve got to know Jesus’ love for you, today, before you can do anything else as a church. You can’t evangelise the community if you aren’t evangelised yourself. Jesus dies for you.

Then I think we need on Good Friday to hold on to hope. My picture is from Lindisfarne and I took it two weeks ago. The cross on the picture is on a little island called St Cuthbert’s Isle where St Cuthbert, Bishop of the island, and leader of the monastery went on retreat. It takes some getting to at low tide scrambling through rockpools, but it is worth the climb. Note in my picture the flowers. I see this picture as a symbol. Today is hard, black, too much for some, what got you thinking about death. But there is a tomorrow. Think about the disciples – most could not do this scene and they fed, locking themselves away. Later they will discover the crucified and risen one living and transforming the darkness of the world. A blog that came my way reminded me of the theologian Jurgen Moltmann who said, “Good Friday is the most comprehensive and most profound expression of Christ’s fellowship with every human being.” I simply want to say don’t rush to that place. Encounter death, stay with it, worship at the cross, let Jesus suffer for you, let him save things, that’s his name, he will save the people from their sins. Let him die, to bring life. Whatever got you thinking about death? Without death there is no resurrection. Death is real. With Christ death is not ignored, sidelined or too difficult to face. It is conquered. 

O Father of our souls, the sovereign Lord of life and death, comfort with your presence all who fear that life’s riches joys and fairest hopes have been buried in a tomb; give them the assurance that what has been truly precious cannot be holden of death, nor that which is holy see corruption. Into your hands we commit ourselves, and those near and dear to us. In our frailty and grief we rest upon your love, O God, from which neither death nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, can separate us. Amen.