Good Friday 2010
In the early church, Good Friday was pictured as a battleground between Life and Death personified. With every lash of the whip, Death heard it a the rhythm of celebration. Every pounded nail echoed in Death's chamber as a victory march. When the soldiers played dice for the cloak of Jesus, death got dressed up in its best array of clothes to dance. the pierced side elicited a piercing cry of triumph from Death. God's own lay in the grave. Prior to Easter, death  won,in all its enormity. Jesus lay dead in abject failure, no mere death mask but burial. Over time, as we reflect on that awful day, we start to wonder if it was an abject loss. Could it be that God could use even death toward a divine purpose? Could some good emerge from that awful day? Could victory be wrung from it somehow, some way?

 

God's life with us intersected with new power at the Incarnation. Even in death, maybe especially on Good Friday, God's life could be found even in the abode of death. In the life of Jesus and the death of Jesus, god is in solidarity with creation. even in all of its fragility and vulnerability. On
Good Friday we see the loving face of God on the face and body of Jesus hanging on the cross. On Good Friday we see the stunning image of the crucified messiah, God in the grave. Hope interred but not put to rest. Good Friday subverts our view of power. From the foundation of the world, the Son was a chosen vehicle. Then God was determined, from the foundation of the world, to offer salvation, Karl Barth argued that the Son was also the rejected one. In giving space to creation, God gave love breathing space. In love, God could give up power over Creation to the worst impulses of human beings. God would turn that evil toward good and make it a gateway for a life of love and forgiveness.

 

Love reaches into death itself and into the grave. God will not be deterred even from death itself. The Lord and giver of life faces death.

The Pieta is a famous image from art. You have perhaps the most famous image with your bulletins this evening. look at that face. You see not only the face of mother Mary. It is looking into the broken hearted face of heaven itself on that day.Look at the broken lifeless body. The TV movie, Jesus, has a heartrending scene where Mary washes the face of her son on the linen sheet in the borrowed tomb.

Jesus would not be left to vultures. Instead some brave souls dressed the body hurriedly, for the Sabbath approached and carried him into a new borrowed grave.What was it like to bury Jesus? Then the cruel finality of rolling the stone across the opening.

 

It continues to be difficult to try to make sense of the death of Jesus on the cross. I do know that it shows us that divine love will reach all the way into the human condition. I do know Jesus represents human and divine love and shows that it can face self-sacrifice for the good of the loved ones, In our case, that means loved ones unknown to Jesus, we who live in a distant future from Nazareth. sacrifice is an offering. Sacrifice joins the giver and receiver. Love is the ability to sacrifice, to offer oneself, for the sake of the other. In the Eastern Orthodox liturgy it says that Jesus left nothing undone until we are brought to heaven. that selfsame love was offered to heaven itself as well.