Good Friday, 2025

The Good Friday service is a meditation on Jesus' death and sacrifice. This evening the chaplain's homily emphasized a topic that I had not heard before: that Jesus taught us how to die.

In this world as his death was coming, Jesus reacted with serenity, truth, courage, and compassion. We are taught a great many things when we are growing up, but many of us are not taught how to respond to pain and suffering, the deaths of our loved ones and how to approach our own deaths.

I see many people in the hospital on their deathbeds. Some are tormented and cannot be comforted unless someone is with them at all times, and even then sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes nothing helps.

And then there are those who know how to self-soothe and are mindful and are serene in accepting while in great pain and tragic, traumatic circumstances and even if isolated and forgotten by loved ones.

Jesus knew pain, but he also knew how to care for his soul while he was in the middle of it. He practiced self-soothing in a deep spiritual embodied way. He cared for his own heart so that he could continue to give of himself. He did this in many ways. Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. When the pressure grew too much, when the crowds kept coming to see him, when he was low in spirits, Jesus stepped away. He didn’t numb or distract himself. He got quiet and still. Jesus didn’t escape to avoid the world. He withdrew to be refilled with the presence of God.

He was honest when he prayed… In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus doesn’t fake it. He lets them fear the weight of his circumstances. He cries, he sweats blood. When he prays, he speaks truth to the father. He opens his heart completely…

Jesus trusted the bigger picture. He was able to accept and surrender, not using avoidance or distraction. In Isaiah’s vision of the Messiah the servant is not frantic. He is not reactive. He is silent and aware and surrendered, not from fear but from focused concentration. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. Like a lamb that went to the slaughter he had inner clarity in the middle of chaos. “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”

Jesus is in control.

Circumstances allow many of us to come to the realization that our death is imminent and that there's nothing we can do about it. It's a seeming paradox: everything is out of our control when are most helpless, yet we can still be in control. Jesus is the Son of God and part of the Holy Trinity, but in the end he was also a great Teacher