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

An Offer We Can't Refuse

Cancel Culture: Despite Humanity's Problematic Past, Jesus Still Offering To Cancel Sins Of The World https://t.co/mrjCM7hhJT pic.twitter.com/tklOUTC1n1

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 1, 2024

Holy Week plumbs the depths and heights of human experience. Whether sad or joyful, Christians normally take the whole week seriously.

Good-natured humor not related to the Easter bunny is relatively rare, but the Babylon Bee comes up with a take (excerpt):

But then He did something really strange that didn't make a ton of sense to anyone: instead of canceling humanity, He sent His Son to pay for the sins of the world and offered to cancel forever the sin-debt of those who believe in Him.

Reports indicated that for those who were dead in their sins, "God made alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross."

However, sources warned that God has canceled humanity once before with water and will do it again with fire one day, for those who reject His offer of canceling their sins forever.

Happy Easter!

It Is Finished

Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I am thirsty.” A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips.

When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

Good Friday, 2023

At 7:30 p.m. the lighting and mood are subdued.

The altar was bare, and the vestments were black. In fact everyone in the congregation wore black.

The lady priest spoke about the necessity of Good Friday, without which there would be no Resurrection Sunday.

We know how the inevitability of death prompts an appreciation of life. As we enter the winter of our lives that insight becomes more meaningful...and urgent.

Good Friday, 2022

In his homily (YouTube 14:30-23:27) the priest said he is troubled by the basic conception of Good Friday--that Jesus died for our sins so that we might live.

Atonement theory states that Christ had to die. The priest explained that the "irreducible minimum" of atonement theory was:

Man was bad,
God was mad,
Somebody had to pay for it.

Referring to his own experience as a parent, the priest said that he believes that Good Friday is an example of unconditional love by the Father toward children who are behaving at their worst.

Though I admire his insightfulness, I'm not going to set aside decades of instruction on the priest's say-so that Atonement Theory is "repugnant." And there's no reason that the priest can't be right, too, that on Good Friday we should focus on God's limitless love rather than on how man nailed God to a tree.

As others are wont to say, Embrace the healing power of and.

"It Felt Like a Miracle"

Good Friday, 2019, in Paris (NBC photo)

Peggy Noonan asks why the burning of Notre-Dame Cathedral triggered an emotional reaction around the world:

the flames and smoke evoked similar [to 9/11] feelings of grief and loss, and a sense of portent, especially for Catholics, who saw in the destruction a metaphor for—or a judgment of—the state of their church...

Tuesday morning, the shocking good news: The fire was out, the structure still standing, the great things still there—the radiant cross, the altar, the Pietà, the pews, the relics saved.

It felt like a miracle, didn’t it? I think it was.

From despair to hope....on Holy Week. Unbelievable.

Prepping for the Party

On Saturday morning the altar is bare and the cross is draped in black from yesterday's Good Friday services.

Out will come the white raiments and tablecloths, and the mournful black will be put away.

Tonight we will attend the Easter Vigil, a quiet meditative service.

Tomorrow is the party, when the sanctuary will be full of life and music.

Good Friday

On Good Friday the cross is shrouded in black, and the altar is bare.

Members of the congregation read aloud their part in John's Passion Gospel.

At the end of the service there was no recessional hymn, everyone filing out quietly. The mood is somber but not one of hopelessness. We know that the tomb is not the end of the story.