(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Good Friday, originally shared on April 10, 2020. It was the fourth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Today, we’re going to talk about Good
Friday. We’re going to look at Matthew 27:32-37.
I have a T-shirt that says, “Body Piercing Saved My Soul”. Appropriate for Good Friday.
I read an article recently on what was selling out in grocery stores. In our area, healthy alternatives are flying off the shelves, but in some other parts of the country, not so much. I saw a photo online of a shelf of herbal tea that was almost fully intact, except for the section marked “Stress Relief”. We are all feeling that stress today.
Matthew 27:32-37
Stress doesn’t begin to describe today’s theme.
False charges, torture, and a gruesome death
are today’s theme.
It’s Good Friday, bad for Jesus, but very
good for us. Here is the selfishness of the world and the selflessness of God are
both on display. Here, our salvation is accomplished. Jesus does for the
salvation of the world.
We are all undergoing a lot of stress and
today in the Church year offers little relief, at least from the events
themselves. Death is the theme.
We are, we are told, now in the midst of the
deadliest part of the contagion.
On Good Friday, we mark the Death of Death for Christians, because Christ died
This year, because of the coronavirus, the Tomb of Holy Sepulcher has closed indefinitely for first time since the 1349 Black Plague.
I’m sure people then were asking the same questions people are asking now.
Good Friday is especially meaningful because
it gives us insight into one of the big questions:
Where is God in my
suffering?
We see where in part through the events in
the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prayed the night before he died.
Would you want to know the hour that you
would die? Jesus knew what was coming next on the night before he died. He
prayed so intensely that he literally sweat blood, asking God if there might be
another way. But, nevertheless, he offered himself to the will of God.
And, in addition to his enormous physical
pain, felt forsaken by God. Many scholars believe that it was that moment when
the sins of the world placed upon him. And he died.
Elie Wiesel in Night tells the story of a group of men who were sentence to death by hanging for trying to escape Auschwitz, where Elie Wiesel was also a prisoner. There were 9 men and a teenager. When the lever was pulled, each of the men died, but the neck of the teenager, perhaps because of his suppleness, did not snap. Instead, he hung there, dying on the gallows. Elie Wiesel said that he heard a voice, not being sure whether it was from within him or from someone else saying, Where is God? After a several more moments it said, Where is God now? And, another voice said, He is there, hanging on the gallows. Any other answer, Wiesel said, would have been blasphemy.
What does that story mean? Is it about the
end of hope, the end of belief; or is it God present with us in our suffering?
I’ve heard it said that we are living in uncertain times but, I wonder, are events in any time certain? What can we hold on to that is sure?
Living water in at the time of Jesus meant moving waters, like rapids, or a swiftly moving stream.
Rain now fills our streams and they move,
they flow, that is, they live; they are not stagnant. They bring change all
around them, they overflow their boundaries, they bring life to us and to
everything we depend upon, they are the same yet always different.
Living waters, the metaphor found in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, describes the work of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the one God, the ongoing presence of God for good in the world.
Living waters point to God’s action in our
baptism.
We belong to God, God has died for us, and nothing
can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.
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