(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Seven”, originally shared on April 16, 2025. It was the 355th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
I have a t-shirt that says, “Body Piercing Saved My Soul”. Today, we’re
going to find out why that’s the most important message in history.
There has always been a shadow
of the cross over Palm Sunday, but the emphasis has shifted to making it a
flat-out combo now. 😊
In some places it’s called
Palm/Passion Sunday but, technically, the Revised Common Lectionary (the
standard three-year cycle of Sunday worship Bible readings used in mainline
churches throughout the world), calls it Passion/Palm Sunday.
That’s right, Palm Sunday
doesn’t even get top billing now!
The reason given for the change
of emphasis is the importance of connecting the triumphal entry of Jesus into
Jerusalem with the shouts of “Hosanna!” to shouts of “Crucify him!” and his
execution in the same town on the cross days later.
The rest of the days of Holy
Week, including Maundy Thursday (the beginning of Holy Communion, the
giving of the new commandment to love one another as God has loved us, and
Jesus washing his disciples’ feet), Good Friday (Jesus’ sacrificial
death on the cross, bad for Jesus but good for us), and Holy Saturday (the final inner
preparations for Easter, and the bridge to Easter Day), used to do that. But that’s changed.
It’s all combined today, in my
opinion, because it’s the admission and fear that people aren’t’ going to show
up to worship on Good Friday. Expectations that people will be there for Maundy
Thursday to worship have been totally abandoned in many churches. Holy
Saturday? Maybe a day to set up the decorations for Easter Sunday.
But, following the law of intended
consequences, naming the Sunday before Easter “Passion/Palm Sunday” takes the
focus away from the days in Holy Week, and weakens the perceived
connection between Good Friday and Easter.
I once heard of a local pastor who
pointed out the importance of Good Friday to his congregation with a shocking
outcome. More about that later.
I mentioned that I have a T-shirt that says,
“Body Piercing Saved my Soul”.
It’s a reference to Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah in Isaiah 53:5,
5 But he was wounded for our
transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
(Some
translations replace “wounded” with “pierced”.)
Body piercing saved my soul. And yours.
It refers to Jesus giving his life on the
cross. Jesus gave his life. No one took it from him.
Jesus said in John 10:17-18,
17 For this reason the Father loves me,
because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. 18 No
one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to
lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command
from my Father.”
Good Friday, the cross, is the main event. Almost a half of the entire
gospel of John is about the last week of Jesus’ life. The resurrection validates
that Jesus was who he said he was, that his death on the cross could reconcile
God and humanity. There’s no Christianity without the resurrection of Jesus.
However, that does not detract from the fact that the crucifixion of
Jesus is the central event of all human history. His death is what brings life
for all humankind.
And as it was happening in real time, Jesus said seven things as he
died. They are known as the seven last words. Here they are:
The First Word: "Father, forgive them; for
they know not what they do." Luke 23:34
I
spent a summer when I was in seminary doing a quarter of Clinical Pastoral
Education. CPE is a program training prospective pastors to do hospital visits
and counseling. It’s very intense and exposes seminarians to a lot of different
kinds of life experiences, including preparing them for gross and disfiguring
illness and injury.
The program I was a part of was held at Lutheran General Hospital in
Park Ridge, Illinois.
One night, there was a humongous thunderstorm, and a lightning bolt hit
a transformer that knocked out the power to the hospital. The emergency
generators kicked in and all essential services like the operating carols, the
Natal Intensive Care Units, respirators, and so on, received power.
Almost immediately, the switchboard was lit up with calls from very
agitated air traffic controllers from the nearby O’Hare International Airport
asking what had happened to the florescent cross on the top of the hospital.
Pilots coming in for landings had used that cross as a visual reference
point as they descended and, seeing no cross, had been thinking that they were
coming in from the wrong side of the airport. They were pulling up and flying
in stacks over O’Hare. They were lost without the cross.
From that night onward, the cross was included in the emergency power
network.
The cross is our reference point. We see the love of God on it. Forgiveness
is what God did to restore the living relationship with God for which we were
created.
The Second Word: "Truly, I say to you, today
you will be with me in Paradise." Luke 23:43
Did you know that there is a local connection to the crucifixion? Jesus was crucified between two thieves. One
taunted Jesus and the other asked Jesus for mercy and received salvation right
there. The traditional name of the repentant thief on the cross is “San Dimas”.
The city of San Dimas, not far from here, gets its name from… well
there’s a probably historical story and there’s a more colorful, but less
likely, story.
First, the colorful version the way I heard it.
When San Dimas was a part of the land grant given by Spain to two
Spanish Dons, the area was called Rancho San Jose. It was plagued by horse
thieves and cattle rustlers. One of the Dons, Señor Ignacio Palomares, is said
to have taken a group of men to search for his stolen property as well as the
men who were robbing him. They stopped in what is now San Dimas Canyon, which
was filled with remote hiding places. He didn’t find the men, but he knew they
were out there, so he prayed loudly that they would repent like the repentant
thief on the cross next to Jesus whose traditional name is San Dismas (or a
variant) and return his cattle and horses. The name stuck and was taken-on by
the town that grew nearby.
The more likely version is that Don Palomares was from Sonora, Mexico,
and there was a village nearby named San Dimas.
San Dismas, St. Dismas, and San Dimas are all variants of the name. The
Lutheran congregation in the Maryland State Correctional System is called The
Community of St. Dysmas. Why? Because they wanted to be reminded of something:
There is no time in which it’s too late to turn to Jesus and be
forgiven, no matter how great the sin or how late in life you are because of
what Jesus did on the cross for us.
The Third Word: "Woman, behold thy
son!" "Behold thy
mother." John 19:26,27
Jesus had a mother, and he loved her. One of his last dying concerns was
for her security, and he arranged for it from the cross.
The
night that Sally and I had learned that she was expecting our son was a happy
night. We went to bed filled with joy. But then the next morning we found that
the young man who lived across the street from us when we lived in another town
had gone up the street and around the corner to buy cigarettes for his mom
around midnight. On his way back, he encountered another young man whose car
had a flat tire and stopped to help him.
Meanwhile, a gang was out looking for the young man with the flat tire,
angry over some offense and when they saw him, gunshots rang out. They missed
the driver but hit the young man who had lived across the street from us
instead. He managed to stumble back to his front lawn and died there. Sally
later said that she had felt that someone had died that night.
In the midst of new life, we were in death. But the message of the cross
is that Jesus took the bullet of sin for us, so that in the midst of death, we
might be in life, eternal life in a living relationship with the one true
living God.
The Fourth Word: "My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me?" Matthew 27:46
We are all undergoing a lot of stress, and death is our theme for the coming few days. We
are worried about the effects of tariffs, how long they will last, and whether
war will come. Some immigrants don’t see a way forward. We are all filled with
uncertainty. Will we be OK?
But on
Good Friday, we celebrate the victory of life over death for all who believe
and are baptised.
On Good Friday, we will mark the
death of our death, because Christ died for us.
Good Friday is especially meaningful, therefore, because it gives us insight into one of the big
questions: Where is God in my suffering?
We see part of the answer through the events in the Garden of Gethsemane
where Jesus prayed the night before he died.
Would you want to know the time that
you would die? Jesus knew about his suffering and
death that was coming next. 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.
In addition to his enormous physical pain, he felt that he had been forsaken by God.
Many scholars believe that it was that moment when
the sins of the world were placed upon him.
Sin
separates us from God, and Jesus died to overcome that separation for us.
The Fifth Word: "I thirst." John
19:28
I remember reading a story about a congregation that asked people to
donate money for easter lilies for its spectacular easter cross display to
decorate the altar area and back wall for Easter Sunday. The flowers remained
for weeks and drew visitors. One year, a woman decided that she wanted the lily
that she had donated back to take to a shut-in. She didn’t think that anybody
would miss one lily.
After the church had cleared out, she crept up to the altar and
discovered that almost all the lilies were fake! She confronted the pastor who
said that years earlier, the leadership had decided that it was not good
stewardship to buy flowers and then throw them away, that they could buy
artificial lilies and then keep them every year and use the donated money for
good causes. And besides, the pastor said, artificial flowers are a better
symbol of the resurrection anyway, because they never died.
The thing is, though, that they never died because they were never
alive. Jesus lived among us, gave up his life, and then took it back again, but
gave it up to bridge the gap of separation from God, to reconcile human beings
with God. And living things need water.
Jesus was fully God and fully human being. He needed water as he
hung on the cross as the result of time, and torture, and the loss of blood. He
was thirsty. But he did not give up.
“Living water” in at the time of
Jesus meant moving waters, like rapids, or a swiftly moving stream.
“Living water” is the metaphor
found in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible to describe the work of
the Holy Spirit, the third person of the one God, the ongoing presence of God
for good in the world.
“Living water” points to God’s action
in our baptisms. It is an eternal gift from God, and it means that we will
never be thirsty for God.
We belong to God, God has died for us,
and nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ.
The Sixth Word: "It is finished." John
19:30
Elie Wiesel in his book Night tells the story of a group of men
who were sentenced to death by hanging for trying to escape the Auschwitz
prison camp, where Elie Wiesel was also a Jewish prisoner during World War II.
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 its 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 around him saying, “Where is God?”
After several more moments a voice 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 about God always being present with us in our suffering? Part of
the message of Good Friday is that God enters into our suffering, that God
suffered and died for us that we might have life.
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? Jesus answered that question with his seventh
word.
The Seventh Word: "Father, into thy hands I
commit my spirit!" Luke 23:46
A pastor who
served not far from us told the story of having gone in to start his church’s
Good Friday service one year, expecting the regular 30-40 people, but finding
the place packed, wall to wall, standing room only.
He said to an
usher, “Wow! This is unbelievable!” The usher said, “What do you mean?” The
pastor said, “Well, everybody’s here!”
The usher
said, “But you told us that we had to be here.” “What?” the pastor replied.
“You said that
we couldn’t come to church on Easter Sunday if we didn’t come to church on Good
Friday.”, the usher said. “What?”, the pastor said.
The pastor
tried to think of what he could have said that the people interpreted in this
way.
And then he
remembered that the theme of part of his sermon the previous Sunday, Palm
Sunday, was that you can’t know Easter without first knowing Good Friday. The
people had taken that to mean, “You can’t come to church on Easter unless you
come to church on Good Friday”! 😊
The message of
the cross is that God redeemed the world because God so loved the world.
What’s so good
about Good Friday? It was terrible for Jesus, but it was really good for us.
I’m not saying
that you have to go to Good Friday worship before you can go to church on
Easter Sunday, but Easter doesn’t make much sense without it.
I encourage
you to go to a Good Friday service to experience the depth of the riches of the
love of God for you on the cross, because body piercing saved your soul.
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