206 What's Good about Good Friday?

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “What’s Good about Good Friday?”, originally shared on April 11, 2022. It was the 206^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.) 

   Good Friday is coming up this week. Good Friday is the day we mark as the day Jesus was crucified. What’s so good about that? Today, we’re going to find out.

   I have a T-shirt that says, “Body Piercing Saved my Soul”.

   It’s a reference to Isaiah 53:5, in Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah,

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.

  It refers to Jesus giving his life on the cross. Jesus gave his life. No one took it from him.

   Jesus said in John 10:14-18,

¹⁴ I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, ¹⁵ just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. ¹⁶ I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. 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.”

   This 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 in no way detracts 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.

   Here it is, at its end, in John 19:28-30,

²⁸ After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.” ²⁹ A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. ³⁰ When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

   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.

   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 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.

   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, what God did to restore the living relationship with God for which we were created.   

  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 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 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 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.

   Did you know that there is a local connection to the crucifixion?  If you read the whole story, you learn that Jesus was crucified between two thieves. One taunted Jesus and the other asked Jesus for mercy and received salvation right there.

   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.

    San Dimas 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 property and the men who were robbing him and 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 Congregations in the Maryland State Correctional System is called The Community of St. Dysmas.

   I remember reading a story about a congregation that asked people to donate easter lilies for its annual spectacular 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 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 throw them away, that they could keep artificial flowers, use the donated money for good causes, and that artificial flowers were a better symbol of the resurrection anyway, because they never died.

   The thing is, though, is 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 as an act of making amends, to bridge the gap of separation, to reconcile human beings with God.

   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, angry over some offense and when they saw him, gunshots rang out. They missed driver but hit the young man from across the street 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 life, we were in death. But the message of the cross is that Jesus took the bullet 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.

    A pastor who served not far from us told the story of having gone in to start his church’s Good Friday service, 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 was that you can’t know Easter without first knowing 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.