Good Friday and Holy Saturday are solemn, hard days. Days of remembering and reflecting on the death of Christ. The readings for these two days are:
Isaiah 52:13-53:12 Psalm 22 Hebrews 10:16-25 John 18:1-19:42
Lamentations 3:9,19-24 Psalm 31 1 Peter 4:1-8 Matthew 27:7-66
Jesus, the Son and Word of God, brought like a lamb to slaughter. God, crucified, dead, and buried. We in our modern churches tend to rush past these moments of remembering and rush to say “But Sunday is coming!” Which yes, it is, BUT, to those who knew Jesus and experienced it first hand, they did not know what was to come. They did not know what Sunday would bring. I think it’s important to allow ourselves to feel and grieve and sit with the reality of what the crucifixion meant. We can’t fully celebrate and understand the Resurrection if we don’t understand and embrace the fullness of the crucifixion as well. Our culture is not good with difficult emotions and grief. We rush past it, ignore it, shove it down, and do not want to deal with it. But that is not what today is for. Today is for feeling the hard aspects of the reality that God was truly dead and what that meant and how we can let God work in these hard moments. The readings from Lamentations are a beautiful reflection of the tension between lament and hope. The writers did not know if their exile and pain would ever end. They allowed themselves to both be angry and cry out to God, as well as acknowledge God still brings hope in that darkness. I think that is a great reminder for us today.
The scripture readings remind us of the story, Jesus died for the world. Jesus both lived and died for the sake of humanity, for all of creation so that we may no longer live by the broken, sinful, oppressive systems of this world, but so that we may live in the fullness of who God is. We may live and die with the heart of God’s SHALOM, God’s completeness, God’s peace. 1 Peter says we are called to live by the will of God, not the will of the world, or sinful desires, or political alliances, the will of God. If how we are living does not align with the way Jesus lived and died, then we need to do some reflecting and confessing to realign ourselves with Christ. This requires lots of humility because no one enjoys acknowledging their wrongs, the ways they’ve missed the mark, the way they have contributed to the brokenness of the world, but that is exactly what Jesus is asking of us.
Barbara Brown Taylor wrote in her book Bread and Wine “He offered himself as a mirror they could see themselves in, and they were so appalled by what they saw that they smashed it. They smashed him every way they could.” The religious people of Jesus’ day could not stand to see the reflection of who they were. They could not stand to be told they were wrong. They couldn’t handle the conviction of the fact they had strayed so far from what it meant to live into the image of God that they were created to be. So they killed God. They chose their “power”, their “rightness” so that they would not have to do the hard work of change, of confession, they killed God instead of letting others see they could be wrong. Looking at the way the Christian church is today, at least in the Western world where my context is, it scares me to see so many similarities to those leaders in us, in our leaders, in our institutions. I pray this Good Friday and Holy Saturday can be a time to sit with the true sacrifice of Jesus. Of what it meant for us and the whole world. We no longer have to be held captive by broken power, by sin, by the ways we have strayed from the image of God. However, we must be willing to confess and let the Lord work in us. We cannot afford to be like the religious leaders, we cannot afford to choose that power, that image of “rightness” because if we do, we are breaking our testimony and witness of Jesus to our world and it’s like we are smashing Jesus, killing God, just like they did. God has set us free, free to live into the goodness and love of God, let us do just that as we sit in the darkness of this weekend, and as we celebrate on Easter
Sunday. Hebrews 10:19-25 says, “Therefore, my brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”