There
is no more strangely paradoxical day in our Christian calendar than this Friday
that we call “good.” Etymologists will tell you it’s good because it is a lasting vestige of the Old English; a word
that once meant “holy.” So, this is “Holy Friday”—and I suppose that makes it
more palatable. But I’m thankful that modern English (and the modern church)
have held on to this antiquated name, because there is something decidedly good about it. While 99.9% of our lives are
spent hiding from death, on this one day death is called “good.” On just this
day we admit that maybe death isn’t the end of the world at all—maybe it’s
precisely what this world needs.
“The
last enemy that shall be destroyed is death,” says 1 Corinthians 15:26, which
happens to have been picked up by J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series and is partly why I have it on the tip of my
tongue all the time. Well, tonight is the celebration of the beginning of the
end of death. It’s not done yet, but death is in its last phase; it’s just
barely holding on. But there’s also a sour side to this Good Friday. If what came out of Jesus’ death was good, it was
still us that put him to death; it was still human beings in our glorious
imperfection. We can’t get away from that. And sure, the last enemy to be destroyed
is death, but that also means that death is going to outlast other enemies:
poverty, war, prejudice, disdain. It’s awfully nice to know that death is in
its own death throes, but it’s less nice to know that it’s still going to
outlast us.
Every
year the cold November winds remind us that death is coming. Every time we hear
of layoffs we feel that death is coming. When marriages fail, when friends and
family move away, when our connection to the land dissolves, and when our
health declines the specter of death lingers on; a cold promise as certain as
the changing of the seasons.
This
is why today is dark—why our altar is shrouded and the lingering fears of night
from days when we were children reverberate through years that now seem like
yesterday. We don’t like it. In Mark’s Gospel when Jesus dies the sky turns
dark in the middle of the afternoon; that’s what we expect—the darkest night
where every loss we’ve ever experienced, and every bad choice we’ve ever made,
plays in our minds on repeat, forbidding us rest from the imperfect humanity
that we know too well lies in our hearts. Dark, despairing death: how we run
from this day all year long.
Yet,
all of these emotions that surround this day are made foolish by the cross.
Yes, despair is real; yes, you will feel loss because of death; and yes, there
is no simple answer—drug or other means of escape—that will make it immediately
better, but the temptation to make all death into nothingness; to suggest that
death is the thing that makes life meaningless; is a strange lack of
consideration that the only reason we have death in the first place is because
we have life. Jesus came to give us life and life abundantly, which means,
among other things, that our abundant life is still destined to end in the coldness
of death, but that there is a story further on.
Sure,
the November winds blow, but the fields need it. Every year the crops
un-harvested return to the earth and die, but it is from those crops that new
life arises in the thawing of the spring. It is only because our bodies have
been disconnected by original sin that we do not see that we are not so
different from the plants of the field—more majestic, yes, but subject to
finitude in the seasons of our lives in the same way as all living thing. We
will all die, yes, but we give too much credence to death as an end. The
process moves forward: Life, death, new life. This is the way the world works
in everything from the grasses of the fields, to the birds and the foxes, and
every living thing that God created in the beginning and called good.
And
that is why this is Good Friday, because we were created
holy and good and today is the day where that goodness is restored in all its
glory. It doesn’t happen on a podium, which is the kind of place we-humans look
for it, but it happens on a cross where a man dies alone and rejected, his body
removed by a disciple who lives in secret for fear of the authorities.
“God saw
everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was
evening…” That’s where we stand right in the middle of Genesis chapter 1, verse
31. We know the story; we know what’s coming; but today we just let the words
hang off in space. It was very good… And
there was evening… Darkness covered the world. The last enemy—that death
that we can never outrun—holds its last icy grip on the things that we so
cherish. But still it is good… still it is good… and there was evening…
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