Good
Friday: What a strange name for this day. This is the day on which Christ was
crucified, taken down from the cross and put in the tomb. This is the day on
which Christ is not available to us. This is the day on which we will not
celebrate the Eucharist or receive Communion from reserved sacrament because
Christ was not there for anyone on
this day. He rested in the tomb: remote, unavailable, in darkness. How can this
day possibly be good?
For
those of us who know the end of story, it is good. In the midst of all the
horror and death, we know the best is coming. The burden of these Holy Week
days is lighter, precisely because we know the end of the story. Even in the
midst of pain we are granted glimpses of God. In the very deepest and darkest
places, where we may not even be aware of it, the light shines in the darkness
and the darkness does not overcome the light.
What
I have learned about the light in the darkness, however, is that we need at
times to forget we know the end of the story. We need to forget any knowledge
we have of the resurrection. We need to forget and leave Christ hanging on his
cross. We need to become like the women who waited to anoint Jesus’ body,
assuming death into their own bodies, on a visceral level, until that is all
they could think about. We need to wait with our pain and darkness. This is the
only way true light comes.
There
is usefulness to simply waiting in darkness. Our eyes become accustomed to the
dark and we see things we never knew existed. Like cave dwelling fish, whose
eyes become accustomed to dealing with darkness, we begin to see light where we
thought there was none. And precisely because we see a little light and hope,
we seek to do something with our pain.
May
I suggest something to you? There is
something we can do with our pain. In one of Madeleine L’Engle’s novels there
is a healer, an old native woman. The old woman lays her hands on a young woman
in need of healing from pain. When she is done, the old woman takes her hands
and rubs them hard, hard, down the solid wood of the bedpost on which the young
woman lies. The young woman asks her what she is doing and she replies, “Honey,
when I treat you I take on your pain. I have to do something with it or it will
pain me and eat me up. So I leave it on the hard wood.”[1]
Good
Friday is the day to leave your pain and darkness on the hard wood of the
cross. Good Friday is the day to so enter into the darkness that our eyes
become accustomed to the darkness. Good Friday is the day to stay in the darkness
until our own glimmers of light begin at the backs of our eyes. Good Friday is
the day on which we become like little children, deeply grieved and deeply
grieving.
We
need to forget we know the end of the story and become like the little boy who
was in church on Maundy Thursday evening one year. In this particular church
there was an ambry or small cabinet where the reserved sacrament was kept. It
was in plain sight of the congregation. When the altar guild stripped the
church of its adornments, the last thing carried out was the Blessed Sacrament.
The door of the ambry was left wide open and even in the dim light at the altar
its gaping emptiness was revealed. The rest of the church was in utter
darkness.
Out of the darkness
arose a little four-year-old wail, “Mommy, Jesus isn’t home any more!” And he
began to sob.
This
is where we need to be on this Good Friday. It can only become good to us if we
are willing to sober ourselves into little children, shocked and appalled at
the acts that brought Jesus to the cross. And then we rub our hands, hard,
hard, down the wood of the cross, freeing ourselves of all our pain and sorrow,
and waiting in the darkness until the light comes. AMEN.
The
Rev Nicolette Papanek
©2018
[1]
Paraphrased from a novel by L’Engle, Madeleine. The Other Side of the Sun.
New York: Random House. 1971.
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