01 April 2018

Sermon Good Friday John 18:1 -- 19:42 29 March 2018 Year B


         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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