Today is Crucifixion Day, Good Friday. Today we can’t pretend anymore that everything will be okay, we can’t be idealists and act like people will simply improve. While being led to Golgotha, Jesus remarks, “If this is what they do to the tree when it’s green, how much worse will it be when it’s dry?” Luke 23:31. And Muggeridge says, 

“Jesus was not in our contemporary sense, an idealist, and gives no intimation that the world could be made better on its own terms any more than that individual human beings could make themselves better on their own terms…Jesus was concerned with showing us how men could be reborn.” 

In the few minutes we have together in this podcast, what can be said about the Cross of Jesus? It’s worth saying that it was necessary, our “wound is incurable”, death is the only remedy. I can’t help but squirm today, looking at a crucified Jesus – surely I’m not as bad off as that? Aren’t you being a little dramatic about all this, overreacting a bit, Lord? But, I know better, really. I’m full of things that, if even my closest friends knew, I’d be terrified they’d abandon me. You’re full of those things, too, I imagine, unless I really am utterly alone in this world. (But we both know better than that. At least, I pray you do.) 

I said death is the only remedy, but not our own deaths. 

Babies don’t have what’s called ‘object permanence’, if I hide behind the couch, to them, I’ve ceased to exist. But we’re adults; we can’t pretend our sin just goes away, when we refuse to look at it. Even secular psychology admits that ignored pain will come back and bite you till you pay attention to it. No, to really go away, our guilt must actually go somewhere. At the cross, Jesus somehow – we don’t really know how – takes us and our sin into himself, and dis-members us from it while re-membering us to himself and his inextinguishable life. 

Again, Lewis says that ultimately we don’t know how the cross works, we’ve simply been assured that it does. Whatever needed to be done to get us home, has been done for us. That’s the Christian claim. 

 

And finally, I can’t help but think of my friend from India who grew up without any contact with Christians, no Bible, nothing. But somehow she heard through the grapevine that there was this god, just one among the millions of gods, called Jesus, whose specialty was healing. That was interesting because she was sick at the time, but she also heard that he had done something really strange. Just because he loved them, he had died for his friends. Why would such a grand cosmic personality lay down his life for his friends?  To my friend, the concept of guilt or sin that’s so familiar to me, was nowhere on her radar. But, still, she was captivated by Jesus’s beauty, simply because he would do such an utterly graceful, beautiful thing for his friends. She picked up on the fragrance of the costly perfume long before she recognized her own need to be cleansed. 

 

This is a hard day, because Jesus’s brutalized face, faces us with the truth about ourselves – asking us to face him with our true faces. We squirm; I squirm. How painful it is to maintain eye-contact with that suffering face. But it is my unmet sorrow and hatred I meet there that he is meeting. Oh God what a pain to witness your love for me! But, I must look, too, because he is so beautiful in his dying. And I know this beauty is of a kind from which ‘men hide their faces’, for it is terrible to behold that bright fixity of kindness. We’re life-long grave dwellers, with clammy palms pressed over our eyes to keep out the sun, which is our only hope if we’re going to get any warmth back in these cold bones. 

 

At any rate, today, we look. Long and hard. Jesus received a kind of un-communion from our hands, he opened his flesh to receive our broken bodies, and he drank the cup of our bad blood, passed down from the first Adam. All so he can offer us the fresh, fragrant bread of his body, and new blood-warming wine of God’s forgiveness and everlasting life. 

 

Psalm 22

 

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

I groan in prayer, but help seems far away.

My God, I cry out during the day,

but you do not answer,

and during the night my prayers do not let up.

 

You are holy;

you sit as king receiving the praises of Israel.

In you our ancestors trusted;

they trusted in you and you rescued them.

To you they cried out, and they were saved;

in you they trusted and they were not disappointed.

 

But I am a worm, not a man;

people insult me and despise me.

All who see me taunt me;

they mock me and shake their heads.

 

They say,

“Commit yourself to the Lord!

Let the Lord rescue him!

Let the Lord deliver him, for he delights in him.”

 

Yes, you are the one who brought me out from the womb

and made me feel secure on my mother’s breasts.

I have been dependent on you since birth;

from the time I came out of my mother’s womb you have been my God.

 

Do not remain far away from me,

for trouble is near and I have no one to help me.

Many bulls surround me;

powerful bulls of Bashan hem me in.

 

They open their mouths to devour me

like a roaring lion that rips its prey.

My strength drains away like water;

all my bones are dislocated.

My heart is like wax;

it melts away inside me.

The roof of my mouth is as dry as a piece of pottery;

my tongue sticks to my gums.

You set me in the dust of death.

 

Yes, wild dogs surround me—

a gang of evil men crowd around me;

like a lion they pin my hands and feet.

I can count all my bones;

my enemies are gloating over me in triumph.

 

They are dividing up my clothes among themselves;

they are rolling dice for my garments.

But you, O Lord, do not remain far away.

 

You are my source of strength. Hurry and help me!

Deliver me from the sword.

Save my life from the claws of the wild dogs.

Rescue me from the mouth of the lion,

and from the horns of the wild oxen.

 

You have answered me.

I will declare your name to my countrymen.

In the middle of the assembly I will praise you.

You loyal followers of the Lord, praise him.

All you descendants of Jacob, honor him.

All you descendants of Israel, stand in awe of him.

For he did not despise or detest the suffering of the oppressed.

He did not ignore him;

when he cried out to him, he responded.

 

You are the reason I offer praise in the great assembly;

I will fulfill my promises before the Lord’s loyal followers.

Let the oppressed eat and be filled.

Let those who seek his help praise the Lord.

May you live forever!

 

Let all the people of the earth acknowledge the Lord and turn to him.

Let all the nations worship you.

For the Lord is king

and rules over the nations.

All the thriving people of the earth will join the celebration and worship;

all those who are descending into the grave will bow before him,

including those who cannot preserve their lives.

 

A whole generation will serve him;

they will tell the next generation about the Lord.

They will come and tell about his saving deeds;

they will tell a future generation what he has accomplished.

 

Imagine with me – Amy Baik Lee, “Blood bought gift of loneliness” 

 

One spring afternoon eleven years ago, I boarded the bus on my college campus.

 

Virginia in the spring is a promise of a hundred jubilant displays of beauty: red tulips against a weathered white garden door, dogwoods spreading lacy plumage along serpentine walls, the slant of afternoon gold on red-bricked colonial promenades.

 

I vaguely remember the swaying dance of komorebi — that welcome Japanese word for the winking of sunlight as it filters through tree leaves — along my walk to the bus stop. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved to walk under archways of that dappled light, but on this day, even as I stood right beneath the trees, the komorebi was only a distant impression.

 

I had made the decision to set a situation in my life right, knowing that the ramifications would affect not only me but the people closest to me. That afternoon, I put that penalty in motion, and braced myself to break the news to my loved ones. My imagination ran wild on the bus as I pictured the hurt and betrayal on those familiar faces, and for a brief, flitting moment, the terror of utter loneliness gripped me.

 

And yet, something within rose up in that moment to say, simply: No. As searing as my choice was, I realized I did not know the stark and solitary abandonment that signaled total separation. Later that week I jotted down my subsequent thoughts:

 

Even now as I pen the words I know that I will never fully comprehend it — the concept becomes so familiar in the story of Calvary — but He died that I should never feel such loneliness.

 

In the years since that bus ride, I’ve known different measures and concentrations of isolation: in postpartum depression, parental anxiety in the emergency room, and the general disorientation of a cross-country move. There was also a time, very long ago, that a deep-seated, fear-fed guilt whispered that I was past forgiveness and redemption.

 

But the silence of Gethsemane and Calvary reveal that I’ve never known what it is to be truly forsaken. And perhaps, until this moment, I’ve never recognized what Christ did to loneliness. As Donne says, out of His sacrifice “we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.” Death and its power, crushed — but loneliness?

 

Loneliness has become our gift of grace.

 

For intimacy waits now where there should have been isolation. As dark as the days may become, the ears of heaven will never be shut to broken cries and tentative approaches. Pain begets it — exhaustion draws me into it — but loneliness is now and so often a merciful usher into the presence of God, there to be reminded of things I’ve forgotten. The blood of Christ, beading His brow in agony and cascading out of His side in death, transformed it into a gateway instead of a final clang of condemnation.

 

He died that I should never feel such loneliness as He felt. 

 

And so I see how the world teems with overtures of His love instead. In the hope of a new morning after a night of weeping. In the laughter dimpling a baby’s face. In the sun fishtailing through the high boughs of elm and oak overhead, and even in every leaden moment of suffering that bids me view eternity with hope instead of denial. God-With-Us draws us in glory, in our rawest hurts, and in life to the full, always toward what lasts and fills better than our souls know to ask. His loneliness was taken up to redeem ours.

 

I clutched that truth that day, held onto it as the bus lurched through Grounds, and —

I dared to think it was no coincidence that it was Good Friday.

 

Poem – Brian Brown – T.S. Elliot – East Coker IV 

 

IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer’s art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

 

    Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

 

    The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

 

    The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

 

    The dripping blood our only drink,

The bloody flesh our only food:

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—

Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

 

Song: Matthew Clark – “Follow you Down” 

 

Philippians 2 

 

Whoever would save their life, will lose it 

CHORUS 

I want to be in your story, Jesus 

I want to follow you down 

Whoever would lose their life, will save it 

CHORUS 

BRIDGE 

Your love is teaching me a new story

 

Brian Brown – Collect for Good Friday

 

Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your

family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be

betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer

death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and

the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

* The collage featured above was created by Shannon Sigler.