The story that we remember
each year on Good Friday is the story of Christ’s death—the transition in Holy
Week from the celebration of Palm Sunday and the intimacy of Maundy Thursday to
the abandonment and suffering of God on the Cross on Good Friday.
It is a familiar story,
but one that should never become so familiar that we’re incapable of being
moved by it again… and again…and again. So,
this year, consider again the story of Christ for us and for you,
from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 15, verses 16-39 after Pilate has just given
Jesus over to be crucified:
The Soldiers Mock Jesus
16 Then the soldiers led him
into the courtyard of the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters); and
they called together the whole cohort. 17 And they
clothed him in a purple cloak; and after twisting some thorns into a crown,
they put it on him. 18 And they began saluting him,
“Hail, King of the Jews!” 19 They struck his head
with a reed, spat upon him, and knelt down in homage to him. 20 After
mocking him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on
him. Then they led him out to crucify him.
The Crucifixion of Jesus
21 They compelled a passer-by,
who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene,
the father of Alexander and Rufus. 22 Then they
brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means the place of a
skull). 23 And they offered him wine mixed with
myrrh; but he did not take it. 24 And they
crucified him, and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what
each should take.
25 It was nine o’clock in the morning when
they crucified him. 26 The inscription of the
charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.” 27 And
with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left. 29 Those
who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would
destroy the temple and build it in three days, 30 save
yourself, and come down from the cross!” 31 In the
same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him among
themselves and saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. 32 Let
the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we
may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.
The Death of Jesus
33 When it was noon, darkness
came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. 34 At
three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema
sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 35 When
some of the bystanders heard it, they said, “Listen, he is calling for
Elijah.” 36 And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour
wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see
whether Elijah will come to take him down.” 37 Then
Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. 38 And
the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. 39 Now
when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed
his last, he said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”
*****
In our Presbyterian church tradition,
when someone is going through the process to become an ordained pastor, one of
the requirements that we have is for that person to do a unit of Clinical
Pastoral Education (CPE)—which, in most cases, is a very intensive internship
as a hospital chaplain to learn and practice and offer pastoral care to those
who are experiencing pain and crisis. I
am currently in that ordination process, and so I’ve been a part of the CPE
internship at St. Mark’s Hospital in Salt Lake City for the past several
months.
Throughout the week as I’m there at
the hospital, I spend most of my time in the rooms with patients and their
families, listening to people’s stories and processing through fears and grief
and things that are related not just to what’s happening to them medically, but
often deep-seeded traumas and memories that come up for people when they’re in
this vulnerable space. I’ve also spent a
lot of time family members whose loved ones have been brought to the Emergency
Room, or have been put on a ventilator, or have passed away. I have encountered so much real, human pain
and suffering and loss in the past few months—more than I’ve encountered in my
entire life.
But something I’ve noticed in a lot of
cases of hearing people’s stories—even while they’re lying on a bed in a
hospital gown with IVs hooked up and machines beeping in the background—is that
many people end their stories by saying, “It’ll be okay… I’ve just gotta make
it through.” One woman who had just
been diagnosed with cancer told me, “I’ll just stay positive, and things will
be alright in the end.”
This shocks me a little, but I also
get it. The desire to stay positive and
focus on the good makes sense. We
wonder: are we going to be lost in our pain if we don’t cling to hope?
Experiencing and sitting with pain is
uncomfortable and scary. Humans don’t
like pain. We have a very natural desire
to move away from it—to minimize the suffering, or smooth it away, or to tell
ourselves that it doesn’t matter because God is good and everything will be alright
in the end. That’s the story of
Resurrection Sunday, right? We know that
in the end, suffering and death are conquered, and everything returns to the
light, so all we have to do is make it through. We just take the steps… with
our chins up… and keep pushing forward.
It makes me wonder if that’s what
Simon of Cyrene was telling himself as he carried Jesus’ cross to the hill at
Golgotha: “I’ve just gotta make it through.”
This has probably served us well in
the past. To be able to weather the
storms with resilience and hope has likely gotten us through some hard times. To
be able to stand where we are now on the other side of Holy Week, and to see
the glorious end to this story of Jesus’ death is a powerful thing. We know that Easter follows Good Friday. We know that resurrection comes after
death. And that because of that we hold
hope and call this day “good.”
But what
if there was no Resurrection Sunday?
What if we
were those first followers and all we had was the story of Jesus’ death?
Would we
still call this day “good”?
Sometimes,
despite our best intentions, Good Friday—and not Resurrection Sunday—is where
we land. Sometimes the pain is so great,
that regardless of what we know and believe, we are overwhelmed by it. We are caught in the suffering, and hope
feels naive… or impossible.
My second
night at the hospital, I sat with a man who lost his wife of 30 years. His sisters were there and told me he was a
man of great faith. But his wife had a
heart attack, and she didn’t make it. He
held her hand at the side of the bed… and kept calling her name. He asked me, “What am I gonna do without
her?”
That is pain that belongs on Good Friday. That is when we truly know the
meaning of Jesus’ words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
When we see
the story of Jesus’ death through the lens of the resurrection, we can easily
glaze over the suffering of the crucifixion.
We know there are just three days... and we’ll make it through. But the entire story is laced with suffering…
They put a
crown of thorns on Jesus’ head.
They
struck him and spat on him.
They beat
him so badly he couldn’t walk under the weight of his cross.
They
mocked and taunted him.
Then they
crucified him, driving nails into his body to hold him to a cross… an act that
Cicero called, the “most cruel and horrifying punishment”
reserved for slaves, criminals, and anyone the Roman empire wanted to not only
kill, but publicly shame as they put them to death. And it was meant for torture. They would beat someone before nailing them
on a cross, but they wouldn’t sever any major arteries… so the one who was hung
would suffer pain, but would die slowly from exhaustion, or suffocation, or a
heart failure.
For six
hours, Jesus hung on the cross in pain.
This is
why we call this story “the passion of Christ”: Passion comes from the Latin
word for suffering.
Yes, Jesus
was raised from the dead. Yes, he was
resurrected and glorified. But first, he
suffered... and suffered terribly.
Even in
the midst of this, we see people trying to take away Jesus’ pain, or get him to
take it away himself. At some point,
someone offers him wine mixed with myrrh, which was a first-century narcotic
meant to deaden pain, but Jesus doesn’t take it. Then there are soldiers and people passing by
and the priests and scribes who taunt him to take himself down from the cross—to
bypass the suffering—but he doesn’t do it.
And some others even assume Jesus calls out for Elijah to come take him
away, because they can’t imagine him dying on a cross—a death that Paul
called “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” because it was
written in Scripture that “anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse.” Still, he stays. And he laments, as a righteous man who is
made to suffer. “Eloi, Eloi, lema
sabachthani?”—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—is the first line
of Psalm 22. It’s a psalm of lament to
God.
“My God,
my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God,
I cry by day, but you do not answer;
and by night, but find no rest…
I am a
worm, and not human;
scorned by others and despised by the people.
All who
see me mock at me;
they make mouths at me, they shake their heads;
‘Commit
your cause to the Lord; let him deliver—
let him rescue the one in whom he delights!’…
I am
poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint;
My heart
is like wax;
it is melted within my breast…
My hands
and feet have shriveled;
I can count all my bones.
They stare
and gloat over me;
They
divide my clothing among themselves,
for my clothing they cast lots.”
Jesus
claims this lament for himself. He is
the righteous one who suffers unjustly.
And by the end, the Psalm reminds us that redemption will follow:
“All you
who fear the Lord, praise him!
All you
offspring of Jacob, glorify him…
For he did
not despise or abhor
the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not
hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him…
To him,
indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;
before him shall bow all who go
down to the dust,
and I shall live for him.”
Jesus is
not unaware, even in this moment of his death, that God will be glorified in
the end. But that doesn’t mean he skips
the suffering. Even knowing that there’s
light at the end of the tunnel—that God will redeem even the worst of human
brokenness and evil—doesn’t take away the pain.
For some
unknown reason, it was in this moment, when Jesus cried out and then
died on the cross that the Roman centurion who stood before him said, “Truly,
this man was God’s son!” This is the
Savior God sent to us.
Take a
minute and find that moment in your own life… that dark night of the soul...
that feeling of forsakenness…
Maybe it was losing someone you
loved—a parent, a child, a spouse, a friend.
Maybe you were the one in the hospital
gown being told by a doctor that your body wasn’t working like it’s supposed
to.
Maybe it was finding out you lost a
job, or lost a home.
Maybe it was battling the temptation
of an addiction.
Maybe it was a moment of loneliness or
emptiness in this last year when you were cut off from loved ones because of a
deadly disease.
Maybe it was simply a moment of
overwhelm and desperation in the otherwise “ordinariness” of life.
It’s okay
to sit in the space of that pain.
And
I’d like to propose that even this—this moment of deepest despair—can be called
good.
We know that Christ, on Good Friday,
suffered for us so that we could be saved from our sin and be made right
with God. But Christ, on Good Friday, also suffered with us. And in crying out, “My God, my God, why
have you forsaken me?” he gives us permission to feel our pain… to name
it, to lament it with our entire being, and to know that even in the worst
of it, he is Emmanuel—God with us.
Maybe we don’t always have to just
“make it through.” Sometimes we can just
be right where we are… in the midst of terrible suffering.
And even
if we never got to Resurrection Sunday, we would still have a God
hanging next to us on our cross who could say to us in that darkness, “I am
right here with you. I know your
pain. I have been mocked. I have been beaten. I have felt utterly forsaken. And I went through all of it just so
that I could be here, in this moment with you, to tell you that you are not
alone. You will never be alone.”
Thanks be to God.
*****
*If you would like to watch the live
service that was streamed on Facebook, you can find it HERE.
