All Souls, Berkeley
Good Friday
Isaiah 52:13—53:12
Psalm 22:1-22
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John (18) 19:1-42 (chanted)
Stay with me, remain here with me, watch and pray.
These were the final words of the Maundy Thursday service last night as we crowded into the Chapel of the Nativity to sit vigil all night with the reserve sacrament, the consecrated bread and wine that we set aside to share tonight.
This Vigil of Repose, as it is known, recalls Jesus’ final night in the Garden of Gethsemane and his urging the apostles to stay awake with him in prayer.
And so all night, people came and went, staying-remaining-watching-praying with the bread and wine—those things that are for us more than mere symbols—those things that means for us Jesus.
++++
I think it would have been pretty easy to stay with Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem with palm and olive branches waving in the air. I think remaining comfortable through last supper and the foot washing would have been difficult. I think watching Jesus pray in the garden must have been exhausting.
I think the only thing that there was to hold on to as Jesus was tried, beaten, mocked and crucified was prayer.
Stay with me, remain here with me, watch and pray.
These are not just words for us in the garden—they are words for us today, another Good Friday, as we contemplate the death of Jesus. As much as we may want to, we can’t make the story either stop before Jesus dies or fast forward to the empty tomb—we must now linger with the broken body of Jesus.
This inevitability of the Good Friday story holds so much power, and yet it is the part of these three great days that I sometimes find the hardest to stay present in. I don’t mind a taste of it, but I don’t want to remain in it for too long—because then I might truly begin to feel the pain, horror and loss that is this part of our story.
Yet, that is why we need to stay-remain-watch-pray as the events unfold. Because many of us don’t want to allow ourselves to feel Jesus’ death that much. We are okay thinking about it, but we only allow our feelings about it to go so deep. We might stay for a brief time, but we don’t want to remain. We will glance at it, but to really watch it would be just too much—an invitation to lose control of ourselves.
Two years ago my son Zach, then just almost 3, showed me just that.
++++
I’m wondering how many people here have seen the Veggie Tales movie An Easter Carol? Well, in case you are unaware of what the Veggie Tales are, they are a group of animated vegetables that tell stories from the Bible and reflect on virtues—such as Dave and the Giant Pickle for the story of David and Goliath, and Larry Boy and the Rumor Weed to explore how lies can grow and grow until they choke out life like a weed in the garden.
And in An Easter Carol, as you might expect, we find a group of cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, peas and an asparagus ‘Tiny Tim’ telling the Easter story through the familiar lens of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
You see, Ebenezer Ezzer is out of control. He wants to make Easter bigger and bigger, with more and more candy filled eggs by pushing the robotic chickens in his factory to make more plastic eggs. But that’s not all. Still reeling from the death of his beloved Grandmother, he decides that in her memory he is going to buy the one place he knows she loved the most—her church—so that he can then tear it down and use that land for the site of Easter Egg Land—a place where Easter never ends!
And so he finds himself on the eve of Easter (they evidently don’t have an Easter Vigil in Veggie Tales land) when an egg sculpture he has releases a fairy named Hope who must lead Ebenezer on a journey through his past, present and into the future to show him what the world will be like without the hope of Easter if he destroys the church.
And it is in the church where Hope and Ebenezer end their time in the present, with her using the stained glass windows to sing the story of Jesus, before a very dramatic action takes them from Easter present to Easter future. As the song is ending and focusing on the brand new rose window of the resurrected Christ (that Ebenezer’s grandmother commissioned before she died), suddenly a huge wrecking ball smashes through the window—showing not only the impending destruction of the church being torn down but the obliteration of the hope of Easter.
It was at this point that Zach freaked out. And I use that term mildly. Because upon seeing the wrecking ball tear through the window of Jesus, it was like a switch flipped inside of him and his reaction was purely visceral.
His body began shaking uncontrollably. He began to cry hysterically. He was clinging to me and clawing at me to try and climb into some safety that my arms couldn’t provide. And he yelled. He just kept yelling and yelling, “Mama! They are killing Jesus! They are hurting God! Why? Why?”
It took me almost 15 minutes to calm him down. During that time my focus was solely on him and I hadn’t turned off the movie—and that turned out to be a good thing. Because I had kept telling him that it was okay, this was only make-believe, that it was only pretend and wasn’t real, and by the time he was through the shock, it was at a place in the movie where Ebenezer had made choices that kept the hope of Easter alive and there were happy images of people worshiping at the church—the church and it’s windows that were not broken.
It took me longer to let go of the shock and surge of emotions that his reaction to the movie had stirred up.
At the time it was because of the adrenaline rush that had kicked in and because of guilt I felt for not pre-screening the movie like a good mother should have (though I’m not sure I would have picked up on that as a trigger), and also because of the overwhelming feelings of protection and love I felt for my son.
But as I prayed about that experience, and as I shared the story with others, I realized another reason I kept coming back to it—and that’s the knowledge that I lied.
Jesus’ death isn’t make-believe. It isn’t pretend. It was real.
Jesus was killed and God was hurt.
That is the unavoidable and inescapable truth of Good Friday. And it has the power to bring us to our knees if we only let go of the pretense of control we hold on to and let ourselves feel the reality of this truth, the pain of this truth, even the abiding love of this truth.
In Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion there is a line sung near the end that I think invites us to feel the anguish and yet hope of Jesus’ death in a wonderful image:
Make thyself, my heart, now pure,
I myself would Jesus bury.
For he shall henceforth in me
More and more
Find in sweet repose his dwelling.
World, depart, let Jesus in!
Or, as a clergy sister of mine said, “I will dig a grave for Jesus in my heart.”
This is our prayer and work for Good Friday. We must dig a grave in our hearts so that there is a place to put the broken Jesus within us.
Digging takes time. But Good Friday is not a church service, it is a sacred period of time in which we stay-remain-watch-pray. When we leave here tonight my prayer is that we will truly keep Good Friday until we ring in Easter, doing this by taking the time to turn over the soil of our hearts so that we will be able to plant the seed that is Jesus—the seed that will bring forth the hope of Easter and call us all into new life.
0 comments:
Post a Comment