Visiting Calvary Recently Was a Jarring Experience, but Not for the Reason You Might Think

Good Friday 2018

Visiting Calvary recently was a jarring experience, but not for the reason you might think. Yes, I was at the site where Jesus was crucified, I could see the rock into which the cross was erected, but it was in a Franciscan chapel, and the crack, which an earthquake caused at the time of Jesus’ death, was behind glass. It was still moving to be there for sure, but the whole scene of the crucifixion with its injustice and horror was completely sanitized.

We know how the story ends three days from now in an empty tomb with Jesus raised from the dead, so it’s easy for us to let the awfulness of tonight wash over us. We shouldn’t do that. Tonight is about brokenness, of the world that would participate in such a heinous act, and of us – we who really don’t know if we would cry out “crucify him,” run away, or wait at the foot of the cross.

Tonight is about sin – all those things that separate us from the love of God – all the hurts we inflict, the anger we express with little regard for the other, the injustice in which we freely participate because it doesn’t cause us any pain. We will have the opportunity to lay those things we repent of at the foot of the cross soon; turn them over to God so that we may experience God’s grace and forgiveness.

But as will be made clear in our prayers, this is not so much about my sin, or yours. It is about our sin – and all the ways we, as a society, as a community, as humanity, reject God’s love and care by failing to love and care for each other and for the world over which God has entrusted into our care.

If Lent was about choice, then Good Friday is about honesty. So, let’s be honest about where we are on Good Friday. And also, about where God is. God is hanging from the cross; not as a substitute for, but because of human sin. We see Jesus on the cross but we know it is God – God who loves us so unconditionally, so completely, that God will die for us. This crucifixion is not what God does to Jesus; it is what God does for us. And through that death, because of what God does next, we find new life in God.

Good Friday is about how we have collectively failed, but also about how we are redeemed despite our failures. We are forgiven. We are saved. The gate to life with God in God’s Kingdom is open to us as everlasting life. This day is called Good for a reason.

I hope you will listen carefully to the prayers we will soon pray and take them into your hearts. Like the promises we make in baptism, with God’s help, we acknowledge in these prayers, again and again, what God will do to right everything that we, together, are doing wrong.

Let our prayers remind us that while tonight is about brokenness, sin, and redemption, it is ultimately about God’s grace. We need God’s grace; we can’t do anything without God’s grace. We pray to God to set things right in our broken, sinful world, in our lives, because we can never do it on our own.

Jesus was crucified, died a horrific death on an unjust cross at the hands of sinners. Three days later God’s grace set the crucifixion right. So that now, tonight, two thousand years later, on this Good Friday, we can know that God’s grace will set everything in our own lives, in our own world, right.

SLWrathall