A Sermon for Good Friday
The Rev. Patricia Gillespie
Isaiah 52:13--53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10:1-25
John 18:1--19:37
Life is a disappointment.
People we love die, marriages fail friends betray us, and we too often hurt those we love most.
Life is a disappointment. or, as some would say, rather more graphically and rudely -- There are times when "Life sucks:" It sucks away our hopes and dreams, it steals away with the good and the beautiful, it robs us of the growthful and joyful, and even love itself seems to die.
Life just doesn't 'live up' to our hopes and expectations. And sometimes it is agonizingly disappointing, when the pain and suffering become nearly unbearable.
As a new priest, feeling both joyful and hopeful about sharing the ways that God had blessed me, the first children I baptized died the next day.
Beautiful, perfect, tiny twin girls. "Here, my daughters, I baptize you and God gives you life."
And Laura and Sarah died. They were perfect tiny images of the crucifixion. Arms spread and immobilized, small bodies covered with the agony of tubes and wires, tiny fingers that had reached out to their parents, and to me. All their parents' hopes and dreams of little girls growing into young women, gone.
We did for them according to the burial custom of the Christians. Washed them, dressed them. I held the tiny, perfect, beautiful girls, dead in my arms, kissed the baptismal crosses on their foreheads, and we buried them.
Life sucks.
Jesus' friends knew it. They, too, were devastated. Their king dies. He was the one who would save them, would save their very lives. With him, their hopes die. And there is none to replace him.
On this day there seems to be an abundance of sacrifice, a lot of suffering to be seen and to be remembered.
Here is our king ... and we shout, "Crucify him." We need a king to save us. And we are disappointed in this king, so in our disappointment we crucify him. The king dies.
"Jesus, are you a king?"
"For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth."
"What is truth?" . . . .
"Jesus" I want to say, "I have told you the truth. The truth is that we needed you and you are dead. The truth is that life is a disappointment.
"You can't hang there on that cross in your miserable death and tell us life is good."
I want to shout with mockers, "Where's that Father of yours when you really need God?"
"But you, Jesus, hanging there in your agony, say only ‘It is finished' -- your work is completed, fulfilled. Is it for THIS that you came into the world?
"Is this the completion, the fulfillment of our hopes? Jesus, you are dead. . . . Life sucks."
But others live. There are the women at the foot of the cross. They live in an agony of abandonment. Perhaps we are there too, by the cross, holding on to the painful disappointments and losses of our lives.
And then there are Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. They are Jesus' secret admirers -- they who have been afraid until now to admit that they know him.
Now, when some of those closest to Jesus in their confusion and disappointment have, like Peter, denied or abandoned him, these others come to do for Jesus according to the burial customs of his people.
They wrap your body with spices and lay it in a tomb. And a stone is rolled in place to cover our great disappointment.
We do what we can. And we wait.
When life is an agonizing disappointment others, like Joseph and Nicodemus, come to do what needs to be done and to wait with us.
Sometimes it is all we can do just to sit in our agonizing losses and wait. It is all we can do to look at the stone in front of the tomb and to weep.
Life sucks. Others know it, and sit with us and their presence is a glimmer of light around the cross even on this day.
Life may seem to crucify us but We are not asked to suffer alone. The women and the beloved disciple were with Jesus.
Family and friends, especially those who had lived through the agony of their own child's death, were with Laura and Sarah and their parents.
Today, we take all the agonizing disappointments of our lives wrap them up with spices and lay them in the tomb with our dead king.
Because God knows, through his own crucifixion that life can be an agonizing disappointment. We wait. And God waits with us at the tomb.
The stone is in place. We wait. We wait for the gift that God is preparing for us.