Today is Good Friday, a day that Christians commemorate the death of Jesus on a cross. It is the day that we read about how Jesus was arrested, abandoned by his friends, humiliated, spat upon, stripped of his clothes and finally nailed on a cross to die a slow death of asphyxiation. Every year on this day I continue to be jarred by the word “good”. What could be so good about suffering and death?
The word good comes from the same meaning as the original old English word that means holy. So, for some, the term “Holy Friday” might take the sting out of the idea that this day is good. But either way, we are still left with this idea that suffering and death can be good and holy.
Where is the goodness?
How can we make sense out of this when we are staring down suffering and death in the midst of this coronavirus pandemic? People are literally suffocating to death alone in hospitals around the world. Dead bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks are waiting for the day that families can come out of their homes and grieve at a graveside together. Others have lost their jobs and their ability to pay for rent and groceries. Many people with compromised immune systems wait in terror wondering if the virus will find them next.
How, in God’s name, could we call any of this good or holy? I am not one to try to contort suffering and death into something that is ultimately good for us. I do not have an alliance with the religious camp that points to this holy day as a way to celebrate freedom from sin. I do not read into this story that somehow Jesus’ suffering and death wipes my sinful contagion away like a good dousing of Clorox bleach. The harsh reality is that Jesus didn’t die for my sins or yours, he died because of sinful actions in the form of power and greed.
The painfully good truth…
In spite of this, his tragic story continues to mysteriously transform the world, some 2,000 years later. You see, to be human is to wrestle with suffering and death. None of us is exempt. There is no way to put some candy in a basket and call it good in three days. My faith will not allow me to put things so neatly in that kind of a sweet candy wrapper. We are told that even Jesus called out on the cross, “My God, My God, why has Thou forsaken me?” Sit with the terror of that for a minute…
Maybe, the reason why this day is good and holy is that Jesus helps us to face the sober realities of life. This pandemic is sharpening our gaze — helping us to clarify what is really important, winnowing off the chaff of our privilege and rendering us members of the global human family. There is no place on this planet that we can hide from this virus. Nor can we hold off our fear or terror by denying it. This virus is calling all of us to take account of our lives in painfully good ways.
Why do bad things happen?
Right now, to try to find a reason for why this pandemic is happening to us, just like Christians throughout the centuries have tried to answer the question about why Jesus had to suffer and die, will not get us ultimately to our soul’s longing. The why questions let us off the hook directing our focus outward. If we can make up a story that makes sense to us by blaming God or others, we don’t have to face our own mortality. When we only focus on the why, we don’t do the courageous work of being in our discomfort. This pandemic is inviting us to open our hearts to our own vulnerabilities. Knowing I will die makes life so much sweeter.
Herein, lies the exquisite holiness – the gift of this moment. Look around you. Take a deep breath. Listen to the sounds wafting through space. Feel your big toe. Wow! In the midst of such pain and suffering we are still here! We get to be witnesses to beauty and goodness and truth. We get to love and be loved.
As Sharon Carr writes, Hope and horror are the beams that meet in the middle of Jesus’s body on the cross. We can’t drink deeply of one without the other. “My God, My God, why hast Thou restored us?”
Once Forsook, Now understood
Waiting to die,
Drinking deep the draught of suffering,
Wringing every moment until a reason to trudge on
Drips sullenly forth;
Watching the flower
Bend and break as the careless heel of affliction
Crushes its abundance of vitality, and beauty, and color,
Until its place knows it no more……
Biding the halcyon hill,
The point of departure,
The place where humanity faced
Forsakenness —-
My God, my God, why hast Thou…… restored us?
Hope and Horror are the beams
That cross in the middle —-
You hung there,
That I may drink deeply of Life.
Yet Life was a Triumph by Sharon M. Carr
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