What Makes Good Friday Good?

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25 or
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
John 18:1-19:42
Psalm 22

Just a quick post for Good Friday, because we've been on the road all day, and I'm going to fall asleep shortly.

I have never really liked Good Friday. It's a downer, and I spent too many nights listening to lay preachers go into the gruesome details of the crucifixion in order to impress upon me how much Jesus had to suffer for my sins. But today, I realized that I'm really very grateful for Good Friday, because so many of my own days are Good Fridays.

I don't mean that I've been crucified with Christ, or that I suffer much in any physical way. But if you look at the disciples on Good Friday, they have lost all hope. Their leader is dead and they can't make sense of the world. They are in despair.

I have frequently felt like God was completely absent from my life. In a way, it was as if He had died and I couldn't bring him back. In Good Friday, we have an affirmation that all of us lose hope sometimes. It is part of the Christian story--even Peter, who Jesus praised for his faith--couldn't even stand by his friend enough to admit knowing him. We all have moments when we despair, and Good Friday gives us a chance to see what is possible for people living in a hopeless world.

People of the Peter Persuasion

Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Psalm 116:1, 10-17 

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no share with me." Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" Jesus said to him, "One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you." For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, "Not all of you are clean."

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, `Where I am going, you cannot come.' I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." 

Disney World is not the worst place to contemplate the washing of feet. After all, metaphorically, that's what every "cast member" at Disney World does every day--they serve the visitors, answering annoying questions, fastening safety belts, cleaning up the garbage and keeping the bathrooms spotless, while never once show annoyance, or sarcasm or any negative emotion. They call little girls princess and wish you a "magical day." It can be difficult to take, especially if, like me, you're a person who's had a lot of experience working in service industries. I find myself wanting to make sure every costumed employee knows that I understand what a challenging job it is, and how badly some of Those Other Tourists can treat them. I really want every employee of Walt Disney Wold to know that I'm not like all of the other people who just mindlessly walk by, never considering that they have lives. Of course, I can't do that, because the employees aren't really allowed to have visible personal lives. They give them up in service to creating a land of pure fantasy where crime, clutter, and hard work don't exist--or at the very least, are never seen. As far as fantasy worlds go, it's a pretty good one.

In a way, Jesus is doing something similar when he washes the feet of the disciples--through an act of service, he's helping them to begin to imagine a new world in which the most powerful have no power over others. The most powerful, in fact, are the ones who serve. Because we live in a post-Jesus world, we maybe don't contemplate as much as we should how much of a unreachable fantasy world that must have seemed like at the time. Love one another? That's it? What about the law, what about the whole Chosen People thing--people who are separated from the rest through our specialness?


I really identify with Peter in the footwashing story. I think he's a little baffled, and very uncomfortable with this new order of things. Often, we see his refusal to let Jesus wash his feet as evidence of his love and devotion to Jesus. It's worth pointing out, though, that the old system is kind of working for him. Sure, Jesus is the Messiah, and Peter needs to serve him and always be below him, but he's positioned pretty high up in the whole social group that they've got going. One of the three who was able to see Moses and Elijah, and the only other person, that we know of, who was able to walk on water (for a second or two), Peter must be pretty invested in the way things are. If Jesus is suddenly humbling himself and doing all this serving, what does that mean about Peter's future in the organization?

Today, two thousand years after Jesus took on the role of servant, there is a new set of rules about how to excel at being God's people, and many of us act like Peter all over again. We can all think of people in the church who keep it running. They organize the coffee hour AND run a Bible study AND serve on a couple of committees AND are always among the first people to greet newcomers. All of these things are wonderful, or would be, if you didn't get the sense that these people are keeping track in their heads, figuring out how very last they are making themselves, so they can be first later.

Part of washing people's feet--the part that can be the most challenging for those of us who excel at rule following--is giving up the privilege of being the ones who are the washers.

On Easter Sunday, those of us who are church people will arrive for services much earlier than usual, and we will still find people sitting in our chosen pews. We will mentally sigh, and grumble, and try to find a familiar face to sit near, because we want to celebrate Easter with other people who have put in the time during the rest of the year. It will be especially difficult for me, because I've grown up in church, but we aren't really well known in our current church, and I will want to spend most of the service explaining to our neighbors that we aren't among the Christmas and Easters, that we actually belong. But of course, we all belong.

If we look around at the dressed up families in their three-piece-suits and bonnets and ruffles, and wish that they wouldn't keep invading our spiritual home twice a year without putting in the time during Epiphany and Pentecost, we might do well to remember the gift that we receive on Maundy Thursday. Maybe instead of offering a prayer book and pointing out the right page, or putting extra emphasis on Lord, when we say, "The peace of the Lord," or any of the other dozens of subtle ways that church people have found to seem like they're helping when they're really marking territory, maybe we can just sit and worship together, enjoy each other's company, and allow anyone who offers to wash our feet.

Staying Awake

The Liturgy of the Palms

Matthew 21:1-11
Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29

The Liturgy of the Word

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Matthew 26:14- 27:66 or
Matthew 27-11-54
Psalm 31:9-16 

I was laying in bed this morning, wondering how I was going to get this written, what with a plane to catch, and a bit of an insight hangover from three days of listening to brilliance. I had tried to write something very different last night, the thing I'd been planning on all week, when brain fog took over and I gave up. So I was not in an opitmistic state of mind as I woke up in my hotel room bed, thinking about how weak they make coffee in Michigan--even at Starbucks--when I had a revelation.

If you read the Gospels as a writer, you notice a change in that happens on Palm Sunday. Suddenly everything appears under a microscope. Up to this point, we've been hearing the words of Jesus--his parable, the sermon on the mount--and isolated incidents: the woman at the well, the conversation with Nicodemus, the raising of Lazarus. Everything has been very distilled and told at a bit of a remove.

Take "Jesus wept." As I said last week, we have no idea what amount of time is encompassed by that verse. Could have been five minutes. Could have been five hours. We don't know. In writing, they call that compression. Yet suddenly, today, we hear every detail. Where the donkey came from. What everyone had for dinner, and why. Washing the feet. Sweating blood. The soldier's ear. The zeal. The terror. The despair. Why? Why are John (and Matthew) suddenly so obsessed with all of the little details?

Well, a writer might say, this is the most important part of the story. The details make it feel real and fresh, as though we're there. And that's true, but an editor would say that the gospel writers really ought to have been going for that all along. The saying "Show, Don't Tell" is to writers what "One Day at a Time" is to AA.

But I think there's more going on. I think what we have in today's readings are the conglomorated stories of people so crushed and broken that they need to get it all out. Every last bit. They need to say everything that struck them about that night in the days and weeks and months and years that followed. Because when we experience something so shattering that if feels as though the very sky has torn apart, we need people to hear us.

Jim has family in Joplin, Missouri, and we had the great pleasure of visiting them two summers ago, a little more than a year after a catastrophic tornado ravaged their community. As we were getting ready to visit, I said to Jim, "I want to hear about the tornado, but I'm not going to ask about it. I don't want to make them relive the trauma, and they're probably tired of talking to people who can't really know what it's like."

Boy, was I wrong.

We weren't there a half an hour before someone mentioned the tornado. The tornado's damage was still everywhere, of course. There were entire neighborhoods where all the trees were gone. Whole streets were stripped of livable buildings. But if you didn't know where to look, it seemed like things were back to normal. People laughed, danced, had babies, gave hugs, and went about their days. The people of Joplin are very proud--and rightly--of the way they came together and started putting things back together on their own, without waiting for FEMA or other government assistance.

But in fact, nothing was back to normal, because the people of Joplin knew that they could never get back to what used to be normal. They were too changed. The tornado is everywhere in Joplin, including the conversation. Life is divided into before and after, the way life in New York and Washington, DC pivots on September 11. People were constantly telling us about how things had been before the tornado, and what had happened during the tornado. They needed to show and tell us what had been lost.

I think this is true of all of us. I think it's what's going on with the gospel writers. When the world is torn in half, when we're so broken and damaged that restoration and repair are inconceivable, we need to be heard.

Jesus was in the garden at Gethsemane, and he did something he rarely did. He asked the disciples for help: "I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me." We know that he walked off, but we know he was still within earshot, because the disciples tell us what he said. And we know that the disciples missed out on a lot of what he said, because he kept coming back to them and finding them asleep. Is it possible that even Jesus, in his full humanity, needed a witness to his devastation and grief?

When my father was in the last weeks of his life, I went to the hospital. When I arrived, we started talking about how to split up our schedules so that his wife could go home and get some sleep, and patch together the responsibilities she had that wouldn't wait for her world to stop turning upside down. They had known Dad didn't have a very long time, but a nurse had used the word "terminal" for the first time that week, and it had shaken us all. In the midst of this conversation of calendars and errands, my father, who was not a man for admitting any sort of weakness if he could avoid it, said, "Well, I would really appreciate it if someone would stay the night. I don't like waking up here alone." I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.

It can be so hard to stay awake for people--even when we are up and walking around. We are innundated with a cornucopia of distractions. People talk proudly of multitasking, and I know mothers who spend their days driving their children from one activity to another, patching together a life of activity in which nobody ever has a chance just to sit and be. It is quite possible to get through a day of errands without looking anyone in the eye. I know this must be true, because when I remember to look at the cashier in the McDonald's or Starbuck's drive through, they always seem so surprised. And when we do begin to pay attention, it is easy to get overwhelmed by how much pain and horror the world contains.
 
But most of the time, we don't have the excuse of the flesh that the disciples had. The disciples were pretty grieved themselves, after all. Their slumber in the garden reminds me of the knack babies have for putting themselves to sleep. It's as if they have a light switch on their consciousness. When things get to be too much, something inside them just flips it to off. It seems like something similar is going on with the disciples--they're just so overwhelmed, they are incapable of processing even one more  of Jesus' anguished pleas to God. Maybe what Jesus should have said was, "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is frustratingly protective of itself."

But mostly, what we're lacking is the willing spirit. It is hard to stay awake. It is scary, and sad, and inconvenient and uncomfortable. But it is so necessary.

A person can say a thousand times, "Our town was devastated by a tornado," or, "My father died two years ago," or, "Jesus was crucified," but telling does not rebuild her soul. Showing does. Showing is the way we get a witness to our grief. We need the world to know every last detail. We need to show our pain and our loss, and we need to tell, no, show, our stories. And we need to show them, maybe  more than once, maybe a lot more than once, to people who are really listening.

Because it is not the showing that begins to heal us. It's the being heard by those who are fully awake. When enough people witness, really witness, our pain and our loss, that is when we, like the disciples, can begin to build a new and powerful and miraculous way to be alive again.

And so, my dear friends, let us make this week, and every week that follows, a truly holy week. Let us, like the disciples, help each other clear away the rubble of our sorrows and losses and disappointments. Let us, like the disciples, build new and powerful and miraculous lives on the foundations of our grief.

Let us remain awake for one another.