“Living the Story of Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter”

Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin
Good Friday, April 6, 2007

John 18:28-19:3-42

            There are two ways to do this Holy Weekend, consisting of Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. One is to hear it as a long-ago story that we’re invited to believe in. The other way is to actually hear what we call the Paschal Mystery as our own story. What is called for in this way of hearing the story is not so much about belief, as it is a willingness to actually enter into the story as our own story. The pattern of this holy weekend then becomes a sacred pattern, or a template, that is laid over our own lives.

            How then, would you locate yourself in this sacred pattern? For example, are you living Good Friday? In the past two weeks I’ve heard three stories of friends and acquaintances having received news of a serious illness. Either they or a loved one have been diagnosed with a serious illness. In one instance, the diagnosis is grim. This is Good Friday news, when for no reason anybody can make sense of, (and most attempts to make sense fall short are hopelessly inadequate), a family is required to come to terms with the reality of mortality and suffering. I know that movies like The Secret lay the blame, like Job’s erstwhile friends, upon the victim. But who can take this thinking as anything other than a desperate and misguided attempt to wrest control from circumstances that are often beyond our control?  No, there are times in our life when we’re required to walk the Via Dolorosa, the path of suffering, with Christ. No amount of fancy thinking lightens the weight of the cross on our back.

            Or you can be living Good Friday when a co-worker or a boss has it in for you at work and you can’t control the damage she’s inflicting on your reputation or self-esteem. You’re faced with the same choice Christ was faced with on the cross – you can begin to scheme and dream of ways to retaliate, or you can wait upon the power to forgive the injustice. We can ask for the grace to discover the words of our Lord forming on our own lips – “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”

            Again, we can be going through our own Good Friday when we look out upon the world and realize that the same principalities and powers that put Christ on the cross are still at it. Imperial powers still cling to power through the power of domination, too many corporations still continue to be blinded by the bottom-line, ignoring the cost to the earth, to the poor, to our habitat, and to the other-than-human ones. When we’re feeling compassion, for example, for entire species of animals that are disappearing from the planet, we’re in Good Friday. These are times, and seasons of our life, when we break through our denial and see the suffering as clearly as the disciples saw the injustice of their friend and leader suffering, and it breaks our hearts. And friends, there’s nothing to do about it, except be in it. We may indeed wrest a blessing from our suffering, but that comes later, if it comes at all. No silver linings for now – only a dark and threatening sky. Our lives are torn in two, like the curtains in the Temple. Jesus, our Lord, is crucified.

Holy Saturday in the tradition is the day after Jesus crucifixion. The worst thing we could imagine has just happened, and now all that’s left is what poet Emily Dickenson called the “sweeping up after death”, the “solemnest industry enacted upon the earth”.  Holy Saturday is the time between Good Friday and Easter. Death, in all its guises, has dealt its blow, and you’re left to pick up the pieces. Actually, it can be an entire season of our life. Some, like theologian Martin Marty, have made peace with Holy Saturday as the predominant season of their lives. He wrote a book called Cry Absence. In it he describes how he takes Easter on good faith, but mostly he sees the world through tears of Holy Saturday. I’ve spent years myself living in this season.  This is a season of grief, for unlived life, for tragedies endured, for not being able to see the New Jerusalem coming any time soon. It is not characterized by the absolute devastation of Good Friday. It’s more like November in Vancouver. Three weeks of relentless rain. You know you’ll survive it, but the feeling is that if you gave into it, you’d end up lying around in bed all day with the sheets pulled up around your head.

The story that captures best the mood of Holy Saturday is Luke’s tale of the two disciples walking home after the crucifixion. The line that says it all is when one of the disciples confesses to a stranger who has joined them on the walk, “we thought he was the one.” They thought that they had discovered once and for all the meaning of their lives, the purpose of their existence, and a sacred project that would stand up to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He would overthrow the empire, Darth Vader would be slain once and for all. But all hope had been dashed, and in Holy Saturday you begin the long process of coming to terms with the things in life that you cannot change. It’s the season when you either cultivate resilience in the face of these things, or your heart begins to seal over as you succumb to spiritual death. You’re living in the shadow of death and you’re never one hundred percent sure that you will be capable of negotiating your way to hope.

            Out of respect for the sentiment of Good Friday, I won’t say too much about Easter this morning. But in the story from Luke’s gospel of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, what they didn’t realize is that the stranger who joined them was the risen Christ. Now, whether you believe in a literal resurrection or not, the point of the story is clear. Even when we feel most hopeless, we are not alone. We may not recognize that the divine presence accompanies us through thick and thin, and descends with us even into the depths of hell, but from the perspective of Easter, we were never alone.

In Easter “death loses its sting”, in the words of Paul. What happens, in my experience, is that once you’ve cycled through this Holy weekend a few times, life becomes the context for death, and hope becomes more encompassing than despair. Spiritual resiliency builds. It’s not that Easter acts as a buffer against the contingencies of life. Bad things still happen. Presidents make tragic decisions. The doctor sits across from us and asks us to have a seat. But in and through it all, you receive the bad news, and suffer whatever life throws at you, with an intuition that “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well”.  Even in the midst of tears you begin to trust that the thermals of grace will bear you and all creation up. In the words of journalist, H.L.Mencken, the words on our lips are “Hallelujah, anyhow!”

So, my friends, we locate ourselves this morning in the shadow of the cross, knowing that darkness and suffering have a place in the spiritual life – bad things happen to good people. Sometimes we’re the victim and sometimes we’re the perpetrators, and more often than we’re both. So we gather to find comfort in each other’s presence, to confess our inescapable complicity, and to wait upon the grace of new life to bear us up. Let us enter this holy weekend with integrity, locating ourselves in the story of Jesus, the Christ. We are held always in the compassionate embrace of the Holy One.